State Liberal leader Steven Marshall on fatherhood and politics

SINGLE dad and state Liberal leader Steven Marshall is balancing his bid to be premier with looking after his children.

SINGLE dad and state Liberal leader Steven Marshall is balancing his bid to be premier with looking after his children.

Everything in Steven Marshall’s life has to be quick. He arrives a few minutes late for our lunch and he ran to get there. And he’s already eaten. Some days he sits through three lunches and a couple of dinners just to fit it all in.
There are no days off.

On a recent Sunday he had an early meeting, a press conference and church followed by three lunches (Italian, Russian and football related), a CD launch, a Norwood garden party then dinner at his house for nine people. His son Charlie, 16, is a dab hand with the barbecue and he served seared tuna on spoons with soy while his father whipped up an orecchiette platter with mushrooms and pesto.

With two months to the March election, Marshall’s family and working life frequently overlap. He had 17 for dinner recently – Charlie cooked again, aged steaks rested before serving – so he could catch up with everyone.

Divorced from wife Sue, Marshall is a single parent who has their children Charlie and Georgie, 14, on alternate weeks. They have increasingly become caught up in the countdown to March 15.

“Dad needs a hand so I help out when we have people over,” says Charlie is about to start Year 11. “I just help out a little more each time.”

The children have been kept out of the media spotlight, but Marshall agreed to let saweekend photograph them with him for the first time. They don’t seem at all fazed – they are relaxed with strangers around the dining table.

When Justin Bieber was about to visit Adelaide late last year, Georgie got into animated conversation with a university vice-chancellor in defence of the teenage pop star.

“It’s been very cool,” says Georgie. “I think the best people who came over were the people from SAFM. They were funny.”

Marshall isn’t stressed by the looming election, just busy. An early riser, he gets up at 5.15am, reads two papers and starts texting at around 6. Opposition Education spokesman David Pisoni is often the first to call, or his adviser Daniel Gannon who has a young baby. Morning media know he is up and he frequently does interviews sitting up in bed. Once a week he gets up at 4.30am to meet a friend for a 90-minute walk at Chambers Gully.

He says none of this is new. “I’ve worked hard all of my life, I come from the manufacturing sector,” he says. “People say how full on it’s going to be and how are you going to cope with it, the early mornings and the late nights? But really that’s been my whole life.”

Marshall is taking a very methodical approach towards becoming Premier. When he became Opposition Leader a year ago, taking over from Isobel Redmond whose authority had collapsed, Marshall treated it like any other new job.

In childhood, his father encouraged him and his brothers and sisters to write down their goals for the year, date them and sign them. He never said what to do next but Marshall got the message.

“There’s no point in having dreams, you need to track your goals,” he says. “If you want them to become a reality you have to track your progress towards them.”

Marshall may be the first MP to apply Business Management 101 using key performance indicators – KPIs – to the job of winning an election. His office uses software that measures Marshall’s performance on indicators including the number of press releases, television and radio hits, newspaper stories and total media visibility.

He has a spreadsheet on his phone showing the number of seats visited this week, interactions with Liberal HQ, speeches (nine), diary requests (71) and individual meetings (21). He also attended 21 functions, two fundraisers and made zero regional visits.

Ask him how his plans for becoming Premier are shaping up and he says things are tracking well in terms of “hard name ID, my net favourability, that sort of thing”. These aren’t captured in KPIs but by different measurement tools. It is all very deliberate which is how he likes it.

“If you just go ‘I hope one day we have a Liberal Government’ then it’s probably not going to happen because someone else will want it more,” he says. “If you’re not out there engaging with industry and meeting 10 groups a week – and I always double my targets, it’s always up above 20 – then how can you say you’re really working towards it?”

In the week we meet, a leaked internal Labor poll put Marshall only narrowly ahead on a two-party preferred basis of the Labor candidate in Dunstan, Jo Chapley. Marshall, who took what was then Norwood from sitting Labor member Vini Ciccarello in 2010, shrugged off the suggestion the seat was closer than he thought.

“No, it’s not tight, it was a spurious poll,” he says. “We would never rely on a spot poll, Labor versus Liberal, because it’s meaningless. I mean she could still win it but that poll doesn’t mean there are two points between Jo Chapley and Steven Marshall.”

Given the electoral climate, Marshall has a strong chance of turning Jay Weatherill into the Premier who brought down the curtain on 12 years of Labor rule. An electoral redistribution has not favoured the ALP, and Weatherill has found it hard to get his message heard above the noise of the school sex scandal and an economy robbed of the expansion of Olympic Dam and now Holden.

Either way, Marshall feels confident, even if his Party does not perform as well as the polls suggest.

“If you look at Labor versus Liberal polling in our 11 target seats, we would win all 11 and that’s not going to happen because you’ve got Labor incumbents with high name ID against virtual unknowns,” he says. “We’re not fussed.”

Adelaide University political analyst Clem Macintyre, who happens to be in Marshall’s electorate, says the Liberal leader is tracking well although still comes across as a first-term member of Parliament who is not as sure-footed as a more experienced MP.

“I think he is still working through the best approach (in front of a camera),” Macintyre says. “I get the sense of someone who is aware how inexperienced he is and isn’t pretending he hasn’t got anything to learn.”

Macintyre says Marshall’s willingness to make himself widely available through his electorate in suburbs like Klemzig rather than just the Norwood hub is helping him to build a leadership profile.

“Until he became deputy leader in October (2012) he would have been known only to those who watch politics closely, and the voters of Norwood,” he says. “He needed to lift his profile very, very quickly and I think he has done that by a combination of community events and being out listening, and he has also been the (Liberal’s) principal ‘go to’ person for commentary.”

