SA-BEST, formerly known as Nick Xenophon's SA-BEST is a political party in South Australia. It was founded in 2017 by Nick Xenophon as a state-based partner to his Nick Xenophon Team party. In 2018, deputy leader of NXT Stirling Griff said that SA-Best is "a separate entity, a separate association, a separate party" from NXT. The party was registered on 4 July 2017. John Darley had been the sole Nick Xenophon Team member in the South Australian Parliament until he left the party to become an independent on 17 August 2017. Darley was elected to the Legislative Council in 2014, and his term does not expire until 2022. On 6 October 2017, Xenophon announced that he would be leaving the Senate to contest the state seat of Hartley at the 2018 state election. Xenophon resigned from the Senate on 31 October 2017. At its 2018 annual general meeting, the South Australian party officially changed its name from Nick Xenophon's SA-Best to SA-Best. In December, Xenophon resigned as a party member.
In the March 2018South Australian election, SA-Best contested thirty-six seats in the South Australian House of Assembly and put forward four candidates for the upper house. The party charged candidates $1,000 to be considered for pre-selection, and a further $20,000 for running in the lower house, or a further $40,000 in the upper house, as well as fund their own local campaign. Any successful candidate would have been compelled to pay five per cent of their salary to the party. The thirty-six House of Assembly seats contested were: Badcoe, Chaffey, Cheltenham, Colton, Croydon, Davenport, Dunstan, Elder, Elizabeth, Enfield, Finniss, Gibson, Giles, Hammond, Hartley, Heysen, Hurtle Vale, Kavel, King, Lee, Mackillop, Mawson, Morialta, Morphett, Mount Gambier, Narungga, Newland, Playford, Port Adelaide, Ramsay, Reynell, Schubert, Taylor, Unley, Waite, and Wright. Antony Green of ABC News noted that Labor needed a notional swing of 3.1 percent to win a majority, since the Liberals held a bare notional majority after the redistribution. However, Green speculated that if SA-BEST repeated Xenophon's past performance at Senate elections, it could do well enough to make those calculations meaningless. The party failed to secure any lower house seats, although there was a close contest in the historically safe Liberal seat of Heysen. Xenophon unsuccessfully contested Hartley and although he came second on the primary vote ahead of Labor's Grace Portolesi by 202 votes, the preference distribution of the eliminated fourth-placed Greens candidate turned Xenophon's 99-vote lead over Portolesi into a 357 vote deficit. Third-placed Xenophon was therefore eliminated, with Hartley reverting to the traditional Liberal vs Labor contest. The party came second on primary votes in ten seats; the strongest results were in Chaffey, Finniss, and Hartley, where the party received over 25%. SA Best did, however, secure two upper house positions, with the successful election of Connie Bonaros, the campaign manager, and Frank Pangallo, Xenophon's former media advisor. According to NXT deputy leader Stirling Griff, the infamous "Bollywood ad" was his idea and actually improved private opinion polling. In the same interview, Griff indicated that the polling showed negative advertising by the Australian Hotels Association against the party resulted in a five per cent loss of their primary vote.
Expansion
It was reported by Buzzfeed in January 2018 that other parties have been registered interstate, including NSW-BEST, VIC-BEST, WA-BEST, QLD-BEST and NT-BEST. Notwithstanding, Xenophon resigned as a party member of SA-Best in December 2018.
