It doesn’t really matter whether Nick Xenophon has pushed the eject button to outrun a negative verdict by the high court and create a dignified exit for himself, or whether he is genuinely over the peculiarities of the Canberra hothouse and wants to go home to Adelaide.
The end result is the same.
As the election analyst Antony Green says, South Australia now has a genuine three-cornered contest, with Xenophon’s entry likely guaranteeing that neither the Liberals nor Labor can secure a majority in their own right at the state election next March.
In a world where political upset is the order of the day, in a world where Donald Trump can be president, there’s also an outside chance the politician who began his professional political career in Adelaide as an anti-pokies campaigner could crash through the major party lock and emerge as the premier of South Australia.
While Xenophon is flatly rejecting talk that he has any grand plan to lead his home state, and insists his sole objective is to emerge with the balance of power, we can watch how his local campaign ramps up as a tangible measure of his ambition.
His party’s current game plan is to run candidates in between 12 and 20 lower house seats.
If you were a self-styled political outsider with a serious ambition to go for broke in a time of major party disaffection, you would need to field candidates in all 47 seats in the House of Assembly.
While the Nick Xenophon Team’s core supporters, the members and backers, are predominantly older people, research undertaken last year indicates the Xenophon group is now a mature political movement, with broad support, polling more or less evenly across age groups.
A Lonergan poll of 3,000 South Australian respondents last year found support for NXT at 21% among 18- to 34-year-olds, 25% for 35- to 49-year-olds and 27% for 50- to 64-year-olds.
Labor has held government in South Australia since 2002.
Before the events of Friday, the Liberal party would have seen next year’s poll as its best chance in some time to crash through and unseat Jay Weatherill. Xenophon’s course correction is a serious blow to that plan.
The Liberal leader, Steven Marshall, on Friday ruled out forming a coalition with Xenophon, saying South Australians had seen the “chaos of the federal Senate circus” and didn’t want that sort of carry-on in Adelaide.
You can guarantee that both major parties, and Cory Bernardi’s fledgling Australian Conservatives, will train their guns aggressively on Xenophon over the coming months, given the threat he poses.
For a genial politician who likes to be liked, this will be a seriously rugged and willing campaign.
There are also big questions about how the NXT in Canberra manages the transition into the post-Nick era, and how that affects the capacity of the Turnbull government to progress its legislative program in more or less orderly fashion.
Xenophon, being Xenophon, will want to do as he does – career around chaotically and exert influence in both spheres.
Letting go, and delegating, isn’t Xenophon’s natural form.
But if he’s serious about making a triumphant return to Adelaide, and running a much larger team than he is used to, Xenophon will need to give his Canberra representatives the opportunity to function with some genuine autonomy and agency, as something more than satellites of brand Xenophon.
And Malcolm Turnbull will have to deal with the consequences of that transition, however they ultimately play out.
