South Australian Liberal Party
South Australian political party
The South Australian Liberal Party, officially known as the Liberal Party of Australia (South Australian Division), and often shortened to SA Liberals, is the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party of Australia. It was formed as the Liberal and Country League (LCL) in 1932 and became the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party when the Liberal Party was formed in 1945. It retained its Liberal and Country League name before changing to its current name in 1974. It is one of two major parties in the bicameral Parliament of South Australia, the other being the Australian Labor Party (SA Branch). The party is led by Ashton Hurn since 8 December 2025.
During its 42-year existence as the Liberal and Country League, it spent 34 years in government, mainly due to an electoral malapportionment scheme heavily favouring rural areas known as the Playmander. The Playmander was named after LCL leader Sir Tom Playford, who was the Premier of South Australia for 27 years, starting shortly after the 1938 election until his party was narrowly defeated at the 1965 election. The Playmander was dismantled by LCL leader Steele Hall after regaining government at the 1968 election, losing government again at the 1970 election. Since the rural malapportionment abolition and one vote one value adoption, the party has won just 4 of the 17 state elections: the 1979, 1993, 1997 and the 2018 elections.
History
Formation
The Liberal and Country League had its roots in the Emergency Committee of South Australia, which ran as the main non-Labor party in South Australia at the 1931 federal election landslide.
“South Australian Liberal Party” enters the record as south Australian political party. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what South, Australian and Liberal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23198434. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1932, 1945, 1974 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “South Australian Liberal Party” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.