Democracy Sausage Making: A Foresight Lens on Where Democracy is heading in South Australia

Words by Professor Ariella Helfgott. Illustration by Stavroula Adameitis.

South Australia has held its election. Nobody was surprised.

The outcome had the quality of something already known. Labor returned with an enormous majority, winning around 35 of 47 lower house seats. The Liberal Party recorded its worst result in history, reduced to as few as four seats. One Nation, running in every electorate for the first time, outpolled the Liberals on primary votes. The Greens grew their vote. Independents held several seats. And 436 candidates, the most in SA's history, put their names forward to serve. 436 candidates. On the surface, that looks like democratic health. More voices, more choice, more participation.

Look closer.

A democracy where one party dominates and the opposition collapses doesn't just create a gap, it creates a vacuum. A surge of newer and older parties rushed in to fill it, competing for that space by differentiating on cultural grievance rather than policy substance. That support is worth understanding, not dismissing.

The Edelman Trust Barometer tells us that the majority of Australians hold a high sense of grievance: a belief that government and business make their lives harder, serve narrow interests, and that people benefit unfairly. This is reflective of a global trend. Globally, seven in ten people report being unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values or background. Edelman calls this "insularity." It's a response to a system that feels like it stopped listening.

People who feel unheard will find someone who sounds like they're listening. Unfortunately, the pattern in the data everywhere is that the parties that channel grievance most effectively are often the least equipped to resolve it. Outrage is a powerful campaign tool and a terrible governing tool. When political competition centres on who you're against rather than what you're building, the actual problems don't get solved. Housing is still unaffordable. Energy bills are still high. Regional communities are still losing services. The cycle deepens - more frustration, more parties promising to burn it down, less capacity to build anything up.

There's a deeper dynamic at work here, and it affects everyone. When economic precarity is real, when people genuinely can't afford rent or energy, it creates fertile ground for a particular kind of political argument - that extending dignity or resources to one group must come at the expense of another. Rights get framed as zero-sum. The implication is that someone else's gain is your loss. That framing is powerful precisely because the underlying pain is real. But it's a false choice. The question of whether you can afford your power bill and the question of whether your neighbour deserves respect are not in competition with each other. They only look that way when someone needs them to.

That trajectory has a destination. James Davison Hunter, who coined the term "culture wars," has concluded that permanent culture war makes authoritarianism dangerously attractive. Not because people want a dictator. Because they're exhausted by a system that generates heat without light, and someone who promises to just fix it - no matter how (un)true those promises are - starts to sound appealing.

Every South Australian deserves representatives who can hear their frustration and do something about it.

Beyond The Sizzle

The 10F Consortium, that Prof Ariella Helfgott is part of, recently mapped ten major global shifts currently reshaping the world. Four of those shifts are showing up in SA in ways that matter for anyone who cares about the health of our democracy F01, F02, F03 and F06.

What follows maps these shifts onto SA to help us all get better at: Seeing. Understanding. Bridging. Strengthening.

Seeing

F01: From Agreed Transparency to Engineered Opacity.

Globally, the decades-long march toward transparency is reversing. Governments and sophisticated actors have discovered that strategic opacity generates critical advantages. As the 10F work puts it: "When data becomes a strategic asset, its absence becomes a weapon."

SA's ICAC had its powers stripped in 2021 by a bipartisan vote that passed both houses within 24 hours. The changes narrowed the definition of corruption, removed the power to investigate misconduct and maladministration, gagged the commission from public reporting, and banned ICAC investigators from speaking to prosecutors on their own cases. Commissioner Ann Vanstone KC resigned in 2024, saying the amendments had "damaged the scheme" and her words had "fallen on deaf ears." The Centre for Public Integrity called SA's ICAC the weakest integrity body in Australia. Both major parties supported the changes. The public, who fund ICAC to the tune of $11 million annually, now cannot be told what it finds.

The Office for Data Analytics was also gutted and moved from the Department of the Premier and Cabinet to Treasury on 1 July 2024.

