Matthew Abraham: What’s Premier Steven Marshall’s campaign message in a nutshell?

Even the Premier dropped a big hint about where he thinks the Liberal campaign stands as it was labelled “insipid” and “lethargic” this week, writes Matthew Abraham.

It’s painful looking back at what went wrong, why it went wrong and how it went wrong.

I should have bought a block of land on the beachfront at Semaphore when they couldn’t give it away in the ’70s. I should have bought Wesfarmers shares when they were $2.87 in 1989. I should have bought shares, full stop. I should have bought a boat sooner. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Shall I go on? Best not.

With only six days to go before South Australian voters decide who’ll run this happy shambles we call home, let’s not wait until election day to glance in the rear-view mirror. With pre-poll booths going gangbusters and record postal vote applications in the post last week, it’s all over bar the shouting anyway.

The Liberal campaign has looked so bad it’s hard to get your head around it.

John Olsen, in one of his losing election campaigns as opposition leader in the ’80s, unveiled a TV ad showing him walking through his election promises – carved in blocks of stone.

Premier Steven Marshall. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

These were his “concrete commitments”. But the Midsomer lighting and dark shadows made it look like he was walking through headstones in a graveyard. At least he had a consistent message.

What’s Premier Steven Marshall’s campaign message in a nutshell? Stick with us because things will get better?

Former senator Nick Xenophon, interviewed by David Penberthy for The Australian last week, described the Liberal campaign as “insipid” and “lethargic”. This is from someone whose lively and colourful “Bollywood” TV ad blew up in his face in his doomed 2018 election campaign. For the record, I thought at the time it was a stroke of genius.

Does this mean the Liberals will lose the March 19 poll? No, because in modern elections, major political parties run two campaigns. The first is the one we see in print, on TV and radio, and on Stobie poles. It’s sort of the Fringe for grown-ups. The second is the “invisible” campaign, run on social media and by direct mail and email, driven by the parties’ huge data bases and sophisticated software, with messages targeted not to whole seats, but individual families in marginal seats.

Sascha Meldrum, state director of the Liberals, is an intelligent and savvy operator. She modernised the party’s invisible campaign machinery and used it to outgun Labor in her first campaign four years ago. Don’t write her off.

In an ideal world, the public and ghost campaigns should dovetail, as they appear to be with Labor’s slick effort. It’s not fatal if they don’t, but it makes the job of winning harder.

It’s taken the Marshall government more than a year to try to defend the economic benefits of the $662m Riverbank Arena while Labor’s kicked it around as an overpriced basketball court. It’s taken a year for the Liberals to try to knock dents in the promise by Labor Leader Peter Malinauskas to build a $593m hydrogen power station and storage facility at Whyalla.

This mind-boggling, green thought-bubble has got more holes in it than a colander.

Instead of playing space cadets at Lot Fourteen, I’d have held a media conference every day in front of the idling desalination plant at Port Stanvac – just to remind voters how Labor blew $1.83bn on something we don’t need.

The entrance to the Adelaide desalination plant at Port Stanvac.

In a significant interview with Paul Starick in Wednesday’s Advertiser, Premier Marshall began with a surprising concession – promising to include conservative Liberals in any future ministry. “I think it’s always good to have balance in a cabinet room,” he said. “We haven’t achieved that in the last 12 to 18 months.”

I can’t begin to imagine how that went down with the “conservatives” he’s frozen out so needlessly and for so long. It’s a clear sign he knows his campaign is in trouble.

This will go down as his woulda, coulda, shoulda moment.

And why is Mr Malinauskas spending so much time and making so many big spending promises in country seats like Mt Gambier and Kavel, held by these same independent “conservatives”? Because, like the Premier, he knows he may need one or more of these “conservatives” to form government.

While we’re on the Labor Leader, he might like to give the whole Captain Mali muscleman thing a rest for the last week. It’s been fun, but we get the picture. Besides, there’s something slightly off-putting about politicians sweating in public.

Even if some mistakes have happy endings, that doesn’t mean we should make a habit of repeating them.