Three deputy leaders of the South Australian Liberal Party in three weeks, and just 200 weeks to go until the next state election. That’s OK, suggested Opposition leader Isobel Redmond at the lectern after this morning’s leadership vote, because in 200 weeks anything can happen.

In South Australia, anything and everything is already happening. The party is shambolic, riven by factions and stumbling between ridicule and incompetence. To understand why, we need to go back to the days when Gough Whitlam was Prime Minister, Joh Bjelke-Petersen was feeding the chooks in Queensland and a former SA Premier, Steele Hall, was leading a breakaway of moderate conservatives to form a new political party, the Liberal Movement.

Hall’s move in the early 1970s began a war between the long-ruling families of SA’s Liberal ranks, which makes the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys look like a friendly argument in a gentlemen’s club. The moderates and conservatives in the SA Liberals despise each other more than they do the Labor Party.

“It’s not a matter of personalities so much as factions,”  Redmond said this morning. “I was not prepared to tolerate a faction deal as part of this party.”

Redmond had fought a good but not great election campaign. On March 20, after the votes were counted, Labor was returned with a smaller but still comfortable majority and the Liberals, despite an 8% swing and wins in seats held by non-Labor independents, are almost as far from the Treasury benches as before the election.

Redmond’s deputy, Stephen Griffiths, had also fought a good though not great campaign. He stumbled just once, but as far as Redmond was concerned that was once too often. After the election she called him to say she was withdrawing her support, and then thought she’d stitched up a deal that would have seen a former leader, Iain Evans from the party’s right, take the deputy’s spot.

“Not on your life,” said the McCoys — represented in the South Australian Appalachians by another leadership aspirant and former deputy, Vickie Chapman.

Redmond’s first mistake was refusing to back loyal deputy Griffith.  Next Redmond backed Evans for the deputy position: mistake two. Whatever his strengths, and he’s not without some, Evans is as popular in the parliamentary Liberal Party as a picador in a bullring — the crowd might cheer but the bulls themselves get a tad nervous.

So bitter is the fighting between the Evans and Chapman camps that they fire squirrel guns across the valley at each other just for the fun of it. There was simply no way that the Chapman forces were going to accept Evans as deputy leader, no matter how Redmond entreated them.

When Redmond couldn’t get Evans elected at a party room meeting last week, the MPs settled for yet another former leader, Martin Hamilton-Smith, as deputy.

Now bad call three. Redmond icily and very publicly said Hamilton-Smith wasn’t her choice. She could have accepted the vote and moved on, but Redmond hadn’t stopped making mistakes just yet.

Bad call four. She refused to work with him. She got on the phone and spoke to senior and junior MPs, including the feuding camps. Soon enough she had a letter with the required five signatures on it, calling for yet another spill.

This morning Hamilton-Smith justifiably did not re-contest. The depth of his antipathy is as deep as the devil’s blue sea. “It is beneath my dignity to stand,” he said yesterday. “The Liberal Party over the past week has been unprofessional and lacking a sense of decency.”

So this morning 13 of the eligible 18 Liberal MPs met at Parliament House to again cast their votes for the deputy leadership. Two of the others, Vickie Chapman among them, were on Kangaroo Island. Hamilton-Smith deigned not to attend. One was delayed by some minor flooding caused by a freak rainstorm that lashed the city this morning and another phoned in a proxy, perhaps declining to fight over carrion.

“I am determined that any government led by me and any Opposition led by me in the meantime will not be a factional-based opposition,”  Redmond said after today’s vote. She may as well try to turn back a locust plague with a flyswatter.

“Clearly in the Labor Party they have very defined factions and we have already talked about the need for us to actually come to the conclusion about whether we then do what Labor does and have defined factions, or simply have no factions which would be my preference,” she said.

“I’d have to concede that over the past couple of weeks we’ve lost some of the momentum that was certainly going our way,” she added with considerable understatement.

Labor is ecstatic. The scandal over its dodgy how-to-vote fraud, revealed hours after the polls closed, is almost forgotten. The fight for Labor’s own deputy leadership position just two weeks ago is almost ancient history in voters’ minds.

Good government needs a good Opposition. There is a very persuasive argument that South Australia is now lacking both.

Hendrik Gout is editor of Adelaide’s Independent Weekly