The SA Auditor-General qualified their controls opinion in 2022-23 on two grounds: questionable processes for selecting recipients of sporting and infrastructure grant payments made as election commitments, and a limitation of scope because they could not access Cabinet documents to determine whether transactions were lawful.

Undisclosed sums have been spent on major events including LIV Golf (locked in to 2031) and AFL Gather Round (the government declined to detail its monetary incentive to the AFL, reportedly in the vicinity of $14 million). FOI compliance is declining nationally, with requests granted in full dropping from 59% to just 25% in a decade.

Opacity doesn't always look like classified documents and redacted reports. Sometimes it looks like a culture where decisions get made in conversations rather than documents, where the informal channel gradually replaces the formal one, where institutional memory lives in people rather than systems. This isn't unique to SA. And once these cultures are established, they're hard to reverse.

Nobody sat down and designed this. But the effect is the same: the public's ability to see how power operates in SA is structurally weaker than it was five years ago.

Understanding

F02: From Political Spectrum to Ideological Fog.

The stable political organising logics that structured competition for generations are dissolving. What's replacing them isn't just multiparty competition. It's something qualitatively different: an ideological fog where positions float free from their historical moorings, recombining based on immediate needs. Contradictory positioning becomes a strategic advantage. Cultural signals matter more than policy substance. The 10F work puts it precisely: "Policy windows become Swiss cheese, where the holes in acceptable discourse appear and disappear rapidly without logical pattern."

In SA, the fog has crossed every traditional line.

The Premier leads a state with the world's most advanced renewable energy grid, while lobbying for gas and calling climate advocates 'eco-purists' in the same year a climate-driven algal bloom devastated the state's coastal and marine life, lifestyles and economies. He champions the First Nations Voice while partnering with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund on LIV Golf, passing special legislation to bypass planning protections on National Heritage-listed public Park Lands over a site of deep significance to the Kaurna people. He delivers progressive social policy while cultivating a personal brand built on sport, spectacle, and big-man energy. Any of these positions could be taken by any political leader. But try explaining the combination to someone from any previous political era. In the ideological fog that's not a weakness, it seems to be a superpower.

One Nation promises lower immigration and more regional workers, in regions that are shrinking without it. It opposes government overreach while proposing government funding for new coal plants and nuclear reactors that would cost billions in public money. It is notably light on education and health policy but promises to pay HECS debts for regional doctors and bolster regional medical services, all of which require exactly the kind of government spending it claims to oppose. In the ideological fog, completely acceptable to voters.

The Liberals, caught between a dominant centrist Labor and a surging populist right, couldn't find a position from which to oppose because every position they tried had already been occupied by someone louder.

The Liberal Party has just recorded its worst result in SA history. Reduced to as few as four lower house seats, outpolled by One Nation on primary votes, with former leaders losing their own electorates. These are real people who dedicated years of their lives to public service, and whatever your politics, that deserves acknowledgment. But the structural lesson matters for all of us. The fog rewards personal brands and emotional intensity. The Liberals cycled through 3 leaders in 18 months.

The old Liberal offer of fiscal discipline, individual freedom, and competent economic management has been hollowed out. Fiscal discipline means nothing when One Nation promises to spend billions on coal and nuclear and nobody cares about the contradiction. Individual freedom means nothing when the algorithm has redefined freedom as "freedom from people I disagree with." Economic management means nothing when people feel the economy is rigged regardless of who manages it. And "credible alternative" means nothing when the Premier has already occupied the centre, the right, and the big-man brand simultaneously.

Their crisis isn't unique to SA. The question for the SA Liberals, and for centre-right parties everywhere, is whether they can find something to stand for that the fog can't dissolve. There is an obvious candidate: the institutions themselves. A party that genuinely committed to restoring ICAC, defending institutional independence, protecting public land from executive overreach, and holding dominant governments to account would be offering something no one else in SA politics is currently offering. That's not a retreat from conservatism, it's the deepest version of it.

Newer parties like Fair Go differentiate through cultural signals (opposing the Voice, "putting parents in charge") rather than governing platforms.

