Matthew Abraham: Over the years, every political party has promised a permanent fix to the Yorkey Crossing joke

One of the most powerful blows dealt to the last SA government was as obvious as a roadtrain, writes Matthew Abraham. The new Premier will stare one down too.

The road to political hell, just like the road to the regulation fire and brimstone hell, is paved with good intentions.

For the smoking ruins of the South Australian Liberal Party, that road has a name. Yorkey Crossing. Sometime over their brief four years in office, the Liberals lost the map to Yorkey’s and if they have any dim desire to return to government one day, they’ll need to find it again.

The crossing is about 308km north of Gepps Cross, on the outskirts of Port Augusta.
It’s a 22km unsealed road that serves as the only by-pass route around the head of the gulf for “over dimensional vehicles”, otherwise known as bloody big trucks.

These trucks can’t use the Joy Baluch Bridge to cross the gulf, so they must use the winding Yorkey’s dirt road as a ford and makeshift by-pass route. The only problem with this cunning plan is that when the heavens open and it floods, the unsealed road becomes impassable, marooning the trucks.

In opposition, Steven Marshall once joked over a coffee that decisions in the Liberal Party room had to pass what he called the “Yorkey Crossing Test”. In other words, will this proposed policy help, or harm, our loyal, conservative supporters?

Yorkeys Crossing.

Over the years, every political party has promised a permanent fix to the Yorkey Crossing joke. In the 2018 election campaign, even Nick Xenophon got in on the act, branding the unsealed road the ‘‘laughing stock of the national road freight route’’.

You’d reckon then that when the SA Liberals won the 2018 election, after 16 years in the wilderness, fixing Yorkey Crossing would be right at the top of the “things we must do in government” list. You’d reckon wrong.

It took them until March last year – after a full three years in government – to seal just a two-kilometre stretch of the road, to reduce the dust hazard for the Davenport Aboriginal

community.

Dan Van Holst Pellekaan, the now ex-local MP for Stuart, told parliament on March 16 last year that “this is a project that people locally have wanted for a very long time”.

“I am incredibly grateful that this has happened three years into our government,” the then Mining Minister said. “Would it have been better if it were two years into government, would it have been better one year into government? Yes, of course it would have been, but it is not easy to get the funding to do these important jobs, and I am very pleased to have been supported by the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport to make this happen.”

Mr Van Holst Pellekaan lost his very safe Liberal seat to Independent Geoff Brock with a crushing swing nudging 30 per cent. The ABC’s election analyst Antony Green now counts

Stuart as a Labor seat.

Former Stuart MP Dan van Holst Pellekaan with former Premier Steven Marshall. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

Before the election, Dan was deputy premier and a shoe-in as future Liberal Premier. In his

quieter moments, he might reflect on whether the Yorkey’s Test bit him on the jacksie. So

might the whole party.

The Transport Minister he thanked for the two kilometres of tar on Yorkey’s was Corey Wingard. He’s lost his very safe, southern suburbs seat of Gibson to the ALP’s Sarah Andrews with a swing of almost 13 pc.

Here’s a funny coincidence. Mr Wingard came unstuck over his handling as Minister of another crossing – not Yorkey’s, but the deeply unpopular and eventually abandoned Hove

railway crossing upgrade in his own electorate. It bit him on the jacksie, too.

I set out to explore how the Liberals can somehow get within cooee of winning an election but it’s hard to see how they can. But one thing they must do is to reconnect with what’s left of the party’s supporters. Maybe even get them to like them again.

The test isn’t about simply fixing a dirt road, it’s about not burning bridges, and the Marshall Government torched way too many, from the powerful hotel lobby to our much-loved independent supermarket chains.

As US President Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, in politics you must dance with the one that brung ya. That means be loyal to those that support you.

If Premier Peter Malinauskas takes four years to fix the hospital ramping crisis, he’ll be a mug. When asked during the week about the $4m cost to taxpayers of the ambulance union’s industrial action in the shadow of the election, the new Premier simply shrugged it off.

“The cost is the cost,” he answered. What’s $4m among friends, eh?