Caleb Bond: Love or loathe Martin Hamilton-Smith, he helped decide the political future of South Australia for four years
YOU can hardly blame Martin Hamilton-Smith for wanting to jump ship, Caleb Bond writes. He says the SA Liberals are so weak, so impotent, that voters really don’t have a strong option in which to invest their faith.
FAREWELL, Major Marty. Martin Hamilton-Smith’s was perhaps a long career, but you’d stop short of calling it distinguished.
His decision to leave politics should come as no surprise. With polling putting him at about five per cent of the primary vote, you can hardly blame the man for wanting to jump ship. But it’s sadly indicative of the cowardice that beset his final term of parliament.
He is a political opportunist. When he realised he could go no further in the Liberal Party, he hurt them in the cruellest way possible. He was elected on its platform, with its campaign funds and promptly decided to go AWOL. The kind that prevents your party from forming government.
It’s not like Cory Bernardi leaving the Liberals to set up his Australian Conservatives, or Jacqui Lambie abandoning the Palmer United Party. Hamilton-Smith’s actions helped decide the fate of South Australia for four years.
That hurts. The Liberals have never – and never will – forgive him. Nor will a sizeable chunk of his electorate. He would have been competing against the competent, hard-working Sam Duluk in Waite, and the defeat would have made him look worse than his original defection.
So damaged is Hamilton-Smith that Nick Xenophon has rejected his endorsement of SA Best.
Credit where credit is due, he has been able to achieve a fair bit for his electorate this term – between all the overseas travel, of course. The government threw money at the Blackwood roundabout and realignment of Springbank Rd in an effort to pump up Hamilton-Smith’s tyres, seeing as he was their bloke.
Now he’s done a runner on them too, having enjoyed the spoils of a ministership.
But behind the anger and the treachery, Hamilton-Smith has a salient point of which the SA Liberals should take note. He this week told the Sunday Mail that moderate faction dictators had taken hold of the party and it was consequently bleeding conservative votes to other parties, such as SA Best.
He’s right. The SA Liberals are so weak, so impotent, that voters really don’t have a strong option in which to invest their faith. You have the bumbling, increasingly autocratic Labor government forever besieged by bungles, or you have bumbling, incompetent Liberals who don’t seem to know what they’re doing.
Traditional conservative Liberal voters feel dudded. It doesn’t matter where you go – the front bar, the street, local sporting clubs – when conversation turns to state politics, Liberal voters nearly always say the same thing: what do I have to vote for?
The two major parties in SA are virtually indistinguishable. The government cocks something up and then the Libs come out and say it’s bad. Righto then, but where’s the vision? How are they going to combat it?
Hamilton-Smith alleges that Christopher Pyne is single-handedly running the SA Liberals and operating Steven Marshall like some sort of puppet. His assessment is unduly harsh and alarmist – what would you expect, given both men have been strident critics of him for the past four years – but there is a grain of truth.
Pyne is an important figure in the state Liberals, and he does wield power. And yes, his Liberal wet politics do have an influence on how things are done. However, it runs deeper than just Pyne. It’s endemic to the whole party.
Factions rule, and very competent people have been prevented from grasping the leadership as a result. Too much time is spent navel-gazing and too little time is spent thinking about the voter.
In reality, Hamilton-Smith’s political career hasn’t been too far removed from the way voters are acting. He invested in what he thought was a sensible, conservative option and when he discovered his interests were being sold out, he jumped ship to the guy with the showiest offering.
His career will be cemented in South Australian political history in the much the same way as Peter Lewis’ was for helping install the Rann government.
Love him or loathe him (and you could probably fit all the former in a Tarago) his impact on South Australian politics has been significant.