The Greens scored highest across housing, energy and human rights in SACOSS's independent assessments, but even parties with detailed platforms find their positions compressed by the attention economy into slogans and tribal markers.

Nobody escapes the fog. The question is whether you're using it or being used by it.

Bridging

F03: From Digital Empathy to Localised Solidarity.

The "empathy engines" that were supposed to connect the world became economics-fuelled attention machines that fractured it. Empathy has a radius, and digital platforms contracted it to the people who look like us, live near us, or appear in our feed. The global village became gated communities. As the 10F forecasts document: "Think globally, act locally" has been replaced with "Think locally, act privately."

SA has 1.8 million people. We don't generate enough political content to sustain our own algorithmic ecosystem. So South Australians increasingly consume political content made for American, British, and Eastern Australian audiences. Culture wars arrive in our feeds that have nothing to do with our lived experience, and they start shaping how we talk to each other anyway. Contested topics become socially risky to discuss. Neutral silence becomes the default public stance. People who might disagree with a policy stay quiet because raising it risks being sorted into a camp.

You can see the result in this election. One Nation polled 39% in regional and rural SA, compared to 23% for Labor and 15% for the Liberals. In metro Adelaide, Labor dominated. These aren't just different political preferences. They're different algorithmic realities producing different political worlds within the same small state. A farmer on the Eyre Peninsula and a teacher in Prospect are scrolling different feeds, hearing different stories, developing different pictures of what's wrong and who's to blame. When political engagement feels risky, people retreat to the safety of their feed. And the civic muscle for working across divides, the muscle that makes a small state like SA function, atrophies from disuse. The solidarity across that gap, the thing democracy most depends on, is quietly eroding.

And it's not just urban versus rural. In Adelaide's northern suburbs, communities like Elizabeth, built around manufacturing jobs that disappeared decades ago, One Nation polled strongly too. Economic precarity and algorithmic sorting reinforce each other. When you're struggling and the algorithm tells you someone else is getting what should be yours, the zero-sum framing lands hardest where the pain is most real.

SA also showed us the antidote this year. When the algal bloom devastated 30% of the state's coastline, something remarkable happened. Citizen scientists documented over 12,000 observations across more than 400 species. Local residents trained each other in plankton identification. Beach clean-up volunteers turned up week after week. Community forums drew crowds from Brighton to Port Lincoln. A UniSA tourism expert called on South Australians to show solidarity with affected coastal communities by visiting them. The infrastructure of local care activated, powerfully, across every divide the algorithm had created.

SA has proximity. We are small enough that most of us are only one or two conversations away from someone whose life looks completely different from ours - a farmer in the Mid North, a nurse in Elizabeth, a student in the CBD, a retiree on the Fleurieu. We need the willingness to talk to each other, in person and online, with genuine curiosity, and the civic infrastructure that makes those conversations possible. The algal bloom proved we can do it for our coastline. The question is whether we can do it for our democracy.

What Holds the Sausage Together

F06: From Open Society to Tactical Shapeshifting.

The 10F Consortium's sixth forecast, F06 From Open Society to Tactical Shape-shifting, tracks a global pattern: the institutions that underpin open, pluralistic societies are being forced to transform under increasingly hostile conditions. Institutions keep their names while losing their missions. Administrative continuity masks substantive erosion.

In SA, this isn't happening through direct attack as it is in other parts of the world. It's happening through the slow physics of power.

Independent institutions don't stay independent by accident. They stay independent because there are enough countervailing forces, enough scrutiny, enough cultural expectation of independence, that the gravitational pull of dominant power doesn't capture them. When opposition is weak, media is thin, and one centre of power is overwhelmingly strong, every institution in the system faces pressure to align. Not through orders. Through funding that flows toward alignment. Talent that migrates toward the centre. Independence that becomes career risk.

