Why South Australian Elections Feel Like Two-Horse Races, Even When They Aren’t

By: Mark Neugebauer

4 January 2026

As South Australians approach another state election, a familiar pattern is already taking shape. Media coverage is narrowing around two leaders, two parties, and two competing visions of government. That focus, however, is not evenly textured.

The Liberal Party, currently grappling with internal fractures and declining membership, has attracted headlines largely through stories of instability and leadership tension. Labor, by contrast, has benefited from more measured and often favourable reporting, shaped in part by strong polling and the media’s tendency to frame incumbency as continuity.

Neither dynamic necessarily reflects the quality of governance or the strength of policy outcomes. Rather, it highlights how polling, conflict, and perceived momentum increasingly drive political narratives during election cycles, often at the expense of deeper scrutiny.

Debate is framed as a contest between Labor and Liberal, while smaller parties and independents struggle to gain sustained attention, even in electorates where they have strong local support. This remains true even for well‑established minor parties with strong national brands. The Greens and One Nation, for example, enjoy high name recognition and consistent polling, yet their coverage is often episodic and reactive, focused on moments of controversy or disruption rather than sustained examination of their policy platforms.

Recognition alone does not translate into equal scrutiny or airtime. As with SA Best in South Australia, minor parties tend to be treated as factors influencing the major‑party contest rather than as competitors in their own right.

This is not the result of conspiracy or crude media bias. It is more accurately understood as the product of how modern politics, media incentives, and institutional pressures intersect. South Australia offers a particularly clear example of how that dynamic operates.

Australia’s media landscape is highly concentrated, and South Australia’s is more so than most. With fewer major outlets and shrinking newsroom resources, political reporting increasingly prioritises what is immediate, accessible, and widely recognisable. In practice, this consistently favours the major parties and their leaders.

Content analyses of election reporting across newspapers, television, and radio have repeatedly shown that minor parties and independents are quoted in only a small fraction of coverage, with the overwhelming majority of stories focused on the two major parties. This tendency becomes even more pronounced during leadership‑driven campaigns, where reporting gravitates toward polling movements, perceived momentum, and the question of who is most likely to form government, rather than a sustained examination of the full range of policy ideas on offer.

Much of the research most commonly cited on this issue dates back to the early 2010s, leading some to argue that the rise of social media has rendered those findings obsolete. Digital platforms have undoubtedly expanded the capacity of smaller parties and independents to communicate directly with voters, bypassing traditional gatekeepers in ways that were previously unavailable. However, this shift has not displaced the agenda‑setting role of mainstream media during election campaigns. Instead, social media more often amplifies existing narratives, particularly leadership contests, major‑party conflict, and polling momentum, rather than replacing them. As a result, the structural patterns identified over a decade ago continue to shape which voices receive sustained attention and which remain marginal, even in a more digitally saturated political environment.

There is also growing evidence that content moderation practices on major social media platforms have, at times, unevenly affected political actors operating outside established institutional norms. While such moderation is typically justified on the basis of safety, misinformation, or harm reduction rather than ideology, its practical effect can disproportionately constrain non‑major‑party voices that already struggle for visibility within mainstream media ecosystems. When combined, these dynamics risk further narrowing the range of political perspectives available to voters, even in the absence of intent or coordination.

Regardless of motive, there is an inherent democratic risk in systems that restrict lawful political speech through opaque moderation processes. When decisions about political visibility and reach are made by private platforms using broad and subjective standards, the outcome can resemble the effective exclusion of political voices rather than the neutral regulation of harm. Over time, this risks compressing public debate and weakening the principle that democratic legitimacy rests on open contestation, not managed consensus.

Journalists operating under commercial pressure and tight deadlines naturally gravitate toward:

• Leaders who are already well known

• Parties that issue daily media releases

• Campaigns with the resources to generate constant content

• Stories framed around who is “winning” or “losing”

Major parties are structurally positioned to meet these demands. Smaller parties and independents, often volunteer‑run and locally focused, simply cannot compete on those terms. Over time, this produces a feedback loop in which visibility generates perceived relevance, perceived relevance attracts coverage, and coverage reinforces visibility.

The rise of Nick Xenophon and SA Best illustrates this dynamic clearly. In the 2016 federal election, Xenophon’s team secured nearly 21 per cent of the statewide Senate vote, outperforming major parties in parts of South Australia. In 2018, SA Best entered the state election with significant public interest and ultimately held the balance of power.

Yet throughout both campaigns, media coverage remained heavily focused on the Labor–Liberal contest. SA Best and other minor parties were frequently treated as side stories until their electoral impact became unavoidable. The same pattern has persisted in subsequent elections, with coverage tracking leadership clashes and polling shifts while independent and minor‑party policy platforms struggle to receive sustained examination.

Australia’s preferential voting system is often cited as evidence that the electorate enjoys a fair and open democratic process. Electorally, that is largely true. But preferential voting does not guarantee equal visibility.

Voters may be free to rank candidates as they choose, yet those choices are shaped by what they see, hear, and understand during the campaign. If certain voices struggle to reach the public at all, the playing field is already tilted, regardless of how votes are ultimately counted. This is especially relevant in South Australia, where crossbench negotiations and upper‑house voting have frequently shaped legislation but receive limited sustained scrutiny outside parliamentary reporting.

It is also impossible to ignore the role of campaign finance. Recent changes to electoral funding and donation laws were designed to improve transparency, but in practice they tend to advantage parties with existing infrastructure, donor networks, and administrative capacity. Media visibility, campaign finance, and electoral outcomes are now deeply intertwined, an issue that warrants deeper public discussion.

This does not imply elections are rigged or voters are misled. It does mean the range of ideas presented to voters is narrower than it should be, and there are observable downsides when political debate becomes compressed:

• Policy discussion suffers

• Local issues struggle to gain traction

• Voters disengage

• Trust in institutions erodes

South Australia has a strong tradition of political independence and innovation. That tradition depends on a public sphere where ideas compete on their merits, not merely on their marketing budgets. Strengthening democratic resilience does not require heavy‑handed regulation or media control, but it does require practical discussion about reforms such as:

• Guaranteed election forums including all registered candidates

• Greater transparency around political advertising

• Stronger support for regional and community journalism

• Clearer separation between paid political content and reporting

A healthy democracy is not one where everyone agrees. It is one where disagreement is visible, debate is robust, and voters are trusted with the full range of choices before them. The challenge is ensuring our political and media systems continue to give them that chance.

As with previous discussions on direct democracy, citizen‑initiated referenda, and bottom‑up governance, the underlying principle remains the same: power must remain accountable to the people. Complacency and apathy do not protect democracy, they quietly erode it.