New Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia on Speirs, rebuilding his party and lessons learned
New Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia inherited a party reeling from drug accusations against the party’s former leader David Speirs and here he finally shares what happened behind the scenes.
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It’s still early days in the leadership of Vincent Tarzia and in his office on the second floor of parliament house there is the sense he is still settling in. That he is still trying out the role for size to see what fits, what doesn’t. What works and what doesn’t. That while he has assumed the robes of leadership, not all the clothes feel comfortable as yet.
But, it is early days.
Unprompted, Tarzia pulls out a thankyou note from famed billionaire investor Warren Buffett, then a parchment outlining his grandfather’s military service in the Italian army. He points to newspaper cuttings of electoral triumphs framed on the wall and paintings by his three-year-old son Leonardo attached to a whiteboard.
There is the feeling he is keen to please. Keen to impress. But that he’s not 100 per cent sure how to do that. Or how much of himself he should trust to the public record.
He has a few aphorisms up his sleeve. “We’re (politicians) a little bit like boxers in some respects because you’re only as good as your next fight.’’ And: “You’re only as good as your next media interview.’’
Perhaps it’s part of the Tarzia method. One long-term observer of Tarzia says the new Liberal leader is always changing. It isn’t a criticism, it’s an observation that he has the capacity to learn and develop.
“What he is today might be very different to what he is next year,’’ this person says. “Do not underestimate his capacity to develop.’’
On a bench close to his stand-up desk there is a copy of The Advertiser and he explains how he reads it every day. Perhapsa little joke after his predecessor David Speirs once boasted that he never read the ’Tiser.
Speirs is, of course, the reason we are here.
He stepped down in August, essentially saying he had a “gutsfull” of the job.
Greater calamity awaited him after he quit, being charged by SA Police with the supply of drugs after being captured on film hoovering up thick lines of what was termed as “white powder”.
Speirs denied any wrongdoing and claimed the video was a “deep fake”. He faced court on Friday where he was bailed and the case adjourned until March
It has meant that the 38-year-old Tarzia has faced an early test of his leadership, fighting a by-election today in Speirs’ old seat of Black in Adelaide’s southern suburbs.
In the dying days of his leadership, Speirs made various dark comments that he felt he was being undermined from within. Most observers believed he was talking about Tarzia, but the new leader rejects this. Tarzia has long been tagged ambitious and energetic by friends and foes alike but denies he agitated against Speirs.
“I don’t know that he specifically mentioned me and a number of journalists have said that he didn’t mention me,’’ he says.
Indeed, he says, he was “loyal’’ to Speirs.
“I think all in all, David did a reasonable job for the two or so years that he was there,’’ Tarzia says. “I always want to be a loyal team player and so you know I certainly had nothing personal against David.’’
And he says he has compassion for his predecessor.
“I, like everyone, was really shocked, saddened and disappointed,’’ he says. “At the end of the day David’s also a human being and he’s got a family and friends and a network. Quite frankly, you don’t want to see what’s happened to David happen to anyone.’’
He also says he has kept in touch with his former colleague to offer support.
“I have been trying to check in on him every so often to see that he’s okay,’’ he says. “I actually bumped into one of his former chiefs of staff just last night randomly and he came up to me and said, ‘I just want to say thank you very much for checking in on David.’’’
Tarzia says Speirs has replied to his messages.
The bottom line is Tarzia is stepping in as leader while the Liberal Party is enduring another of its semi-permanent bouts with crisis. But the new leader claims he is not looking for pity.
“You would never find any sympathy for an opposition leader, the only place you’ll find the word sympathy is in the dictionary, as someone reminded me recently,’’ he says.
And there is something of the optimist about Tarzia. A quality he says has served him well so far in his political career. A career which started when he was elected to the seat of Hartley in 2014, when he was only 27.
“I’m a big believer that you can develop strength in adversity and my parliamentary career has shown that,’’ he says.
Tarzia has had a political bent from a young age. A student at Rostrevor College, where he was school captain and dux, he was volunteering on long-time federal Liberal member Christopher Pyne’s campaigns when he was 16.
But his initial inclination was to pursue a career in medicine rather than politics. He puts that down to a desire to please his grandparents. Both sets of Tarzia’s grandparents emigrated to Australia from Italy in the 1950s and settled in Adelaide’s northeast suburbs. He says the position of doctor carried a great deal of respect and authority in the Italian villages his grandparents had grown up in.
Tarzia went as far as sitting the UMAT test, which is given to prospective students as part of the application process to be accepted into medical school. He failed.
“You can’t be good at everything,’’ Tarzia says with a smile.
Instead he studied law and commerce at Adelaide University. For a while he thought he might become a merchant banker but when 2008’s global financial crisis hit he decided law may prove a more stable career option.