SA's independent media landscape has thinned. The state is served by InDaily (a small independent digital outlet reliant on reader support and some government advertising) and The Advertiser (News Corp). There is no equivalent of the investigative capacity that exists in larger states. Multiple senior journalists have moved into government media adviser roles. In a state where the government polls at historically dominant levels and the opposition has effectively collapsed, the scrutiny function that media provides is structurally weakened at the very moment it matters most.

Arts funding in SA has not kept pace with other states for years, with the government investing heavily in sport and spectacle (LIV Golf, Gather Round, MotoGP) while arts organisations struggle. A new 10-year cultural policy was released in March 2025 with $80 million in new funding, but the sector's dependence on government favour means its capacity for independent cultural expression is tied to political goodwill. As the Premier himself acknowledged, the arts had been "easy for government to take for granted."

A healthy democracy needs institutions that can say no to the government of the day. An integrity body that can investigate without permission. Media that can scrutinise without dependence. Cultural organisations that reflect the full complexity of a society, not just the priorities of whoever holds the chequebook. And a public service that does good evidence-based work in service of the highest public good, gives frank and fearless advice because that's its job, and leaves the politics to the politicians. When the public service becomes politicised, when proximity to the leader matters more than expertise, when the culture rewards loyalty over candour, the state loses something it cannot easily rebuild: the institutional memory and independent judgment that make good governance possible regardless of who holds power.

When these institutions weaken, it doesn't feel like a crisis. It feels like quiet. And quiet is the most dangerous democratic failure, because nobody notices until the thing that was supposed to catch the problem isn't there anymore.

What's In A Good Sausage

If this is what's happening, what does the alternative look like? Not in theory. In practice, in a small state like SA.

Democracy is not just voting.It's the civic infrastructure between elections: community organisations, independent media, cultural institutions, deliberative processes, local networks. These need maintenance just like roads. Communities themselves are infrastructure. When they're strong, everything else works better.

Disagreement is healthy. Contempt is not.A well-functioning democracy doesn't need everyone to agree. It needs people to disagree well: with curiosity, with evidence, with a willingness to be surprised. That's productive contestation, arguing about how to solve shared problems. When the argument shifts to whether whole groups of people belong, that's corrosive. It doesn't produce better policy. It produces fracture.

The evidence here is genuinely hopeful. When citizens are brought together in structured deliberation, with diverse perspectives, good information, and skilled facilitation, they consistently find far more common ground than the political theatre suggests. SA itself has a strong track record here. We know this works. The question is whether we invest in it at the scale it deserves.

Local democracy is most exposed.Local government is where many of these dynamics are most acute and least visible. Council elections don't have compulsory voting, and turnout is often below 30%. That means a small number of engaged residents, or a single organised faction, can determine who governs your neighbourhood, your planning decisions, your local services. Every democratic vulnerability in this article is amplified at local government level, and the simplest protection is showing up to vote, you can also get involved.

Why opposition matters (even when it's annoying).This is one of those things that sounds obvious to political insiders but genuinely isn't obvious to most people. On Saturday, we heard punters at polling booths asking "Why does it matter if there's no opposition? The government's doing fine."

It matters more now than it has in a generation. With the Liberals reduced to a handful of seats and One Nation entering parliament as the second-largest primary vote, SA faces a genuine question: who holds this government to account? A four-seat Liberal rump? A grievance party with no governing experience? A crossbench of independents who may not be able to coordinate? This isn't a theoretical problem. It's the democratic reality we just voted into existence.

Here's why it matters. When you're buying a house, you want a building inspector to check it before you sign. Not because you think the house is bad, but because you want someone whose job it is to find the problems you can't see. An opposition is the building inspector for government. Their job is to read the fine print, find the mistakes, ask the uncomfortable questions, and force the government to explain itself. When there's no credible opposition, nobody's reading the fine print.

And here's the bit that matters most for everyone, including people who love the current government: power without scrutiny changes people. Not because politicians are bad people, but because that's how institutions work. When nobody's watching, standards drift. When nobody's challenging, assumptions harden. When nobody's proposing alternatives, thinking narrows. The best government in the world gets worse without scrutiny. The worst gets dangerous.

