'Here if you need': Ashton Hurn played a short and difficult game in the SA election
ABC
By Evelyn Manfield
Topic:State and Territory Elections
Ashton Hurn had acknowledged there was a "mountain to climb". (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
A week out from election day, SA Liberal Leader and aspiring premier Ashton Hurn sent a text.
"Here if you need," she wrote.
It was to the coach of the Adelaide Thunderbirds netball team, who she was watching play that night.
But it very well could have been a text she sent her colleagues three-and-a-half months earlier, before she assumed the role as leader, when things were beginning to look particularly dire for the party.
Just before former leader Vincent Tarzia stepped down, the party's state director Alex Hyde shared polling with shadow ministers which showed they were on track for a near wipe-out.
Polling in mid-February predicted a similar result.
It was something Ms Hurn reflected on in her speech to the party faithful on Saturday night.
"The pundits, they said that we wouldn't get a single seat, but tonight we will prove them wrong," she declared.
Ashton Hurn concedes defeat on election night. (ABC News: Tricia Watkinson)
It is a rather positive assessment considering the party hung on to just a handful of seats, saw its primary vote plummet and in some electorates polled lower than minor parties.
But those in the camp, like federal Liberal senator Anne Ruston, credited Ms Hurn with holding on to seats many thought the party would lose, including her own seat of Schubert.
"Her performance over the past three months has been really quite outstanding," Senator Ruston said on Saturday night — finding a silver lining after political destruction.
"Anyone who doesn't support her as our leader going forward should think about whether they want to be in the Liberal Party."
Ashton Hurn's supporters say she was born for the hustings. (ABC News: Che Chorley)
The campaign countdown
It was always going to be a tough ask for Ms Hurn, who was subbed in to the role just a couple of months before the state election.
On Saturday, giving a nod to her country roots, Ms Hurn likened the result to farming.
"Not every season goes your way, sometimes it doesn't rain when you want it to and sometimes the crop that you're growing doesn't produce the goods," she told supporters.
"But that doesn't mean you walk off the land — you stay and you fight another day because you love what you do."
A sporting go
Alongside her regional upbringing, Ms Hurn often draws on her family's sporting prowess.
Ashton Hurn, pictured here celebrating the resurfacing of a netball court in her electorate, is a former South Australian Sport Institute netballer. (Supplied: Ashton Hurn)
She was a South Australian Institute of Sport-level netballer and her brother is West Coast Eagles champion Shannon Hurn.
Sport and politics often go hand-in-hand.
Good players work hard and perform well under pressure, something those within the Liberal party have continued to spruik about Ms Hurn.
But when you are subbed in at the fourth quarter, kicking against the wind, the odds of a miracle are not good, as the votes clearly reflected.
For Ms Hurn, many of the conditions, including federal Coalition leadership turmoil and two by-elections lost in once safe Liberal seats, were out of her control.
The SA election has been widely considered the first electoral test for One Nation, whose leader is Pauline Hanson (right), since gaining popularity in the polls. (ABC News: Che Chorley/Matt Roberts)
But those in her control were also of note.
The four-week campaign was largely re-announcements, and there was also the preference conversation with One Nation, where Ms Hurn displayed a strong openness to dealing with the right-wing party.
It did not work out, though, and left the Liberals directing preferences to One Nation (including over the Nationals) but not getting preferences in return — a complaint made by some of her colleagues.
It also opened her up to political attacks from Labor who argued they no longer understood what the Liberal Party under her leadership stood for.
There were bouts of momentum for Ms Hurn and her team at a couple of points.
The most significant was an email saga in which Labor tried to discredit the widow of a man who had experienced ramping in his final hours.
But attention moved on when Labor exposed Liberal candidate for Wright Carston Woodhouse as saying "same-sex marriage isn't real" and feminism is "demonic" on a podcast.
The party initially stood by Mr Woodhouse before Ms Hurn revealed he was no longer running for the party.
Bronwen Paterson (left) with Ashton Hurn. (ABC News)
Next Liberal test looms
The party's moderate and conservative factions also look set to battle it out for its future vision — if comments by senators Anne Ruston and Alex Antic on Saturday night are anything to go by.
"This nonsense that, by leaning to the left, we'll capture seats that we don't have has been proven wrong more times than I've had hot dinners," Senator Antic told Channel 7 on Saturday.
On the same day Senator Ruston told the ABC's state election program the party needed to return to being John Howard's "broad church".
Whatever those lessons may be, at a federal level it doesn't have long to learn them.
A by-election in Sussan Ley's old seat of Farrer is looming as is a Victorian state election later in the year. One Nation has already vowed to campaign hard in the latter.
A previously secret review into Peter Dutton federal run last year identified some answers, including an inability to capture the young and female vote.
But it also reported a "notable absence of reflection" which perhaps does not bode well.
On Sunday, Ms Hurn admitted there were "a lot of lessons" for the party to learn.
Just how much attention Ashton Hurn and the handful of remaining Liberal colleagues will give to those lessons will play out soon enough.
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