Guardian Australia · Tom McIlroy · Sunday 22 March 2026
Labor's commanding SA victory and One Nation's surge have reduced the Liberals to parliamentary irrelevance, raising questions about whether effective opposition exists in South Australia at all.
Democracy requires tension between government and opposition the way a bridge requires tension between its cables. Remove one side and you don't get a wider bridge — you get a collapse. Malinauskas now governs a state where the official opposition couldn't fill a cricket team, and the unofficial one thinks parliamentary procedure is a UN conspiracy. The question isn't whether he'll share power. It's whether anyone's left to hold him accountable for not sharing it.