So when the Liberal Party records its lowest vote in history, and the space is filled by grievance and parties whose policies have never been tested against the realities of governing, that's not just a problem for the people who lost their seats last night. It's a democracy problem. It belongs to all of us. And rebuilding a functioning opposition, one that can hold government to account, develop real policy, and offer a credible alternative, is in every South Australian's interest, no matter who they voted for.

Four Ways the Sausage Gets Cooked

At SA Futures Agency, we've been developing scenario work exploring where SA's democratic ecosystem might be heading over the next 10 to 20 years. Two big uncertainties drive the picture: does accountability strengthen or weaken? And does SA's political culture stay grounded or get captured by imported culture wars?

That gives us four trajectories:

The Renewal. SA uses this moment of dominance to strengthen the system itself. ICAC is restored to full power, not as a weapon against any party, but as insurance for all of them. The public service is valued for independence and expertise, serving whoever holds power with equal rigour. A credible opposition rebuilds around policy substance, giving the government the scrutiny that makes its own decisions better. Independent media finds a sustainable model. The First Nations Voice matures and inspires templates for broader participatory democracy. Citizens' juries and deliberative processes become routine. The system is strong enough that it works well regardless of who wins the next election, or the one after that.

The Quiet Drift. No crisis. No drama. Competent government delivering visible results. But year by year, the things that only matter when something goes wrong quietly thin out. Integrity bodies stay weak. Media stays thin. The opposition doesn't rebuild. The public service learns what not to say. Community organisations lose funding and volunteers. None of it makes headlines. Then the shock arrives, a drought, a recession, a global disruption, and the system that was supposed to catch it has nothing left to catch it with. Not from attack. From disuse.

The Performance. SA has all the visible features of a healthy democracy. Elections, parliament, announcements, media coverage. But the substance has hollowed out. Government performs delivery. Opposition performs outrage. Question time becomes theatre. SA has accountability structures, but they're consumed by performative conflict. Media covers spectacle. Everyone is loud. Nothing actually checks anything. The real decisions happen in rooms where nothing is written down. Everyone is loud. Nothing gets built. This scenario is dangerous because from the outside it looks exactly like democracy working.

The Rupture. An external shock hits a system that has quietly weakened. It could be economic, a global recession or trade disruption. It could be environmental, another climate-driven disaster at scale. It could be strategic, an AUKUS cost blowout or a regional security crisis. The shock itself isn't the problem. The problem is that the institutions that should absorb it, an opposition that can propose alternatives, media that can investigate emergency spending, integrity bodies that can prevent crisis profiteering, a public service that can give frank advice under pressure, have all thinned to the point where they can't do their jobs.

None of these is inevitable. They're not predictions. They're plausible alternative futures, maps of terrain we might be moving through.

One of the things foresight teaches is that good decision-making requires engaging with multiple possible futures, not just the one you prefer.

The question becomes which one are we building toward? And are we doing it deliberately or by accident?

What We Can Ask Of Our Politicians

Here's what we think South Australians should ask of every elected representative in the new parliament, regardless of party. These aren't criticisms. They're invitations, offered in the belief that the people who put themselves forward for public life deserve to be taken seriously, and that taking them seriously means asking them to be their best.

Show us your vision, not just your announcements. What does SA look like in 2040 if your policies succeed? Not a dot-point list of funding commitments. A genuine picture. Where do families live? How do they get to work? What does the economy run on? How do communities hold together? If you can't describe the future you're building toward in human terms, you might not have one.

Engage with more than one scenario. Every politician operates as if their preferred future is the only one worth planning for. But the world doesn't work like that. What if energy prices don't fall? What if AUKUS is delayed? What if the population grows faster or slower than projected? What if the next drought is worse? A government that can only imagine one future is a government that will be blindsided by the others.

Explain your theory of change. It's not enough to say what you'll fund. Tell us how you think it will work. If you can't explain how your housing policy actually reduces housing costs, or how your energy policy actually lowers bills, then you're offering slogans, not solutions. South Australians are smart enough to follow a real argument. Trust us with one.

