Nick Xenophon's decision to leave the Senate came out of the blue but has rattled the political elites in his home state, South Australia, and stirred the pot nationally. His gambit not only has some immediate state and federal implications but also raises larger questions about the future of Australian politics.
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Xenophon has gambled on leaving the leadership of his party's three-member Senate team plus one House of Representatives MP to return to South Australian politics. He plans to stand for the Liberal-held lower-house seat of Hartley, leading a large team of candidates for his new state party, called SA Best.
This fresh gambit is not about returning to South Australia's upper house, the Legislative Council, where Xenophon his political teeth for a decade before switching to the Senate 10 years ago. He is not aiming to strengthen his party's upper-house crossbench position but to forge a new lower-house balance-of-power position at the next state election early next year. He will confront the struggling long-term Labor government of Premier Jay Weatherill and the ever-hopeful Liberal opposition led by Stephen Marshall.
Xenophon has a remarkable electoral record and considerable political momentum after the 2016 federal election (winning 22 per cent of his state's Senate vote). However, he is one of those caught up in section 44 dual-nationality problems and has not been quite the force in the current federal parliamentary term that he was in the previous one. His party, the Nick Xenophon Team, has suffered disunity and defections at the state level, where his critics have accused him of being dictatorial. The big question is whether he can repeat his recent barnstorming federal effort at the March 2018 state election.
One obvious immediate implication is for South Australian politics. If SA Best proves to be as popular as most commentators predict, then neither of the main parties will be able to form a majority government in the 47-seat lower house. This has happened several times to state Labor under Mike Rann and Weatherill recently, but each time Labor performed Houdini-like escapes to create stable coalition governments with a variety of unlikely partners. But the challenge is much greater this time given the government's problems and Xenophon's popularity. He may even lead a large group of SA Best MPs, somewhat like One Nation did when it broke through dramatically in Queensland in 1998.
Another implication is for federal politics. The Nick Xenophon Team will suddenly become very inexperienced without its leader because the others were first elected at the last election. This further weakens the Senate's crossbench, following the resignations of Bob Day and the two Green senators, Scott Ludlum and Larissa Waters. Experience is always difficult to factor into parliamentary negotiations, and Xenophon may still be a part-time guiding presence as his party's leader and founder, but his absence will still hurt the Senate's ability to hold the government to account.
The larger question for Australian politics is whether Xenophon is correct to rate a decisive lower-house role in South Australia ahead of being an influential player on the Senate crossbench. If so, it flies in the face of the general presumption that federal politics is always more important than state politics and federal MPs are inevitably more powerful than their state counterparts.
The attraction for a party of a place in the Senate is that it offers a national role and visibility. But the weakness of Senate power is that it is within a house of review, not the house of government.
Xenophon is only able to contemplate this shift because his party has strong regional appeal rather than being spread more evenly across the nation like most other minor parties, such as the Australian Democrats and the Greens.
If he is successful, it may portend a more fragmented federal system, in which genuine regional parties contend effectively with the major national parties. The name SA Best points towards such fragmentation, as it clearly has only state appeal.
A good illustration of this contradiction between state and federal power can be found in the Greens. Their nine senators, led by Richard di Natale, certainly have a greater national profile than their state counterparts and they play a role in developing national policies. But it is at the state level that the party can get its hands directly on the levers of power. The Greens have shown they can regularly take part in government in Tasmania and the ACT if they win lower-house seats.
Xenophon is not necessarily a one-off. Pauline Hanson's One Nation is another example. Though it is more genuinely national than Xenophon's federal party, with its senators from three states, Queensland is its heartland.
Perhaps Hanson is pondering Xenophon's gambit; her One Nation party threatens to win a big swag of seats again in the forthcoming Queensland election. Is she wondering whether she would be better off as party leader in Queensland than a team leader in the Senate?
If she did a Xenophon and flipped to state politics, she would ensure that One Nation did even better in the state election than it is already likely to do, and she would become the kingmaker Xenophon hopes to be. The ABC election analyst Anthony Green has even suggested the outside possibility of Xenophon becoming South Australian premier. In Queensland, Hanson may dream of becoming deputy premier in a Liberal-National-One Nation coalition government after campaigning on a "make Queensland great again" slogan.
John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.
