Welcome to Burnside, comrades.

Gold shoes have been shoved to the back of the closet, a sign of conspicuous bourgeois capitalist excess.

Birkenstocks and socks are now the must-have footwear at Burnside Village, the Red Square of the leafy east.

Da, da. Who knew Burnside Bolsheviks were a thing?

As the votes rolled in for the ridiculous, expensive and unnecessary Bragg by-election last Saturday night, quite a few people worked themselves into a bit of a rapture.

None more so than veteran Labor MP, Transport Minister Tom Koutsantonis, who took to Twitter with this gem:

“BREAKING. ECSA (the Electoral Commission of SA) reporting Labor’s Alice Rolls has won the Burnside Booth! The Burnside Booth!”

Let’s put aside the annoying recent habit of politicians using the news tag “BREAKING”.

BREAKING: you stick to politics, we’ll stick to reporting.

The Minister fleshed out his scoop. He explained that in the 2018 election the Liberal vote of 66.2 per cent in Bragg’s Burnside booth was nearly double Labor’s share.

Four years later, “the David Speirs Liberal Opposition has lost that same booth to Labor’s Alice Rolls who received 50.2 per cent of the vote. It’s a historic night”, he tweeted.

Did Labor really win the Burnside booth, the jewel in the crown of Bragg, always the safest metropolitan seat in what’s left of the SA Liberal empire?

Well, da and nyet, sort of but not really. Yes, on paper, the Burnside booth will always show it was lost to Labor, but it’s not much to get excited about. If a share of those 9000 postals had been cast at the booth on the Saturday, we now know they’d tell a different story.

And did Labor nearly win Bragg? After all, at 7.53 pm last Saturday night, the two-party preferred figure had Labor on 49.4 per cent and the Liberals on 50.6 per cent. Jack Batty went to bed that night with a roughly 250 vote lead. Sweet dreams.

No, it didn’t even come close. By the end of this week, the Bragg by-election turned out to be a pretty good result for “the David Speirs Liberal Opposition”. A near-death experience, to be sure, but a good result just the same.

For Jack Batty, the soon-to-be Liberal MP for Bragg, I’d go so far as to say it was a brilliant personal win in a by-election that had total disaster written all over it.

So, let’s calm the farm, as the Foodland guy said about panic buying toilet paper, and unpack this by-election because they are strange, fraught beasts.

Former Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman comfortably retained Bragg at the March state election. Despite a two-party swing of almost 9 per cent to Labor, she was returned with 58.2 per cent of the vote.

Still, Tasmanian psephologist Kevin Bonham points out this was the first time Bragg’s Liberal result had dropped below 62 per cent.

Within weeks of a crushing election defeat for her party, Our Vickie decided she didn’t want to stick around for the next four years.

Quitting a safe seat for no good reason while the ashes of an election are still hot created the perfect conditions for losing a by-election. And the Liberals really deserved to lose Bragg.

It’s hard to think of a more reckless, pointless, politically dangerous by-election. It was held not only a few months after a state election, but mere weeks after a federal election that saw massive upheaval in the Liberal vote, with so-called Teal independents storming Liberal fortresses on the East Coast.

Something big is happening to voting patterns and nobody really knows where it is taking us.

Liberal leader David Speirs even confessed he hadn’t voted for Jack Batty in the preselection contest, because he believed Bragg needed a woman as MP. Fair enough. But did he have to say it? The Opposition Leader suffers from a rare political ailment – honesty. It’ll be his undoing.

So why all the hoopla last Saturday night?

Under a dopey quirk of our Electoral Act, the electoral commission is forbidden from counting pre-poll and postal votes – votes cast before election day – on election night. It can’t start counting these “missing” votes until the following Monday.

This meant on Saturday night they counted only 13,000 votes. A whopping 9000 votes stayed on ice.

Former federal Liberal MP for Sturt Chris Pyne messaged me saying “the polity is going to have to adjust to the fact that we no longer have an “Election Day” result, we have a two-week voting period”.

“The result everyone is reporting in the press will be unrecognisable from the actual result yet the impression will already be set,” he said. “Bizarre.”

He was spot on. Those 13,000 votes showed a tight contest and a Liberal hammering with a seven per cent swing. Yes, on paper, the Burnside booth will always show it was lost to Labor, but it’s not much to get excited about. If a small share of those 9000 postals had been cast at the booth on Saturday, we now know they’d tell a different story.

As the pre-polls and postals were tallied from Monday, the Batty margin improved miraculously, by the hour.

With some postals still to be counted, he’s won the seat with a two-party preferred figure of 55.5 per cent, a mild swing of under 3 per cent, just winning on primaries and maintaining Bragg’s record of never needing preferences to hold the seat.

In such a toxic by-election environment, that’s a solid victory. It marks Batty out as a future leader.

Think that’s a stretch? Let’s stroll back to 2012 and the by-election held in Labor’s version of Bragg – the seat of Port Adelaide.

Former Treasurer Kevin Foley quite reasonably decided to quit politics mid-term, two years before the next state election. This is how you’re meant to do it. He’d suffered a double-digit swing against him at the 2010 election but still held the seat on almost 63 per cent.

Labor’s candidate was Susan Close. She nearly lost.

Independent Gary Johanson ran against her and collected a shed full of preferences from the gaggle of other independents in the fray.

Ms Close scrambled home with 53 per cent to his 47, a swing against her of almost 10 per cent.

A decade later, Susan Close is Deputy Premier and holds Port Adelaide on a big, fat 71.4 per cent.

BREAKING: Labor nearly lost Port Adelaide. Did it? Da and nyet, sort of but not really.

Matthew Abraham is one of South Australia’s most experienced political journalists. His column will be published on Fridays.