David Penberthy: Beaten by blunders and blamed for Covid, Steven Marshall blew it

Former premier Steven Marshall copped all of the aggro and none of the praise but has only himself to blame, writes David Penberthy.

Steven Marshall’s political epitaph reads as follows – claimed by Covid, taken away in an ambulance.

If this election had been held a year ago, or even four months ago before South Australia opened its borders to the Omicron strain, Marshall would have benefited from the power of incumbency at the height of a pandemic.

Fast forward to today as governments try to negotiate a path out of the pandemic and incumbency has gone from a blessing to a curse.

The community is divided – often bitterly and intractably – over the wisdom of the November 23 border opening and whether the chaos it caused was wholly avoidable, or merely the necessary and inevitable challenge brought by ending the era of hard lockdowns.

Mr Marshall was uniquely vulnerable on the pandemic question, as having left so much of the public sell job to his police commissioner and chief medical officer when things were going well, he took the tactically mystifying decision to become the front man after November 23, when all hell broke loose.

As such, he received less of the credit for the great figures and lower restrictions when Grant Stevens and Nicola Spurrier were running the show, and all of the blame over Christmas when he became the face of the troubled exit from the pandemic.

Stuck in your car for 10 hours at Victoria Park racecourse waiting for a Covid test? Blame Marshall. Prevented from spending Christmas with your family due to close contact rules? Blame Marshall. Still tearing your hair out trying to manage the roster for your small business? Blame Marshall.

Premier Steven Marshall at the Golden Grove Tavern the night before the SA election, on March 18, 2022, in Surrey Downs. Picture: Tom Huntley

Beyond Covid, the government had only got itself to blame for leaving itself exposed to one of the most brutally well-executed negative campaigns in South Australian history.

The Libs should have seen the ambulance ramping campaign coming a mile off.

Labor’s cunning decision to immediately oppose the $662m Adelaide Entertainment Centre was an obvious case of the party telegraphing its punches ahead of this year’s election. Not only did the Liberals never sell the positives of the entertainment centre, they failed to respond to a Labor campaign which almost seemed to suggest that the construction of the centre would be fully funded by kicking toddlers off dialysis machines.

Labor prosecuted the case with single-minded aggression and turned the entertainment centre into a byword for a lack of priorities on the part of the government.

The Liberals could and should have done much more countering this – for example, the hydrogen plant Labor is promising to build costs roughly the same, yet there was no sustained and high-profile Liberal attack on that promise, which many regard as a completely unwelcome foray by the state into an energy project best left to those in business.

So we had a government with a largely good economic story to tell – reduced taxes, lower water and power bills, the ESL reduced – which should also have been basking in the glory of Adelaide being (rightly) selected as the most liveable city in Australia.

Instead, these strengths were drowned out by the public’s division and crankiness over Covid, and a relentless smash-up over ambulances.

Mr Marshall himself was badly out-campaigned by Peter Malinauskas. The premier, perhaps belying his business background, seemed to campaign on the assumption that the economic story was so irresistible that voters would just fall into line. He also probably suspected that people would pull up short of returning to Labor so soon. Well, they have. And again, the Libs find themselves banished to the opposition benches, in no small part because their opponents campaign harder, campaign uglier, and just seem to want victory more.