Rex Patrick move to lower house seat of Grey hangs on Nick Xenophon’s return to politics

How a potential return to politics for a former wannabe SA premier could pave the way for Senator Rex Patrick to run in the lower house seat of Grey

Blame the Liberal Party for planting the idea that Rex Patrick, the accidental senator who took over in Canberra from the irreplaceable Nick Xenophon, might switch houses and run in Grey, the sprawling electorate representing the state’s vast northern outback.

In the manner of Parliament House intrigue, his intentions for Grey were raised casually in conversation but with no formal Liberal Party approach. There had been earlier discussions about Patrick joining the Liberals but he had ruled it out: “You don’t keep the bastards honest by becoming a bastard,” he says.

This time it was more in a spirit of concern that Patrick might run against the sitting Liberal, Rowan Ramsey, whose margin is comfortable but whose profile is low. Patrick is, after all, a Whyalla boy who went to Stuart High School before joining the navy at 16, so the credentials were there. He has also been keeping an eye on Grey from Canberra, buying into big issues like the desalination plant for Eyre Peninsula and small ones like reopening the Whyalla Beach cafe.

“I’ve weighed in because I think it’s really important for Eyre Peninsula, but that’s not because I had made a decision or even contemplated Grey,” Patrick says. “The Liberal Party noted I was doing some of this work and someone said, ‘well, he must be going to run for Grey’, which was not on my mind.”

Well now it is.

Senator Rex Patrick in Adelaide’s East End. Picture Matt Turner.

From the moment Nick Xenophon flagged a possible return to federal politics over the fight for Australia to regain the right to sell ugg boots overseas, candidates have been holding their breath, including Patrick who was Xenophon’s adviser before he left Canberra to try to conquer state politics. There is no doubt the return of the charismatic Xenophon to the federal sphere would put a scare into the campaign, given that in 2013 he won almost 25 per cent of the entire vote, single-handedly beating the SA Labor team.

Xenophon’s massive state election overreach in 2018 is now history but his federal popularity is sitting there untapped, with nothing taking its place. All it needs is a spark from Xenophon to reignite it.

Xenophon is silent for the moment and probably will be until early next year. But should he decide to run for the Senate in 2022, Patrick would be forced to stand against a massively popular figure who he not only worked for as a paid adviser, but inherited his seat from. He sees this as an ethical difficulty and a practical one.

“The reality is that Nick will disrupt the entire Senate ticket because he has had 250,000 South Australians vote for him in the past at some stage,” Patrick says. “Now it could mean that I could somehow work with Nick, and we could go for two slots in the Senate, but it’s also likely that him coming on to the scene makes it very, very difficult for me.”

There is another way to play it which would help Patrick rather than hinder him: Patrick could leave the Senate and run in Grey, with Xenophon standing for the Senate but campaigning at his side in Grey. Patrick has done polling since Xenophon’s return was flagged which showed Ramsey’s margin was comfortable but not insurmountable. In 2019, with Xenophon gone, the candidate for Centre Alliance, Andrea Broadfoot, had a first-preference vote of around five per cent. In 2016, with Xenophon in the picture, she came within two per cent of winning on a two-party preferred basis.

TURNER - Rex Patrick

“Rowan has a significant margin but it would be possible to take that, with some effort and certainly with Nick backing me,” Patrick says.

Leaving Xenophon aside, Patrick is hugely attracted by the potential of a hung federal parliament and the way an Independent in Grey who influenced the balance of power could bring money and attention to the region. He is thinking big; so far $100m has been allocated for a desalination plant near Port Lincoln. Why not expand the vision and build a larger desalination plant with pipelines that secured the entire future of the Eyre Peninsula, serving communities and industry from the Whalers Way spaceport to mining? If the Whyalla-Morgan pipeline had stopped at Port Pirie, there would be no Whyalla, he says, so think how transformational secure water would be for the future of Eyre Peninsula?

“The extra $200m they might need to do that, you could get overnight, I could make such a huge difference,” Patrick says. “If Nick was in the Senate and I had the balance of power with people like Rebekha (Sharkie, the Centre Alliance Member for Mayo) in the lower house, that is actually quite an interesting proposition.”

Senator Rex Patrick, dressed as a submarine looking for signatures for a petition in the East End. Picture: Tricia Watkinson

Patrick approached politics the way he has the rest of his life, which is to take on something that seemed like a good idea at the time, work hard and become good at it.

