South Australia, June 2026

01

The two-party measure now runs Labor against One Nation

At the March election One Nation took 22.9 per cent of the lower-house vote and the Liberals 18.9. DemosAU's two-party chart for this wave is headed Labor and One Nation, and its election baseline is a Labor lead of 58.1 to 41.9.

The poll's figures exclude 7 per cent of voters who were undecided. The election two-party figure is DemosAU's own estimate rather than a declared result, which its report notes. This wave is weighted on the 2026 state vote.

Nothing in the primary-vote column clears sampling error. The largest movement is One Nation's 3.1 points and the margin of error on this wave alone is ±3.9, so three months into the term the electorate is where the election left it. That is the finding, and it is a different kind of finding from the two earlier South Australian waves, both of which were measuring an electorate in motion.

The change that matters is in the instrument. In October 2025 the lower-house question did not offer One Nation and the two-party figure was Labor against the Liberals at 66–34. In February the party was added and took 19 per cent. In March it took 22.9 and finished ahead of the Liberals. By June the two-party measure itself has been redrawn around it, and the Liberals, who held 35.7 per cent of the vote in 2022, are no longer one of the two parties the state's headline figure compares. A reader who carries 56–44 forward without knowing who the 44 is will misread this term from its first wave.

02

The poll establishes the order of the top three, which no earlier wave in this series does

Labor's nine points over One Nation clear an interval of about ±6.0, and One Nation's eight over the Liberals clear about ±5.1. Both orderings hold.

Each bar is the 95 per cent interval on a party's June first preference, from the effective sample of 632, and the dot is the share itself.

Both gaps clear their intervals, which makes this the first wave in these briefings to rank its top three parties on the poll's own terms. In Victoria's June wave the two points between One Nation and Labor established nothing; in Queensland's the single point between Labor and One Nation established nothing; in New South Wales the five points between them did not either. Here a nine-point gap and an eight-point gap both clear, so the ordering of Labor, One Nation and the Liberals is a finding rather than a reading.

The Greens at 13 per cent are 2.6 above their election result and the only party other than One Nation to gain since March. Their interval runs from 10.4 to 15.6 and the Liberals' from 15.0 to 21.0, which overlap, but overlapping intervals on two separate shares are not the test of a difference between them: the within-poll gap of five points carries about ±4.3 and clears it. So the poll ranks all four of its leading parties, and a Liberal Party ranked fourth behind the Greens would be the next step in the sequence these three briefings describe.

03

The premier's rating is thirteen points below where it was and he still leads by thirty-one

Peter Malinauskas records a net rating of 22 points positive, down from 35 in October 2025 and down 7 since March. The One Nation leader records 21 negative and the Liberal leader 3 negative.

Malinauskas leads Ashton Hurn as preferred premier 51 to 20, a margin of 31 points, with 29 per cent naming neither. He has lost five points since March and the undecided share has gained six, so the margin has narrowed because people have stopped answering rather than because they have switched. A premier eight months past a net rating of 35, now on 22, is still the strongest-rated leader in any wave of these briefings.

The opposition's position is the interesting one. Ashton Hurn leads the Liberals, the third-placed party, and is the leader named in the preferred-premier question; Cory Bernardi leads One Nation, which is the opposition and the party in the two-party figure, and is not. The question DemosAU asks therefore compares the premier with the leader of the party that finished third, which is a reasonable reading of who the alternative premier would be and not the same thing as the two-party chart two pages earlier. Both are in the same report and they describe different contests.

04

The state's direction turns negative for the first time in the series

Thirty-eight per cent say South Australia is heading in the right direction and 39 per cent the wrong direction. In October 2025 the same question returned 45 and 36.

38–39 South Australians split 38 to 39 on whether the state is heading in the right direction, a net of one point negative. The October 2025 reading was nine points positive.

The right-direction share is down six points since March and the wrong-direction share up three, with the undecided share up three. That is a ten-point swing on this measure across eight months, from nine points positive in October 2025 to one negative now, and it is the clearest sign in the wave that the government's position has softened even though its vote has not moved outside error since the election.

Cost of living is named by 35 per cent of respondents as the biggest issue facing the state and housing affordability and homelessness by 25. The health system follows at 9 per cent and government spending at 7. Concerns about political leadership appear at 5 per cent, which is a category that did not register in the October wave, and urban and infrastructure issues at 5. The algal bloom, which took 6 per cent in October and was rated 38 points negative, does not appear in the June list at all.