Dennis Hood

Hood followed Brokenshire to the Australian Conservatives, led by South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi, after Family First merged into the Conservatives in 2017. However, Hood defected to the Liberal Party nine days after the 2018 state election. Hood noted that the Conservatives had only garnered three percent of first preference votes for the House of Assembly, with none of their 33 lower house candidates coming close to being elected. He claimed that the Conservatives were focused almost entirely on federal issues, and were likely to have "no impact" at the state level. At the same time, he praised the vision of the newly elected Liberal government, saying that there was a "substantial" overlap with his own platform. Reportedly, Brokenshire had encouraged Hood to consider defecting to the Liberals. When Bernardi learned of Hood's defection, he suspected that the Conservatives had been "white-anted from within."

Following the 2010 election, although Hood's identity has been outweighed by colleague Robert Brokenshire, dubbed the "de facto opposition leader", Hood has worked with independents Ann Bressington (the Nick Xenophon No Pokies Party) and John Darley, in attempts to improve funding for mental health, disability, child protection and public housing. His work with Bressington, whose 22-year-old daughter Shay-Louise Bressington died from heroin overdose, in the area of "tough on drugs" is landmark. Bressington however, is positioned as even tougher on drugs, or at least quintuply economically. Hood's proposal draft bill that will allow parents to become better informed of their children's Facebook activity, was accepted by John Rau and Robert McClelland.

In 2009, Hood suggested the scrapping of compulsory voting, on the basis that he considers it is undemocratic to force people to cast a vote, despite the fact that South Australian electoral legislation only requires a voter to attend a polling booth, not to mark a ballot paper. He also established a Parliamentary committee to evaluate the establishment of marine parks off the coast of South Australia, which involves the examination of the environment, economic and social impacts. In 2011, Hood advocated the creation of a police task force to address the backlog of unexecuted arrest warrants. Hood supported the redevelopment of the Adelaide Oval, with some amendments. In 2010, Hood noted that the State Coroner needed more resources to address the backlog in cases.

At a Family First State Executive meeting on 1 February 2007, Hood replaced Andrew Evans as the Family First parliamentary leader. Although failing to gain the reputation as a serial Freedom of Information Act user as colleague Robert Brokenshire, Hood has been an active user of the FOI too, but has a better reputation for the publication of public records. Nevertheless, Hood is established as the mathematical identity of Family First, involved with the compilation of econometric statistics.

Dennis Hood was elected to the South Australian Parliament at the age of 34, and was described by Peter Goers as "one of the youngest pollies in State Parliament". In 2006, Hood's wife Lisa Hood gave birth to his daughter, Madeline Hood, and said his good experience with the Women's and Children's Hospital was "fantastic" and "outstanding", and that he couldn't comprehend why people "whinged" about the system. He has been a comical conservative voice in South Australia, with such descriptions of the banning of the words "ho ho ho" during Christmas as "plain madness" as the word "ho" could be misconstrued as "whore", in what a University of South Australia communications senior lecturer concurred as being "nonsense".

Hood became the federal director of Family First in 2005, and was selected as its primary candidate for the South Australian Legislative Council in the 2006 state election. He was elected with the assistance of preferences on a primary vote of 5%, becoming the party's second representative in state parliament's upper house. Family First and the other minor parties, share the balance of power in the Legislative Council. Although Hood tends to hold party lines, as distinct from the mandatory requirements of the Liberal Party and Labor Party, and more like the Greens, party members exhibit a unique flavor of policy, as evident by Hood sometimes operating independently from his colleague Brokenshire, analogous to Bob Brown who described his own party as having "as many factions as there were candidates". In July 2011, Hood wrote to The Advertiser complaining about what he claimed were factual errors and false assertions in an article about Family First.

Dennis Garry Edward Hood (born 12 January 1970) is an Australian politician. Starting out in 2006 as a Family First Party member of the South Australian Legislative Council, he became South Australian state leader of Australian Conservatives, before defecting to the Liberal Party shortly after the 2018 state election. Dennis now holds the position of Government Whip in the Legislative Council.