Tarzia worked for some big names in his 20s. He interned for Adrian Tembel, who runs the national law firm Thomson Geer.
He worked as an in-house lawyer for the Peregrine Corporation, which owned the OTR petrol station chain, and its executive chairman Yasser Shahin.
“They’re risk takers, they’re measured, they’re calculated, they’re strategic, they’re just intelligent, sharp guys,’’ he says. “I look back and I have tried to take the best bits out of all those early mentors.’’
Tarzia only worked for Tembel for a few months, but the men are still friends.
Tembel says Tarzia left such a good impression that he uses him as an example to other young law graduates who work at Thomson Geer.
“After about a week he marched in all very serious and said to me, ‘How do I get ahead and make a bit of a name for myself,’’’ Tembel recalls.
His advice was to try to have an opinion piece on an aspect of law printed in a newspaper. Tembel says it was a “throwaway line”. He didn’t expect the young lawyer to follow through.
But a few weeks later Tarzia came in with a copy of the now defunct Adelaide Review.
“He managed to convince a journalist to publish a little oped about some law reform in corporation’s law,” he says. “It made an amazing impression on me because I thought there’s very few young grads who would have gone to the effort to cold call a journalist, convince them to run something that was quite dry and quite dull.
“I still tell the story to this day that this is a person who rose to become the Opposition leader because he’s got serious initiative and when he says he’s going to do something he almost always comes through and does it.’’
Tembel follows up to say that “if there was one characteristic that jumps out (about Vincent) is that he’s a very reliable person”.
But politics was always there in the background. Part of that was his parents Mary and Tony. Tarzia says they were always community minded. Helping out at Rotary clubs and local fundraising efforts.
In particular, Tarzia says it was his mother who inspired him. His mother is a survivor of breast cancer. But she took that experience and channelled it into something bigger, holding gala balls and fundraising and generating $500,000 for breast cancer research.
“That was a real pivotal moment,’’ he says. “It’s not just about helping yourself. It’s also about helping other people.’’
A piece of advice from future premier Steven Marshall also gave him a push. The pair met at an event at the Altavilla club in Beulah Park. Marshall was a newbie politician himself, but was on track to become Liberal leader.
Tarzia was only 23 but approached him and asked him for some advice. “I’m thinking of having a crack at politics. What do you think?”
Marshall’s advice was for Tarzia to run first for council. That’s what he did, topping the count in his ward in the 2010 election, beating two long-term councillors in the process.
Tarzia says his experience running for council was good preparation for the step to state politics. It was an opportunity to find out if a political life was what he wanted.
“Basically you see whether it’s for you because as soon as you nominate on that form and they’ve got your address and they’ve got your mobile phone number, you become public property,” he says. “That’s not for everyone.”
He found he enjoyed the life and in 2012 was nominated to run in the eastern suburbs seat of Hartley. Tarzia was up against stiff opposition, battling Grace Portolesi who was a cabinet minister under Mike Rann and Jay Weatherill.
“It was 18 months and it was hard but sometimes, as I’ve said before, I think sometimes the hard apprenticeship is a good apprenticeship,” he says.
But all the door-knocking and endless community functions paid off when he was elected at the 2014 election. He was only 27 – an age he says was probably too young, before switching tack and saying a bit of youthful energy is a bonus in a life as demanding as politics.
It paid off in another way as well. One of the doors Tarzia knocked on belonged to a family friend of another young lawyer called Charissa Duffy. Duffy was another Young Liberal, albeit from the conservative wing of the party. The family friend was suitably impressed by the prospective MP and told him all about Duffy.
The pair hadn’t met but were connected through LinkedIn.
“It wasn’t long and he sent me a message on LinkedIn, saying, ‘Hey, you know we’re connected but have we ever actually met?’’’, the now (spoiler alert) Charissa Tarzia says.
The first date was to be a coffee at Cibo on Norwood Parade, but Tarzia was running late. It was a Friday afternoon and Charissa sent him a text saying she was heading to the Bath Hotel. Not knowing what to expect, Charissa also took a friend along as insurance, with the instruction she could depart “if everything feels comfortable”.
It did.
“I still remember that time and that sort of tall table at the Bath Hotel, because it felt like I’d known him for so long and I just met him,” she says. “Which was a strange feeling to have, but there was that instant connection and instant feeling of being comfortable with him.”
The pair married in 2018 and now have three-year-old Leonardo, as well as Howard the dog (yes, named for the former prime minister), who has his own Instagram page.
Charissa, 36, is now back at work, lecturing law students at Flinders University.
In one of her previous jobs she worked at the same law firm as Annabel Malinauskas, wife of the premier.
Becoming Opposition leader has led to even more calls on her husband’s time and a need to preserve some family time.
“It’s a seven day a week role, it certainly interferes with what others might perceive as normal weekends but what is normal?” she asks. “But we still make sure that, you know, Leonardo has his AFL Max on a Saturday morning and he has his swimming lesson on a Sunday.