At 16 in Whyalla, he had no ambition for university and the navy seemed like a cool job. He packed his bags, passed the medical in Adelaide and began learning how to march and tie ropes. He had such a flair for maths he was guided into electronics.

His naval career working on submarine combat systems, first the Oberon and then the Collins Class – where he became the first crew member to be promoted – has given him a voice and insight into the submarine fiasco that has dogged federal politics for more than a decade. Even after he left the navy, he worked in the industry on highly classified sonar systems for Australian submarines that also involved the US navy. He did trials on US nuclear-powered submarines, which they have been operating for 60 years, as well as Norwegian, Greek and South Korean submarines.

He knows what he is talking about and he is horrified at the state we are in. Taking as a baseline the 2009 White Paper, which assessed our future security needs, the recommendation was to increase our submarine fleet to 12 within three decades to deal with changing circumstances, namely the rise of China. The way things are going, in 2039 we will instead be reliant on five ageing Collins Class submarines.

“That’s where we’ve landed, from a defence perspective, we are naked,” he says. “These (Collins) submarines are already ageing. Their technologies are not as good as what I’ve personally seen on South Korean and Greek submarines a decade ago. The current plan is completely broken.”

Senator Rex Patrick and Rebekha Sharkie MP with 'I Love Murray' shirts in Canberra. Picture: Rebekha Sharkie

The switch to nuclear, prompted by deteriorating strategic circumstances – code for the fact that we may actually need them a lot sooner than their promised 2040 delivery date – is like buying a parachute after the plane has crashed, he says.

What about Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement that the Australian government intends to acquire eight nuclear-powered submarines, and that these are set to be built at “the world-class Osborne naval shipyard in Adelaide”?

“I don’t believe that will happen,” Patrick says. “The only thing that was announced was a study, an intergovernmental study.”

Patrick says the announcement was political sleight-of-hand to focus attention on the nuclear commitment while hiding the $2.4bn wasted on the Attack class deal with the French, a deal signed even though the nuclear option was then on the table.

“It was an atomic marketing campaign; ‘look over here at the nuclear thing while I scoop this $2.4bn failure behind me and hopefully no one will see’,” Patrick says. “And that’s what they did and everyone was talking about nuclear. The real outcome of the day was terminating the contract, doing a study.”

Because Adelaide’s submarine future is far from secure, Patrick wants more influence over decisions as they are made by taking the fight directly to Canberra. The Collins Class life-of-type extension work is locked in but in terms of submarine construction, there will be nothing for at least a decade. Skilled workers will potentially vanish into other industries and Adelaide’s efforts to build a skilled workforce will be squandered.

“That is the consequence of the decision that has been made,” Patrick says. “We talk about a valley of death (between contracts) – now we have a Grand Canyon we have to get across.”

Patrick after receiving an honourary black belt in karate to promote the sport he participated in as a teenager. Picture: Supplied

Patrick’s expertise in submarines got him into parliament in the first place. After leaving the navy and starting his own company, he worked with submarines internationally and began writing about them in ways that demystified what they were and what they did: What do submarines do in peace time? What does range mean? What are the different weapons systems?

It attracted the attention of WA Liberal Senator David Johnston, the then shadow defence minister, who leaned on Patrick for help writing questions for Senate estimates. When Johnston became defence minister in 2013 – a year before infamously stating he wouldn’t trust the Australian Submarine Corporation (ASC) in Adelaide to build a canoe – he asked Patrick to join him but Patrick’s company was doing well and he had concerns about the Abbott government.

A couple of years later Nick Xenophon’s adviser approached him.

“I started helping him with advice on submarines, none of it was paid, I was trying to do the right thing,” Patrick says.

He liked the way Xenophon did business; he had empathy with people and the energy to fight injustice, and his influence in Canberra was growing by the day. All Xenophon had to do much of the time was to show interest in a problem and it would be fixed. So, when Xenophon in 2015 asked him to join, he said yes.

“He actually asked me whether I wanted to run in the 2016 campaign but I was ‘no, no, I’m happy working behind the scenes complementing you’,” Patrick says.

By the time Xenophon decided in 2018 to return to South Australia and throw everything at winning candidates in the upper and lower house, Patrick had grown into the job and agreed to take the Senate spot.

