Not everyone believes the Malinauskas Government can walk and chew gum at the same time | David Penberthy
It feels like you could launch a TV show called Everybody Loves Mali at the moment, writes David Penberthy. Well, not quite everybody.
Opinion
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You have got to hand it to Peter Malinauskas. If this whole running the state thing doesn’t work out, the Premier has an exciting alternate career ahead of him as a full-time concert and sport promoter.
Mali marched into the MCG’s exclusive Olympic Room last Saturday banging a bass drum, playing a kazoo and wearing a sandwich board reading COME TO SA FOLKS, IT ROCKS!
By the time the Lions had put the Swans away with a dominant second quarter, Katy Perry had already fallen for Malinauskas’ charms and agreed to sneak Adelaide into her Australian tour schedule.
By the time the Lions were lifting the premiership cup, key AFL operatives were mulling favourably over the Premier’s intense one-on-one lobbying efforts to hold Gather Round in SA in perpetuity.
A new movie is in the offing with the working title: Everybody Loves Mali.
This isn’t cynicism, it is good-natured ribbing.
I for one think it is excellent that SA has a long overdue spring in its step thanks to events such as LIV Golf and Gather Round.
And while I’d personally rather the Premier used the authority of his office to stage a Greasy Pop bands reunion gig than a Katy Perry concert, I have no issue with his getting involved in making the Perry show happen given how popular she is with her many local fans.
LIV and Gather involve the use of significant public money, in the estimated order of some $80 million.
It’s a big figure, but it’s a figure easily dwarfed by the real-time injection of hospitality dollars and the enduring tourist-attracting benefits from the state’s promotion.
Perry, in contrast, hasn’t received a cent from the SA taxpayers, unlike that questionable arrangement where an undisclosed payment was made to stage that elitist Sam Smith event at The Cube where influencers were flown in and had their accommodation, meals and tickets covered.
All that has happened is that the state-owned Adelaide Entertainment Centre has been offered at a reduced rate on a night when nothing was happening there anyway.
It means its staff will get shifts that night, beers and premixes bought that night, Ubers and many hotels filled that night – and importantly, thousands of people have fun that night.
The only other sweetener, which proved redundant in record time with the first two concerts selling out in a flash – a fourth has now been announced – was to underwrite the event in case no-one showed up.
This was a good use of the Premier’s time off the back of a chance encounter on Grand Final Day.
As was his decision to get in the ears of pretty much anyone who would listen about the wisdom of making Gather Round permanent.
But here comes the but.
For all the adulation and praise Malinauskas has enjoyed for promoting our state, a significant portion of the community feels his priorities are wrong.
They argue he could get away with this stuff if everything else was going swimmingly.
Many of the people who feel aggrieved at his showmanship have tales to tell involving failures of the public hospital system or the impact of the cost of living squeeze.
There are also many South Australians who could not afford a general admission ticket to the Katy Perry gig, or a general admission pass to LIV, let alone the eye-watering price of entry to the Party Hole.
The fact that anyone is partying at all feels like an insult to these people – let alone when the same bloke who promised a single-minded focus on fixing ramping is the one pulling the corks out of the champagne.
It’s funny how politicians change from opposition to government.
Malinauskas approached the 2022 election offering a binary choice between a steely-eyed gaze on fixing the hospital crisis versus the purported inanity and profligacy of the Liberals’ so-called “basketball stadium”.
Labor also targeted Steven Marshall over his financial support for pet projects in the arts which failed to attract crowds.
Since Mali became Premier it’s been more a case of let the good times roll.
As I said, I have no issue with us chasing down these events.
Having watched most of my friends leave a then-bleak South Australia for the eastern states in the 1990s after the State Bank collapse, and having done the same thing myself, I think it is genuinely terrific that SA and Adelaide are now regarded as a desirable destination. I also think that governments can walk and chew gum at the same time.
But a lot of people don’t buy that.
They don’t buy it because they don’t think Malinauskas is doing it.
And certainly, when you see the less ambitious, reworked version of their health commitments in those new government advertisements – “Building a Bigger Health System” – you can understand why some are raising a cynical eyebrow at the good-times Premier.
(By the way, that new slogan was apparently approved after the other one tested poorly with focus groups – “SA Health, now with more ramps!”)
Malinauskas insists that his lobbying efforts in the Olympic Room were good for the state. On that you would suspect most people agree.
Most people like the passion the guy has for SA and the fact that he is revving the place up. Malinauskas also insists that his Olympic Room efforts came amid a dance card which included speaking with the Prime Minister about Whyalla at the end of a week occupied by the future of its steelworks, progress on hydrogen energy and other meaty policy issues.
One thing I do know for a fact is that the guy who runs the tomato farm at the centre of the virus outbreak spent almost all of last week waiting for a phone call from the Premier about an issue which threatens more than 500 jobs.
The Libs asked a question about it on Thursday, where it was confirmed that no phone call had been made. The call was finally made by the Premier late Friday.
A good thing it was too.
You wouldn’t want to have forgotten to do that, what with all the excitement of meeting Katy Perry.
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