“There are certain non-negotiables in Vincent’s diary of things that he attends or time that he allocates, because it’s been really important to me for Leonardo to have that consistency of knowing that he’s got his daddy time.”
The couple are also accustomed to political life and its demands. It was campaigning that brought them together after all. Before they were married they would make sure they had lunch at least once a week together. They didn’t live together before they were married.
“Neither of our parents were really on board with this idea of living together before marriage, they are both quite traditional and conservative,” Charissa says.
“We do what we need to do to be supporting Vincent because he’s got to have a blinkered focus on his job and on what he’s seeking to achieve,” she says. “And that’s complemented by me recognising that he’s got to do that and then me taking charge of the family side of things.”
It was while organising their wedding that Tarzia learned that the high-profile senator Nick Xenophon was quitting Canberra to run against him in Adelaide at the 2018 state election. Xenophon had long been a phenomenon in state politics. Elected on a No Pokies banner to the SA parliament in 1997, he parlayed that popularity into a federal seat, his party winning a remarkable 25 per cent of the vote at the 2013 election when he outpolled the Labor Party in SA.
Tarzia says he was sitting in his parliamentary office when he heard Xenophon was running against him. The announcement caused an enormous stir. Early polls had some pundits even predicting Xenophon could become premier.
“You know for 20 seconds, I was probably a little bit shocked and from then on I think you just go into fight mode,” he says.
He says others were more pessimistic.
“Everyone had free advice that day about what to do and what not to do and some people were saying, you know you might want to update your CV,” he says.
Again, Tarzia would prevail and his victory made him one of the heroes of the night when the Liberals returned to power after 16 years in the wilderness. Tarzia’s reward was to become Speaker in the House of Assembly, the youngest person ever to hold the job.
In July 2020, after yet more Liberal turmoil, Tarzia was elevated to cabinet as police minister, in the midst of the covid pandemic.
The Liberal government under Steven Marshall was generally regarded as having done a good job in shepherding the state through covid, avoiding the worst of the lockdowns and death tolls that hit other states. Yet, after the 2022 election, the Liberals found themselves back in opposition with Marshall resigning as leader to be replaced by David Speirs.
“My take on that (the election loss) is that we were very busy governing and not so much campaigning,” he says. “We had a lot of positive messaging to sell but we were so busy governing and dealing with the pandemic in front of us that we forgot that we also needed that campaign element.”
Since then the Liberals have fallen further behind the Labor government. It lost the Dunstan by-election after Marshall left parliament. It was the first time a sitting government had won a seat off an opposition at a by-election in a century and Tarzia concedes it was “probably a good temperature gauge of where we were in the cycle”.
Now they have another by-election in Speirs’ old seat of Black which, if the Liberals lose, will leave it with a pitiful 13 seats in a 47-seat chamber.
Now Tarzia is the man in charge and the question remains what kind of leader he will be. This is politics so there are detractors and boosters. One of the former is sceptical of Tarzia’s leadership qualities. “Vincent has spent so long chasing the job, now he looks like he doesn’t know what to do with it. Does he have a vision for the state? It’s hard to see what it is.”
But one booster says Tarzia has spent a career proving doubters wrong.
“People underestimate Vincent at their peril,” this person says. “If there is one person who can deliver the undeliverable it is Vincent,” pointing to his wins in 2014 and 2018 in Hartley as well as winning the Liberal leadership, when the early favourite was deputy leader John Gardner.
“Opposition is a place of doubt and insecurity and Vincent does not have doubt and insecurity.”
He will also have to balance the competing interests of the party’s right and left factions. Tarzia is part of the moderate faction but won the support of the right to win the leadership.
But he maintains he won’t be held hostage by the right, elements of which pushed the recent controversial abortion reforms that were defeated in the Legislative Council.
“I think I’ve got good relationships with people right across the spectrum of the party but I’m just trying to get them to see that the enemy is on the other side of the chamber,” he says.
“The votes are in the middle and we’ve got to win the middle ground in the seats that count and that means whilst we can embrace both sides of the spectrum the marginal seat voters, the swing voters, are often in the middle.”
Since becoming leader, Tarzia has been chipping away at Labor’s weakness in living up to its ramping promise at the last election, crime, cost of living, state debt, energy, housing, job creation and the government’s proposed $600m hydrogen project at Whyalla. He supports Peter Dutton’s plan for nuclear energy.
He has something of the man in a hurry about him. Perhaps it’s because he knows political careers can be brief. Perhaps that’s just the way he is. He knows winning the next election is a “monumental task’’. “There is time, but we don’t have any time to waste,” he says. “You do have a political mortality and if you accept that one day you won’t be here then you work backwards from that and realise we’ve got to make the most out of every opportunity.” ■
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