Daniel Wills: Marshall’s own job is on the line if South Australia’s employment figures don’t improve
Steven Marshall promised “more jobs, lower costs, better services”. But these limp jobs figures will ring alarm bells at Liberal HQ, writes State Political Editor Daniel Wills.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- SA jobs growth the slowest since car industry shut down
- Men struggle as SA employment rate nation’s worst
- Subscriber rewards: Win Adelaide Oval Stadium Club memberships
“More jobs, lower costs, better services.” It was a mantra repeated so often by Steven Marshall while on the campaign trail that hearing it almost induced a vomit response.
That was, of course, the point. He wanted everyone to know that, if elected, the Liberals had a plan for change that would lead to a fix on all three.
Mr Marshall’s government is coming up for its two-year anniversary in March. How time flies.
From there, it will have two more years to run until the next election, when it will be judged on how it has performed.
“More jobs” was first on that list for good reason. No doubt rinsed through multiple focus groups, it hit on the political issue that has obsessed South Australia for a generation.
Sick of seeing young people go east, voters have been desperate for a stronger job market and hope Mr Marshall’s team can deliver.
But the latest unemployment figures, and especially the historical analysis of recent years published by The Advertiser, should be ringing alarm bells in Government circles.
In 2019, the first full calendar year that the new Liberal government has been in office, the total number of jobs in SA grew by a paltry 1300.
It’s the worst result since 2013, and a terrible return on the promise of a magical economic turnaround that would come by replacing the man who sits behind the desk in an office high up in the State Administration Centre, on Victoria Square.
There are always multiple, perhaps countless, factors in play that add up to these sorts of results.
No state government will ever be able to make it rain, stop a natural disaster or force consumers in China to switch overnight from dumplings to Balfours pasties. But the mutually agreed fiction that all politicians buy into is that you should vote for them because they can change the world.
Mr Marshall’s plan was to basically bring neoliberal economics to SA for the first time.
After the controlled economy approach fashionable in the Playford era, and former premier Jay Weatherill’s unapologetic faith in big government to lead growth, Mr Marshall promised tax cuts across the board and “radical deregulation”.
Even his strongest supporters would be struggling to find evidence that the plan they so firmly believe in is showing the expected results.
For Labor, bad news is good news. After getting hammered over the state’s appalling unemployment record, and with an election hurtling towards it, the then-government launched a massive direct jobs stimulus plan in 2016 that included wage subsidies and cash handouts to just about any business that would agree to hold a joint press conference and make even a vague jobs pledge.
Analysts, including SA Centre for Economic Studies executive director Michael O’Neil, have raised major doubts about how effective and sustainable the programs were, and the then-government was almost completely unable to track how much of the money actually went to creating jobs as opposed to lining the pockets of business owners who were planning to put extra people on anyway.
But in the dumbed-down, one-liner world of contemporary politics, the numbers are a powerful weapon that Labor will use enthusiastically.
Forget everything else that has been happening around the world, from Trump tweets to Brexit, the jobs data shows solid growth in the twilight of their watch and a lukewarm story at the dawn of Mr Marshall’s. If this keeps up for another two years, one of the three planks that’s holding this first-term government up starts to creak and splinter.
And there are credible arguments, being put by business and expert commentators, that the political mishandling of the land-tax saga last year had a real impact on confidence.
That’s something the State Government can – and should – be made to own. It was a policy and process completely of their creation that appears to have torpedoed the confidence boost that came with a change to business-focused government. And it’s not just on the unemployment test where the government struggles to marshall a passing grade.
Recent figures on population and growth for the year ending in June show a modest improvement but, nonetheless, SA is the most sluggish of all states.
Deloitte Access Economic’s respected quarterly outlook, which was released his week, junked its usual glass-half-full language to intone: “The growth engines for the SA economy have spluttered. That slowdown is widely-based. A range of positives will help the state muddle through in the medium-term, the improvement will be a slow trudge”.
Politically, Mr Marshall can’t accept a slow trudge. He needs to show, soon, that something significant did actually change at the last election. If not, there’s little to convince voters they’d lost much, if anything, by flipping the government.