Earlier this year, following the defection of Julian McGauran, everyone
was talking about the desperate plight of the National Party. But on
Saturday it staged a comeback, in the unlikeliest of places.

The South Australian Country Party (as it then was) was absorbed by the
Liberals in 1932, but re-emerged as a minor party in 1963, winning its
first seat ten years later. Since 1997, its sole MP has been Karlene
Maywald in Chaffey, who has played a remarkable double game: she voted
against the formation of the Rann government in 2002, but then accepted
office as a minister – the first member of another party to sit in a
Labor government in almost a hundred years.

Prior to Saturday’s election, Mike Rann promised that Maywald would
retain her cabinet spot in the new government, but she also announced
she would support a Liberal government in the (unlikely) event that
they outvoted the ALP. Voters rewarded this bipartisanship with a 4%
increase in her vote, and huge swings to the National Party in two
other seats: Finniss (up 18%) and Flinders (up 16%).

The total National Party vote increased from 1.5% to 2.2%, its highest
since 1982. That still only put it in sixth place, just behind the
Democrats, but for a party contesting just four seats it’s pretty
impressive, and not a long way behind its more well-established
counterparts in Victoria and Western Australia.

Commentators (including me) tend to say that the Nationals have two
choices, neither of them promising: to tie themselves ever more tightly
to the Liberal Party, perhaps even amalgamating with them, or to take
the One Nation road of independent right-wing populism. South Australia
suggests a third strategy: to return to their centrist roots and
balance between the two major parties.

Of course, it might not work anywhere else. This election was an
especially good one for independents, with Nick Xenophon’s amazing vote
in the upper house and three independents apparently returned in the
House of Assembly (still some doubt about Kris Hanna, but latest counting puts him on 51.9%). But it’s a tantalising prospect.