Michael McGuire: Labor needs more than Liberal weakness to win an election

Labor is celebrating a triumphant week but the State Government’s meltdown has left them a ticking time bomb too, writes Michael McGuire.

It’s not just the Liberal Party that has to proceed with great caution now the next state election is firmly hoving into view.

Labor has its issues as well. For those counting down the days until the election, it’s just 151 sleeps until the next poll.

There is no question the Liberals had a shocker last week. That a first-term government, with a comfortable majority, could lose control of the parliament quite so quickly, takes a special kind of ineptitude.

It was an ineptitude that led to the Liberals spending 16 years in opposition before 2018 and that many had hoped had been vanquished under Steven Marshall’s leadership.

Turns out the ineptitude wasn’t dead, it was just resting.

MP Fraser Ellis. P David Mariuz

The priority now for the Liberals should be to reclaim the credibility and the sense of calm it lost in last week’s weirdness that resulted in Dan Cregan taking a leap off the high diving board, performing a beautiful pirouette and landing in the speaker’s chair.

Instead, they are mollycoddling the feelings of Narrunga MP Fraser Ellis, who is currently sitting as an independent. Ellis wants to rejoin the Liberal Party.

Ellis also faces 23 charges of deception stemming from an alleged 78 fraudulent claims for the country members accommodation allowance, totalling more than $18,000.

Ellis denies the charges and has vowed to clear his name. Good on him. If he succeeds he should be allowed to rejoin. But his case won’t be heard until after the March election.

Liberals from the Premier down have been twisting and turning to avoid answering if Ellis should be allowed to run again as an endorsed Liberal candidate. The answer should be an obvious no.

We can’t have a candidate who is facing allegations of ripping off the taxpayer. Yet the Premier and various senior ministers deflect the question, saying that’s matter for the party secretariat, as if views of the Premier of the state and the leader of the Liberal Party are an irrelevance.

Adding to the poor optics of the situation is that two weeks ago, the Liberals played a leading role in gutting the ICAC, which conducted the investigation that led to charges being laid against Ellis.

The desperation of the Liberals in placating Ellis, either by taking him back or running dead in his seat of Narrunga, is clear enough. It needs another reliable number in what is now an unreliable chamber.

The danger in all this for Labor is that they have become overly obsessed with the travails of the Liberal Party at the expense of a broader policy agenda. There was a sense of triumphalism last week from Labor and a delight in playing political games.

A change in sessional orders now places the setting of sitting days solely in the hands of the Speaker, instead of at the direction of the government.

The change will expire at the election, so if Labor wants to avoid charges of cynicism it will be morally bound to continue with the change.

Labor MP Tom Koutsantonis. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

One of the problems with politics is that it can be very insular. MPs become so focused on winning the game of politics the bigger picture becomes fuzzy. See last Sunday’s protest about the Ellis situation at Steven Marshall’s Norwood electorate office led by Labor’s Tom Koutsantonis.

It was the kind of juvenile stunt that no doubt sounded like a winner in the hothouse of a political office but would have aggravated just about everyone else.

It was a week that provoked much whooping and hollering from Labor MPs but is unlikely to make any impact beyond parliament’s grey stone walls.

If anything, Labor added to the public’s perception that parliament is an ugly place. Leaving a sense that it’s not only the Liberals who have lost control but parliament as an institution. Clearly, part of the job of any opposition is to highlight perceived flaws in the government.

But that’s not the whole brief. Labor can’t spend more time talking about the Liberals than its own vision for SA.