Matthew Abraham: Isobel Redmond was the best female premier SA never had
Former Liberal opposition leader Isobel Redmond was the best woman premier we never had, writes Matthew Abraham. Here’s why.
Opinion
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It’s the daylight hours when the curse strikes.
Not coronavirus but falling asleep without notice. During almost half a lifetime on early morning radio, daylight nanna naps became my superpower.
The gloomy press gallery loft above Adelaide’s House of Assembly? Out like a light in 90 seconds, tops.
In Canberra, driving home from the morning shift on the ABC’s 2CN 666, I dozed off at the wheel, stupidly drifting across three lanes on Adelaide Avenue, right outside The Lodge.
The Federal Police who pulled me over told me to go straight home to bed.
I once actually nano-napped while interviewing an Adelaide GP, live on air.
Dr Peter Ford has such a soothing voice. In my defence, throughout these dozy years, I had a chronic, undiagnosed vitamin D deficiency, now fixed.
But for cringing, red-faced embarrassment, nothing compares to the time I fell asleep next to Isobel Redmond.
As Liberal Opposition leader, she’d asked my then colleague David Bevan and I to lunch at a Hutt St bistro to shoot the breeze.
We agreed on the condition we paid for our own lunches. Isobel thought this a fine idea.
Sometime during the meal I fell asleep, in my chair, right next to the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition.
Fortunately I didn’t slump sideways on to her shoulder, but it was a close run thing.
Did she storm out of the joint in high dudgeon? Not at all.
Ms Redmond gently absorbed my embarrassment, said I mustn’t be feeling well, and laughed it off.
South Australia, I present to you the first and very best female premier we never had.
When Isobel Redmond was elected Liberal leader on July 8, 2009, she became the first woman to lead a major party in SA.
Let’s use the term “major party” loosely because at the time the SA Liberals were little more than a shambolic collection of warring tribes.
She led this hopeless rabble into the 2010 election, another major party first for SA’s history books.
Despite squaring up as a newbie against Labor’s battle-scarred Machiavelli, Mike Rann, she recorded a remarkable 8.4 per cent swing, won the popular two-party vote but only 18 of the 47 seats, another casualty of SA’s rigged electoral boundaries, only recently and perhaps temporarily fixed.
Most first-time leaders who pull off such a result would get a second shot at leading the party to an election.
Rann certainly did after his stunning 9.4 per cent swing in 1997, a record that still stands, paving the way for his 2002 victory and 16 uninterrupted years of Labor government.
But not the Liberals, not for Isobel.
Smart, tough and disarmingly honest, the fact she was such an unorthodox politician made her a dangerous opponent for Rann, and privately he knew it.
When she supported giving police taser guns, I asked her on air if she’d agree to be tasered, given it was apparently so safe.
She said yes, and so she was zapped. It was a crazy brave thing to do.
She should have ducked the challenge, and the five-second burst of 50,000 volts. The episode still gives me the heebie jeebies.
Redmond’s personal qualities and foibles would have made for a refreshingly different premier, with a plain-speaking style to open eyes and ears nationally and, back home, shake our complacent public service rudely awake.
But the knives were out by late 2012 and when a Liberal source told me she was considering quitting SA politics to fill a Senate vacancy, I naturally bowled that up to her on air.
She admitted she was considering the move. Zap. That’s the sound of a politician tasering herself. Why didn’t she just fib, like the rest of them?
Regrets, we’ve all had a few. Isobel Redmond deserved a second chance. She should have been our first female premier.
Isn’t it time we had one? Carolyn Power for the Liberals and Susan Close for Labor are two candidates who’d shake things up.
Some evenings, dozing off during the TV news, it feels like Steven Marshall and Peter Malinauskas have melted into the same bloke, like two marshmallows toasted on the one stick. Wakey, wakey, maybe it’s just a bad dream.