Matthew Abraham: The seven deadly sins of Team Steven Marshall
No government is without sin, writes Matthew Abraham. Here’s how, in Matt’s view, Team Marshall has fallen foul of the big seven.
Opinion
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It seems a sin to restrict the Seven Deadly Sins to the list knocked up by Pope Gregory the Great in a quiet moment, sometime in the 6th Century.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, the deadly sins – also known as the seven capital or cardinal sins – are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony or drunkenness, anger and sloth. The reason they’re deadly is that they’re vices that lead to other immoral behaviour, such as dancing or hoarding toilet paper.
No government is without sin, even if they’re not all as sexy as the Big Seven, and the Marshall government is no exception. So let’s have a look at the Seven Deadly Sins of Team Marshall.
SMILING Premier Steven Marshall doesn’t need to look deliriously happy, not all the time, day in and day out. It’s unnerving. At the Liberal Party’s recent federal council knees-up, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that in his entire political life he’d never met anyone cheerier than our Steven. “If Steven was an animal, he’d be a quokka,” the PM said. “The happiest animal in the world.” Sorry? Did he just say a quokka?
“If you are having a bad day, ring Steven Marshall and you’re going to feel great at the end of it,” he said. Don’t get me wrong, I love quokkas as much as the next person, but do you want one running the state?
DELEGATING The ability to delegate authority is a characteristic of all good leaders. Totally surrendering your authority to unelected officials is not. During the week we were simultaneously threatened with tougher COVID restrictions by pandemic supremo Grant Stevens while being told by chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier that Collingwood’s red carpet visit to Adelaide Oval posed no risk. Where have we heard that before? Professor Spurrier warned fans that if the footy flew toward them “my advice to you is to duck and do not touch the ball”. Enough of the Stevens-Spurrier show Premier, you were elected to run the joint.
TALKING Nicola is quirky but she speaks like a human being and her messages cut through the fog. With the exception of the Premier, Treasurer Rob Lucas, Education Minister John Gardner and Attorney-General Vickie Chapman, the rest of Team Marshall perform like Robby the Robot on the nightly TV news. They have the thousand-mile stare, squinting into the distance at the sunlit uplands, terrified of deviating from their scripted dot points. It looks like amateur half-hour. Try pretending you’re having a normal conversation with real people. It isn’t that hard.
FISHING This is a personal bugbear, but SA’s 277,000 recreational fishos are treated like a nuisance by this government rather than a sector that pumps hundreds of millions of dollars into the state’s economy, supporting thousands of jobs. SA deserves a dedicated Minister for Fishing and Boating. They have one in Victoria, where fish stocks are well-managed and rec fishos treasured rather than trashed.
PROMISING It really was sinful to promise cheaper power when you can’t deliver the goods. The promised cheaper energy prices for households are lost in transmission. Instead, it’s deja vu all over again, with SA’s energy policy a half-arsed affair, just as it was under Labor. Home solar is both encouraged and punished. The hideously expensive SA-NSW interconnector is supposed to deliver average bill savings of $100 annually, but will push prices higher for years. Energy Minister Dan van Holst Pellekan says SA is “on a trajectory” to his promised lower prices. Bewdy.
REFORMING Voters who thought they were electing a conservative government should be flummoxed. They gave no hint of it before the election, but in government Steven Marshall and his factional soulmate Vickie Chapman have adopted and skilfully steered through radical social reforms on full-term abortions and almost certainly voluntary assisted suicide. Funny, but these didn’t rate a single mention in Marshall’s “2036” manifesto glued under his arm throughout the last election campaign. The manifesto has mysteriously vanished from the party’s website.
STADIUMS Mr Marshall wants to spend $700 million on an indoor city sports and entertainment stadium nobody seems to want. It’s his “Jay moment”, reminiscent of former Labor premier Jay Weatherill’s promise to build the $160 million O-Bahn tunnel nobody really wanted, or needed. We got it anyway. We think it’s a $700 million stadium, but it could cost more. Or less. Who knows? Right now it’s an uncosted thought-bubble.
For my sins, I’m now working on the Seven Heavenly Virtues of Team Marshall.Bless ’em all.
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