Malinauskas speech heralds overdue end of an era | David Penberthy

The perception of SA in the east is that our biggest industry is moaning – but the Premier just delivered a big sign that will change, writes David Penberthy.

For a long time now South Australia has been derided in the eastern states as a rust belt state, a handout state, a mendicant state.

While business and industry chugs along in the east, and the west continues to ride the benefits of a mining boom, the perception of SA is that our biggest industry is moaning.

We are seen as can rattlers incapable of helping ourselves, always demanding someone step in to protect jobs and prop up ailing companies.

The reason we have this reputation is that often it’s been true.

Historically we have been our own worst enemies in perpetuating the stereotype.

Our economic situation hasn’t been our fault. It’s been the result of one thing – the unstoppable tide of globalisation, with the political reality of having successive state governments which, since the rot began in the early 1980s, felt duty bound to save what we had.

What we had was the Playford-era legacy of a vast and lucrative heavy manufacturing base which has now largely collapsed.

SA Premier Peter Malinauskas at The Advertiser’s Building a Bigger, Better SA forum. Picture: Kelly Barnes

We were the home of the Australian car industry, both vehicles and parts, and we also made a lot of white goods and textiles.

With a few exceptions it is now gone.

Conservatives say it’s largely the fault of union extravagance, but the reality is we could never compete in the long term on labour costs with a Mexico or a Thailand or a Bangladesh, with or without a union movement.

Other factors such as the strength of our dollar driving up export costs also rendered us uncompetitive.

It wasn’t just that SA wanted bailouts to prop up something which ultimately could never be saved.

Worse, a tone of neediness and desperation imbued every call we made for assistance for new industries.

Nowhere was this more pronounced than on defence projects, where the clamour to win new contracts or retain existing ones was framed less around our capacity to deliver, but a sense of panic at how bad things were locally.

Things reached an absurd climax when Tony Abbott was prime minister and his leadership was on the line, with Liberal MPs threatening to switch to Malcolm Turnbull if Abbott did not guarantee subs jobs for SA.

This was politics as extortion, which underscored the view in the east that SA will do anything to keep being propped up, including sacking a prime minister.

On this site last week I gave Premier Peter Malinauskas (and the now-supine ambulance union) a decent whack over the failure to make inroads on ambulance ramping.

At the risk of confusing the Premier, I want to use this column today to laud him over a speech he gave last week at The Advertiser’s Building a Bigger, Better South Australia function.

It was the best speech I have ever heard him give and one of the most important speeches any SA premier has given for a long time.

This was because it sought to draw a thick black line under the handout mindset which has plagued public policy in this state for too long, and which has helped create such a negative assessment of us in the rest of the country.

Malinauskas’s speech was framed around heartening new economic reality, one of which our detractors remain largely ignorant on account of 40-odd years of us rattling the can.

The truth is that SA has actually done a really good job of emerging from its Playford-era past.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Tonsley precinct a couple of years ago, built on the bleak remains of the Chrysler/Mitsubishi factory – a place where some of my old schoolmates thought they would have a job for life.

For a long time I had thought the Tonsley precinct was a triumph of hope over reality, one of those joint government-university “thinking spaces” that had the vibe of a movie set, where it looked good from the front with not much going on behind.

The reverse is true.

The place is filled with businesses that are standing on their own two feet and doing amazing things at the cutting edge of technology and manufacturing.

Micro-X managing director Peter Rowland at the Tonsley Park manufacturing hub. Picture: Dean Martin

Businesses like the mobile x-ray company Micro X, which has been sending units to the Ukrainian military to help tend to wounded soldiers in the field.

Businesses like these in advanced manufacturing, emerging businesses in the space and cyber industries, and biggest of all, defence, all form a future for our state which is increasingly real.

Malinauskas was channelling JFK, but was not a big enough poseur to say so, with the words he used in relation to SA’s lead role delivering on the nuclear submarines project.

For example, the tone of his speech can be summed up in paragraphs such as these:

“For South Australians, on a project as ambitious as building nuclear submarines, we must also be prepared to not only ask questions of the Commonwealth, but also of ourselves,” he said.

“It’s time, as South Australians, that we ask ourselves a tough but necessary question: Do we approach the submarine program with a sense of entitlement, or with a sense of ambition?”

The shift in these words is important. For a long time the one word coming out of South Australia was: “Help.”

The message from Malinauskas was: “How can we help?”

It is a message which has been long overdue.