David Penberthy: The Liberal Party is now utterly structurally stuffed in this state

By the next election Labor will have been in power in SA for almost 40 of the previous 50 years, and the Liberals will lose again, writes David Penberthy.

The devastating thing for the South Australian Liberal Party is that they didn’t just lose the 2022 election last Saturday. They also lost the 2026 election.

The political cliche holds that you should never get ahead of yourself, that a week is a long time in politics, blah-di-blah. It’s not always true, and for the Liberals, it is usually untrue in South Australia. By the year 2026, Labor will have been in power in SA for almost 40 of the previous 50 years.

If anyone gives you odds greater than $1.01 on Labor to hold power in four years’ time, put your house on it. For, barring a State Bank-style economic collapse and a string of ministerial scandals, Labor has set itself up as at minimum a two-term proposition, whereas the Liberal Party is now utterly structurally stuffed in this state.

Last Saturday’s election was always tough for the Liberals to win because it was fighting a war on two fronts. It was fighting against a resurgent and well-led Labor Party, but it was also fighting against its own people in country seats who had swung behind independents.

Premier Steven Marshall concedes defeat at the Liberal HQ at the Robin Hood Hotel in Norwood. Picture: Tom Huntley

The scale of Saturday’s calamity means this two-flanked war must be fought again in 2026. Yet with their opponents massively more powerful next time thanks to their own weight of numbers, entrenched rural independents, and the conversion of hugely safe Liberal seats into marginal Labor or Liberal ones.

A few examples to bolster the case – Unley, held by former Marshall government minister David Pisoni, is now a marginal Liberal seat. Dunstan, held by former premier Steven Marshall, is again a marginal seat, as it was back in the days when Labor ministers Greg Crafter and Vini Ciccarello held it before Norwood became fully gentrified and more Liberal-friendly.

Conversely, seats which were Labor marginals are now Labor strongholds. Before last Saturday Leon Bignell held the southern Fleurieu seat of Mawson by just 0.7 per cent. In the normal run of events Bignell would have been hanging on for dear life. He improved his margin to 13 per cent. He won every single booth on Kangaroo Island, an area where the cockies almost invariably side with the Liberals, but have now dropped the party like a hot marron on an Island Beach barbecue.

It is an astonishing result overall, made more astonishing by the fact that it was achieved against a good economic government. But one that utterly stuffed the politics through the poor management of its internals, perceived weak political leadership during Covid-19, and capped it off by running one of the worst campaigns in the entirety of Australian political history.

The situation the Liberals find themselves in now is the repeat of a pattern that has been plaguing them for as long as I have been alive. Not since the 1960s has a Liberal premier strung two terms together. That was Sir Thomas Playford, when our homes did not have colour TV. Steele Hall, David Tonkin, Dean Brown, Rob Kerin, and now Steven Marshall all failed to win consecutive terms of office. In contrast, Don Dunstan was premier for 10 years, John Bannon was premier for 10 years, Mike Rann was premier for 10 years, with Jay Weatherill ruling for six.

Unless he is a complete incompetent – and few people are predicting he will be – who knows how long Malinauskas has got, other than to say it looks like at least eight years, minimum.

The one big challenge Malinauskas has in the immediate term goes to the ill economic headwinds blowing globally and locally. Cost of living is the number one issue facing South Australians as house prices continue to soar, petrol prices surge thanks to war criminal Vladimir Putin, interest rates threaten to jump, yet wages are stagnant.

New Premier, Peter Malinauskas with his deputy premier Dr Susan Close. Picture: Dean Martin

Handling this will be difficult, and it’s an area where many would argue the Liberals have historically been best equipped to run the economic side of government. But when you look to the other side of the aisle in SA, the devastation was so vast that it is like cobbling together an alternative government with brown paper and string.

The obvious first challenge for the Liberal Party is to try to draw a line under the past and find a way to go forward without the dead weight of factionalism dragging the party continuously into the mire. To that end the member for Black, former environment minister David Speirs, has rightly emerged as the most sensible candidate for the task, being putatively a moderate but also holding and expressing conservative views on social policy. He has support from both sides of the divide, and at the risk of damning him with faint praise, he is probably also the last man standing in the still-smoking wreckage of the SA parliamentary team.

The other issue the Liberals must address is their commitment to being tight-fisted with public money when facing an opponent that is prepared to spend. Former treasurer Rob Lucas might have been a canny political operator. But there are plenty of Liberals who are now asking whether his refusal to dip into treasury coffers to throw money at a problem such as ramping was politically wise. Clearly, the Liberals got no credit for being frugal economic managers, yet no-one marked Labor down for promising more.

A former Labor minister joked to me this week that the scale of the win last Saturday was stunning in its historic context, saying: “We had to bankrupt the whole state to lose this badly.”

You would sincerely hope the ALP doesn’t find a way to do that again. In the absence of any blame for an economic disaster, and the likely continued pressure on our hip-pockets as the cost of living keeps going up, get very used to the sound of these two words: Premier Malinauskas.