DAVID SPEERS: … let’s go from the Labor camp to the Liberal camp in Adelaide and Liberal Senator Simon Birmingham. Simon, we are seeing big swings in some seats but not in all and indeed in a couple of very marginal Labor seats… Light, we were looking at just earlier, it looks like a swing to Labor so it’s still a way off popping the champagne corks where you are?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: It’s going to be one of those nights, David, we can’t expect to necessarily see everything move in unison. We’re seeing some amazing results, particularly in seats like Florey, a seat that nobody had been talking about before tonight, but with something like nine per cent of the vote counted it looks like we may well be ahead there. Now that’s a long way to go and Florey’s a seat that could come back significantly but that would have Labor very, very worried. Equally Light, it’s where I grew up, my parents were on polling booths out in Light with Cosie Costa today… we could not have preselected better there but it’s a strange seat, it’s a peri-urban seat, it has its own media market and in that seat you would expect things to be very tight… the Labor candidate, Tony Piccolo, has had a public profile as mayor dating back for many, many years, so I expect that will be a tight one. I would still hope, though, knowing how hard that Cosie Costa and his team have worked, that that one will come back but it will, as always in these equations, be a seat-by-seat thing.
DAVID SPEERS: And what do you put some of those swings to Labor down to, the fact that it has been fairly lumpy so far tonight?
SIMON BIRMINGHAM: Well, I think there are probably two things here. One is issues, the other is style. On the issues front, of course it’s things like water, it’s things like health… these are the things that Isobel Redmond campaigned on, Mike Rann failed to really get any traction on the issues that he wanted to talk about. And that’s because they weren’t the issues that mattered most to South Australians and water will always rate right up there at the top. But style also has to be a big factor and it’s the style of Mike Rann, which is very much the style that Kevin Rudd has adopted as well, that is one of spin over substance, talk over action and South Australians really started to see through that over the last few months and that’s why we saw a huge turn against him and that’s the thing that the Rudd Government has to watch for as well.
DAVID SPEERS: Simon Birmingham, Liberal Senator, thank you for that…