Macintyre said the polls put the Liberals ahead in most of the marginal seats and Marshall’s high local profile should carry Dunstan on March 15 even though Jo Chapley was a strong candidate.

“She is going to struggle in an environment where really the election will be a referendum on the performance of the Weatherill Government rather than the local member qualities of Steven Marshall,” he says.

Given the pressure he is under, Marshall seems surprisingly relaxed. He is easy-going, enjoys a story, likes to laugh and is uncomplaining about the hours.

Although single, he comes from a close family who provide him with a support buffer. Marshall moved house earlier this year, leaving the 120-year old cottage he had lived in since his 20s but which fell outside of his electorate, in Grace Portolesi’s seat of Hartley, and had possums in the roof.

“I didn’t like my local member of Parliament,” he laughs.

The move happened quickly. He was about to renovate when a friend with a multi-level townhouse in Norwood was selling.

“The kids walked in and said, ‘look at this!’ Everything worked. I’m saying ‘I think the rooms are smaller than yours’ and Charlie is saying ‘don’t worry about that, it has a lap pool’,” Marshall says. “I said, but it’s the only house you’ve ever lived in, won’t you be sad?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘OK, we’ll stay then.’ ‘No!’”

His family stepped in to help. Marshall had a trip to Port Lincoln planned early one week so he farewelled his old house on the Sunday, and walked into his new place on Tuesday.

“My sister and my best friend’s wife packed up my entire house and moved it into the new one,” he says. “We’re a very close family. My sister and Mum and Dad painted the other one and sold it. They should start a business actually.”

When his children are home he returns from early meetings at 7.30am to get them up and off to school. He likes to do a cooked breakfast or something special, not just cereal, he says. There are raised organic beds in the courtyard with an array of parsley, oregano, basil and cherry tomatoes to be picked fresh for meals.

“I try to manage my time so, for example, tonight Georgie is at a concert so I’ve got dinner with Charlie – I’ve got something defrosting now and I’ll do a leaf salad,” he says. “If they were both at home I might get Mum and Dad to stay up with them until I get home.”

His parents help on the domestic front, particularly mother Barb who grew up as one of six children in Broken Hill. She is a colourful character who, aged 70, cleans the house when she visits. She’s not saying anything about his housekeeping, she tells him, but you do need a bit of a hand.

His father Tony built Marshall Furniture into a $15 million-a-year company and Marshall went into the family company after studying business at the Institute of Technology followed by an MBA from Durham University in England. In 2001 Marshall Furniture was sold to a German company and he became chairman of Jeffries compost and mulch company, and a manager with Michell wool company.

He entered politics, he says, because he complained so much about the direction South Australia was taking that his friends told him to shut up or do something.

“When I was a kid, no one made jokes about Adelaide, we were a proud state, the third largest city when I was born,” he says. “I’ve seen this real blow to our confidence level going back to the State Bank collapse and we’ve really struggled since.”

He stepped up at the 2010 election because he wanted to change things, not because he was a political animal. He was not involved in student politics, never worked for an MP, never even joined a party or knew any politicians.

So is his attempt to be Premier more about public service than a chosen career?

“Well it’s not something I’ve had a personal ambition for,” he says. “But this opportunity came along and I’m very grateful for it. I think it’s a great privilege to lead the Liberal Party of SA, especially at a time when there is so much to be done.”

Also, he thinks he has the right resume for the Premier’s job.

“My skill set is very applicable,” he says. “We need leadership that has an audacious goal for us to turn ourselves around. We can’t, as my father would say, continue to major in the minors.”

The children so far have not been recruited, Tony Abbott style, to be part of Marshall’s election campaign, although access to them for this article would suggest that could be under consideration. Both of them are excited that their father could be the next premier but don’t expect their lives will change overnight.

“He’s worked very hard, he deserves it I reckon,” Charlie says.

Georgie says she isn’t nervous, more curious to see what people say. Her friends are very supportive and they have not had to restrict themselves on social media.

“We’ve both always been very responsible with social media so nothing has really changed in that regard,” she says. “I don’t think a lot of people know (who we are). I don’t think they put two and two together and that’s OK.”

Marshall wants to turn the state around so his children will choose to remain in SA, although exactly how that will happen is yet to unfold. The lack of policy detail concerns analysts like Clem Macintyre who says he expected the Liberals to have been more on the front foot in terms of policy before the Christmas-New Year break.

“I’m surprised they have not been more aggressive in their policy launches,” he says. “A lot of time will be lost until February and then we have a Festival which will be a major distraction.”

In broad terms, Marshall says he wants to build the state’s economy in a way that stops the exodus interstate of the most successful graduates who seek employment overseas or interstate. He wants it for the sake of SA, but most of all he wants it for himself.

“I have loved living in Adelaide my whole life, except for one year in the UK. It’s been great for me, great for my family,” he says. “Unless we start doing something to grow our economy, Charlie and Georgie are going to leave Adelaide and I really want them to stay.”

WILL HE WIN?
The Liberals need to hold onto their seats and gain six more to win government. Labor has 11 marginal seats (held by less than 5 per cent) with Transport Services Minister Chloe Fox’s seat held with a wafer-thin margin of 0.2 per cent. An electoral redistribution has narrowed the margin in seats such as Hartley, held by Skills Minister Grace Portolesi, making it harder for Labor to hold on. Marshall holds Dunstan (formerly Norwood) by 4.9 per cent.