Matthew Abraham: The Deputy Premier has dug in and the Premier has dug himself into a constitutional crisis

Steven Marshall and Vickie Chapman dived headfirst into a constitutional crisis and I can say from painful personal experience what may be next, writes Matthew Abraham.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones but it’s also a good idea not to break bread inside a glass room.

It was early August, 1998, and to say then Liberal Premier John Olsen was a little unhappy with my reporting for The Australian is like saying the drowned Egyptian army was a little unhappy at Moses over the Red Sea thing.

A tense dinner was organised with the Premier, his chief of staff Vicki Thomson, the paper’s Adelaide bureau chief Terry Plane and yours truly. We’d booked a private room at the then landmark Adelaide CBD restaurant, Alphütte.

The private room turned out to be not so private. It had glass walls, resembling a villain’s aquarium in a Bond movie.

Shaken but not stirred, we noticed a Conga-line of TV news cars driving along Wakefield Street, but miraculously they missed the premier in the glass box.

Outside, something big was going down. Graham Ingerson, or “Ingo” to just about

everybody, was in the throes of a messy resignation from the Olsen frontbench. When he hopped into a lift to exit the press pack, the journos crammed in with him as the doors closed. That was trademark Ingo.

Twenty-three years later, the mess Deputy Premier Ingerson and the minority Olsen

government found itself in has sorry parallels to the mess Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman and the minority Marshall Government now finds itself in. Even the seats are the same – Ms Chapman inherited Mr Ingerson’s fortress seat of Bragg in 2002.

South Australian Premier Steven Marshall and South Australian Deputy Premier Vickie Chapman are seen at a sod turning ceremony at Remarkable Rocks during a tour of Kangaroo Island in June. Picture: David Mariuz

Both are messes of their own making and easily avoided. Both go to an important principle – that our MPs and their governments must be accountable for their decisions. And not just at the ballot box every four years, but held accountable while doing their jobs. This doesn’t undermine good government, it strengthens it.

Mr Ingerson resigned in the face of findings by a privileges committee – then the first in parliament’s 140-year history – that he deliberately misled parliament over his role in the sacking of a racing industry executive.

He jumped. But he was pushed, too, by party colleagues afraid that if he dug in they’d all be forced to an early election.

The names have changed, but the threats have not. On Thursday, now the second privileges committee in SA’s history found Ms Chapman had deliberately misled parliament, and breached the ministerial code of conduct, over her refusal of planning approval for a $40m timber shipping port on Kangaroo Island.

Parliament then passed a historic motion of no confidence in Ms Chapman and demanded she resign or that Premier Marshall sack her. The Deputy Premier has dug in and the Premier has dug himself into a constitutional crisis.

Ms Chapman has strenuously denied misleading parliament or having any conflict of interest – perceived or actual – in her decision to reject the Kangaroo Island Plantation Timbers project. She says she was not aware KEPT would log and truck timber from a private plantation adjacent to a property she inherited and rents out.

“The Minister was obliged to have regard to the effect on road infrastructure, and the dust, noise, and pollution effect on all residents of Kangaroo Island,” her lawyer told the committee.

Ms Chapman says trucks don’t bother her. They obviously bother plenty on KI. Who can blame them?

Residents whose homes will be bulldozed for the South Road tunnels, and those in surrounding suburbs, might wish they too could be protected from the dust, noise and pollution of road infrastructure.

Ms Chapman is honest and one of the few grown-ups in the Marshall Government. But the Chapman name is the closest KI has to royalty and, while she lives in Adelaide, she’s the island’s queen.

It’s not enough for governments to do the right thing, they need to be seen to be doing the right thing. This is the real problem for Premier Marshall.

John Olsen quit in tears as Premier in October 2001 after an independent QC’s report found he had given misleading and “dishonest” evidence to a judicial inquiry into the Motorola contract. He vigorously rejected any wrongdoing, but resigned anyway.

Reflecting without rancour in a 2018 interview with The Advertiser’s Michael McGuire, Mr Olsen observed: “I note that the standard I applied to myself at the time seems to have disappeared from modern politics.” Different times, different folks.

Just days away from our borders opening on Tuesday, this is the worst of times for a government to find itself in a glass box with its pants down