Daniel Wills: Jay Weatherill safe, but his reputation takes a knock

IS Premier Jay Weatherill going to keep his job? With questions over his handling of child protection and decision to merge Families SA with the Education Dept, there are repeated calls for him to step down.

• ANALYSIS: A decade on, Weatherill is repeating himself
• MAIN REPORT: What the Royal Commissioner recommended
• VICTIMS: System is ‘not just broken, it’s really broken’
• McCOOLE: Shocking litany of blunders let monster loose
• TIMELINE: 20 key moments in the lead-up to the Royal Commission

PREMIER Jay Weatherill isn’t going anywhere.

The man who has — for the majority of his political career — been in charge of a system that is now in “crisis”, “disarray” and broken from the bottom up says he is also the one to fix it.

Opposition Leader Steven Marshall demanded Mr Weatherill’s resignation within 90 minutes of the report going public on Monday, linking it to the similarly-savage State Bank Royal Commission that documented the end of former Labor leader John Bannon’s career in 1992.

And it is a call that is already being echoed through barometers of public opinion like the letters to the editor pages — where angry readers are demanding someone take ultimate responsibility.

But one of the great myths in politics is that ministers or premiers resign for what they have done. Most only go when forced by circumstance, and the brutality of ballot box calculations.

Mr Bannon went because Labor could have been left without a single seat had he stayed.

Within the contemporary Labor Party, Mr Weatherill remains an extremely authoritative figure.

His colleagues broadly believe this latest scandal is not enough to torpedo a generally positive public view of Mr Weatherill’s character, and doubt there’s a better alternative among them.

But Mr Weatherill is likely to survive as a weaker premier as a result of the unflinching destruction of his government’s record on child protection that’s laid out over 850 pages.

Perhaps the most condemning aspects of the royal commission are confirmation of what seems commonsense to many observers.

Many have long warned that putting the child protection and education departments together must result in resources and attention being stretched too thinly and that ignoring thousands of calls to the child abuse report line each year would lead to kids falling through the cracks — despite stubborn government assurances otherwise.

And these findings must be read as direct criticisms of Mr Weatherill’s judgment: he personally built and defended this system, which is now revealed as a case study in policy failure.

The resonant problem for Labor is that it heads towards an election in 2018, where voters will be seeking someone with a credible plan to fix the state’s flagging fortunes, and its leader’s credibility as an agent of positive change has been dealt a deep and heavy blow.