When Louise Miller-Frost won the federal seat of Boothby in 2022, she became the seat’s first post-war Labor MP.
And Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived in South Australia (SA) on April 1 with all guns blazing, determined that his party will not only hold onto Boothby, but also take Adelaide’s only remaining Liberal-held seat, Sturt.
In Boothby in 2022, Miller-Frost won 32.2 percent of the first count against the then-Liberal candidate Rachel Swift’s 38.0 percent, and it took nine preference rounds before she was eventually declared the winner, benefitting particularly from preference flows from the Greens and independent Jo Dyer.
This time, the Liberals have selected the woman who held the seat for them in the past, Nicolle Flint, who'll need a swing of 3.28 percent to wrest it back.
So Albanese went straight to the Flinders Medical Centre, where he was joined by an entourage of SA-based MPs including the popular SA Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas, federal Health Minister Mark Butler, Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth, and Senator Penny Wong.
Together, they announced an ambitious plan to deliver 10,000 extra healthcare appointments to locals and help 1,300 healthcare workers to graduate each year through building a $300 million new health service for Adelaide’s south.
The promise is, of course, contingent on Labor’s re-election, in which case Flinders University will provide half the funding while the government contributes the other $150 million to what will be called the Flinders HealthCARE Centre, located in Bedford Park.
Voters See Healthcare as 2nd Only to Cost-of-Living
Although cost of living is ranked as the top issue for voters, healthcare generally rates as the second most important. In the first full week of the election campaign, the prime minister has made health-related announcements almost every day.He pledged money for a hospital upgrade in Perth on March 31, having promised additional urgent care clinics in Queensland two days earlier.
Both major parties are making big-ticket health commitments as polls continue to show a tight campaign, with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton pledging the Coalition to match Labor’s promise of a $5.8 billion boost to Medicare funding.
That didn’t stop Albanese from telling voters that only Labor can safeguard Medicare’s future as an accessible healthcare system.
The government has repeatedly criticised Dutton over his record as Coalition health minister more than a decade ago.
Labor thinks it may also be able to take South Australia’s second marginal seat of Sturt, which the Liberals have held for more than 50 years. Incumbent MP James Stevens holds it with a 0.5 percent margin.
Last time, he was behind on election day voting, but won thanks to pre-poll and postal votes.
Sturt was previously held by Christopher Pyne until his retirement in 2019, usually with a comfortable margin, though he came close to defeat on the election of the Rudd government in 2007.
This time, Stevens faces Labor’s Claire Clutterham, a local councillor, and is also up against local GP Dr Verity Cooper and the Greens Katie McCusker, so preferences could be crucial.
The Greens say Sturt is “one of the most winnable seats for the Greens in the nation,” though McCusker won just 16.4 percent of the first preference votes in 2022.
