The emergence of anti-pokies campaigner Nick Xenophon as a South Australian Senate candidate is the most exciting development in the struggle for upper house control that we’ve seen all year.

Peter Andren’s withdrawal from the NSW Senate contest due to cancer largely ended the hopes of independents in the Senate, although the lamentable Pauline Hanson remains an outside prospect in Queensland.

Xenophon is a giant killer of the first order. He first got elected to the South Australian Legislative Assembly in 1997 with just 2.86% of the vote, but preferences from a range of parties got him up to a quota of 8.33%.

After eight years of relentless campaigning, the stunt master then faced a preferences push against him from most of the other parties at last year’s South Australian election, but floored them all with a staggering 20.5% statewide primary vote. An extraordinary editorial endorsement by The Sunday Mail certainly helped and it will be interesting to see if editor Phil Gardner does likewise this time.

While his 1997 victory was achieved with the eighth lowest primary vote in Australian upper house elections, the 2005 victory was the highest statewide vote ever achieved by an independent, suggesting a Senate quota of 14.28% should be a cake walk.

It’s good that Antony Green has changed his tune. The ABC election analyst assumed Xenophon would poll just 2% in his preferences calculation before the 2005 election, but he told AM this morning that he would definitely take Natasha Stott Despoja’s seat.

Xenophon’s entry will finally put Australia’s notorious addiction to gambling – we lose more per head than any other country – front and centre of the political debate in Canberra. Surely, the ALP couldn’t keep running 400 pokies in its various Canberra Labor Clubs if you had a no pokies MP sharing the balance of power in the Senate.

It will also be interesting to see if any other anti-gambling candidates jump on the Xenophon bandwagon in other states.

As Australia’s most unsuccessful candidate who has never run in a Federal election, I’m half tempted to have a crack at the Victorian Senate on an anti-gambling platform.

However, trying to do a Maxine McKew and run against Peter Costello in Higgins would probably be more fun. Costello has done sod-all to support his brother’s anti-gambling agenda, sod-all to promote the interests of small shareholders and he continues to ban Crikey from the budget lock-up.

One campaign slogan might be: “you can lock us out of the lock-up but you can’t lock us out of Higgins”.

Preference negotiations would be fun as Costello is only on a margin of 8.76%. For now, it’s just a thought.