Supplied Editorial Fwd: rex pic

As the accidental senator he has shown a doggedness and willingness to engage with detail, from pursuing material shielded from Freedom of Information request to knowing what defence-related questions to ask in Senate estimates. He doesn’t have Xenophon’s charisma, but he has exposed details about the submarine debacle, spoken up for South Australia and published the attendance records of colleagues, including Liberal SA Senator Alex Antic who was absent last month during a debate on a federal ICAC Bill even though he was in Canberra.

“He’s not showing up in the chamber, even though he is there,” Patrick says.

Almost from the moment he stepped into Xenophon’s spot, the political landscape changed. First, Xenophon’s 2018 misfire caused him to retire from politics, or at least take an extended break. The Xenophon team became Centre Alliance but Patrick left it to become Independent, not over any major disagreement but because he saw no future as part of Xenophon’s old team without Xenophon.

“You look at the vote and think, ‘you know what, South Australia is not going to have any independent representation after this, maybe One Nation, maybe Clive Palmer but none will have a South Australian focus’,” Patrick says.

“You look at who has done well in the Senate and they are names – Jacqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson, Nick Xenophon – or well-branded parties. Centre Alliance was neither.”

He reasoned there weren’t many politicians named Rex and it was easy to spell so maybe he could be a name. As an Independent he has called for an inquiry into China, and has spoken in defence of Taiwan, a democracy with whom Australia trades but isn’t allowed to formally recognise, and which China is threatening to take back. While the larger parties are constrained by the policy known as deliberate ambiguity – neither committing to Taiwan’s defence nor denying it – Patrick wants Australia to be clear that it would stand by Taiwan if China went to war.

“I think we should recognise the situation as it is, I’m not tied by party lines,” he says. “We wouldn’t do it on our own, we would do so at the side of the US, and it looks as though they are committing to do that.”

Senator Rex Patrick at the proposed site for a waste dump facility near Leonora, WA. Picture: Supplied.

By accident or design, he has also paid close attention to events in Grey, securing $25m for a multi-commodity port at Cape Hardy north of Tumby Bay, and $15m for a steel processing and galvanising plant to construct power network transmission towers in Whyalla.

He and Xenophon are still good friends which gives weight to this period of indecision. Until Nick moves, no one can. Patrick is convinced Xenophon’s federal vote would hold up and that his 2018 South Australian rout was due to circumstances that would not be repeated. The way he sees it, Xenophon got too caught up in what the polls were saying, chose Hartley which was a difficult seat in which to run, became side tracked by the idea that he might actually become premier, and neglected Hartley until it was too late.

“I think potentially he was chasing the idea that he could be premier,” Patrick says. “He ended up biting off way more than he could chew, even for Nick. And he ignored Hartley, he just didn’t campaign enough, he ran dead.”

While Xenophon works out his future, which includes caring for ageing, frail parents and being father to a nearly three-year-old girl, Patrick is biding his time and enjoying being a senator.

“I’ve worked really hard and I feel like I am a much better senator than I was four years ago,” he says. “I’m getting good at rustling up the numbers, I’m getting good at disrupting the government in the Senate or through the media to force good outcomes.”

Patrick with Pauline Hanson before a vote in the Senate in 2018. Picture: Mick Tsikas

But he is also eyeing off Grey where he says Ramsey is a good enough local member but that he treats Grey as a safe Liberal seat. The Xenophon-inspired scenario that really excites him is the one where he and Sharkie team up in the lower house to operate with South Australia’s broader interests in mind, while he also safeguards the interests of Yorke and Eyre peninsulas and beyond. “I am looking after the Murray Darling’s interests now, I could happily do that as the member for Grey because where does Whyalla’s water come from, or Woomera’s, or Port Pirie’s? The Murray Darling,” he says. “People forget that. I can still have that fight over saving the Murray.”

He talks to Xenophon regularly and says he has been open and honest with him and played out the possible scenarios. For now, he is a senator but he is thinking things through. He can be a Whyalla boy in the Senate, but he hasn’t ruled out being a Whyalla boy in the lower house.

“I haven’t made any decision so that means I am a senator, an accidental senator,” he says.

“I could end up battling it out in the Senate and there is some hope I will be returned but if not, I will be very proud of what I have done and go on to do something else. I am in a happy place.” ■