Resist the culture war. Every hour a politician spends on a symbolic fight is an hour not spent on housing, health, water, energy, or the democratic infrastructure itself. The test is simple: does this proposal build something, or does it just perform something?

Restore and protect independent institutions. Restore ICAC's powers. Strengthen FOI. Ensure the Auditor-General can access the documents they need. Protect the independence of the public service. These aren't partisan issues. They're the foundations that make everything else work.

What Every South Australian Can Do All Year Round

Democracy doesn't happen on election day. It happens in the 1,460 days between elections. Here's how to keep it alive.

Demand transparency. When undisclosed sums are spent on major events, ask what the public is paying. When ICAC is weakened, say something. When FOI requests are denied, notice. When the Auditor-General flags concerns, pay attention. These aren't abstract governance issues. They're about whether you can see how your money is spent and your power is exercised.

Subscribe to and financially support independent local media. This is possibly the single most important thing you can do for democracy in SA right now. When the opposition is weak and the government is dominant, independent journalism is the last remaining accountability mechanism. InDaily, community radio stations, local publications: they need subscribers and supporters, not just readers. If you can afford a streaming service, you can afford to support the people holding power to account in your state.

Learn to spot the difference between policy and performance. When a politician or party makes a claim, ask: does this solve a problem that affects real people's lives, with a mechanism I can follow? Or is it designed to make me feel something about someone else? If it's the second one, someone is using your attention as a resource. You deserve better.

Increase the surface area of genuine conversation, especially across divides. Not on social media. In person. Over a meal. At a community meeting. In the school car park. At the sports club. After the game. Seek out people who see the world differently from you. The research is clear: when people engage face to face with genuine curiosity, the divisions shrink dramatically. Every genuine conversation across a divide is democratic muscle-building. And SA is small enough that these conversations can actually shift things.

Value a functional opposition, even if you didn't vote for them. Especially if you didn't vote for them. If you're a Labor voter, you should want a competent opposition. If you're a Liberal voter, you should be demanding your party rebuilds as a genuine policy alternative, not a culture-war franchise. If you vote Greens or independent, you should want a crossbench that can coordinate, not just grandstand.

Invest time in the things that hold us together. Community organisations, local media, libraries, arts, sport, neighbourhood networks, community gardens, citizens' juries, school communities, volunteering, local government: these are all civic infrastructure. They're the spaces where we practice being a society. Every hour you spend in these spaces is an hour invested in the democratic immune system.

Show up for the institutions that protect your freedom. When a citizens' jury is convened, participate if you're selected. When the First Nations Voice holds elections, pay attention. When your local council makes decisions, attend a meeting.

Vote in local government elections. Unlike state and federal elections, voting isn't compulsory, turnout is low, and the dynamics described in this article, the fog, the grievance, the algorithmic sorting, all play out at council level with even fewer safeguards. Your local council makes decisions about planning, development, community services, and public space. When only a fraction of residents vote, those decisions are shaped by whoever shows up. Show up.

These institutions are not someone else's problem. They're the architecture of your freedom. And they need you to care about them before they're gone.

Stop outsourcing your judgment to the algorithm. The content in your feed is selected to maximise engagement, not to inform you. Actively seek out sources that challenge your assumptions. The algorithm wants to sort you into a camp. Refuse to be sorted.

Last Bite

South Australia was the first place in the world to give women both the vote and the right to stand for election. It held the world's largest citizens' jury on nuclear waste. It has the first political donation ban on Earth. It's one of the first Australian states to establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament, and it held those elections on the same day some parties were campaigning to abolish them.

SA has democratic DNA. The question isn't whether we have it. It's whether this generation will use it.

Foresight tells us the future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we make, together, through the choices we make now and every day after. Including the choice to talk to each other like neighbours rather than combatants. Including the choice to invest in the civic infrastructure that holds a society together. Including the choice to demand more from our politics than outrage and slogans. Including the choice to show up, not just on election day, but on all the days in between.

That's not naive. It's the most practical thing we can do.