Paul Starick: AFL Magic Round in Adelaide masks Premier Peter Malinauskas’s electricity price pain
While the Premier flaunts the good news of nabbing the debut AFL Magic Round, we’re distracted from deepening crises engulfing the state, writes Paul Starick.
Opinion
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The unadulterated good news of the AFL’s debut Magic Round being staged in South Australia was welcome relief from the deepening crises engulfing the state, national and global agenda.
Self-confessed pretty average footy player, Port Adelaide fan and Premier, Peter Malinauskas, is astute enough to appreciate the timing of the AFL’s announcement.
Little more than a fortnight before the Adelaide 500 Supercar race returns to Adelaide’s streets, Mr Malinauskas now has another major event for which he can claim credit.
The Premier is acutely aware of the importance of sport in Australian society, as are most accomplished political leaders.
Some Liberals were privately dismayed when the-then premier Steven Marshall axed Adelaide’s annual Supercars event in October, 2020. Mr Marshall blamed the significant challenges of Covid-19 and “other factors” that “became an insurmountable hurdle” to delivering a successful race.
There was some internal disquiet that a Liberal premier had axed an event first staged in 1999, having been created under the government of another Liberal premier, John Olsen. (Ironically, Mr Olsen, now the Adelaide Football Club chairman and Liberal Party federal president, was a key member of the SA team that secured the Magic Round).
Mr Malinauskas pounced on the Adelaide 500’s axing and turned the issue into a cause célèbre.
This helped him build a narrative that Mr Marshall was out of touch with mainstream South Australians and ignoring passionate Supercars fans. Unsurprisingly, there happened to be a lot of voters sufficiently upset at the Adelaide 500’s axing who maintained the rage until the March 19 election.
Sports fans have long memories. Most care far more deeply about Port’s centre bounce set up, the Crows’ transition to goal or Shane van Gisbergen’s race tactics than they do about issues on the daily state political agenda.
Every so often, though, one of these issues causes households pain. That’s when voters sit up and take notice.
This is happening now, on a few fronts. Living costs are surging. Interest rates are rising. Energy costs are spiralling. These are global problems, yet some have particular bite in SA. Electricity price and supply is, arguably, chief among these.
Electricity has been a top-level issue in SA for at least the past 25 years. It was intense in 1999, when Mr Olsen’s Liberal government sold ETSA Utilities to the Hong Kong-based Cheung Kong Group. That same year, electricity supplies hovered dangerously close to demand, culminating in a series of load-shedding blackouts.
The depth of feeling about the state-owned power utility’s sale was evident in a 2016 Advertiser poll, in which it was revealed as the major source of public blame for soaring power prices.
But as the-now Premier Mr Malinauskas and his Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis know, ETSA’s privatisation is an egg that cannot be readily unscrambled – as much as they wish it could. The electricity headache has intensified under their watch, even if they did identify energy as a major election issue almost a year before the March 19 state poll.
In his first major policy release, Mr Malinauskas in March, 2021 detailed a $593m Hydrogen Jobs Plan, aimed at harnessing South Australia’s wind and solar energy to generate clean power. A hydrogen-fired power station designed to cut electricity bills and create thousands of jobs would be built, owned and operated by a Labor state government, he vowed.
But an SA Productivity Commission report has cast doubt over the centrepiece project’s viability. The same report into renewable energy also says this has spurred a steady decline in electricity market spot prices since mid-2019, but this has “not flowed through to SA retail customers, who continue to face the highest electricity prices” across the National Electricity Market (NEM).
This is a historic problem that is rising up to bite the Malinauskas government. Finding solutions will be enormously complicated and subject to further political risk. If the centrepiece hydrogen project flops, huge amounts of public money will have been squandered. This challenge lies ahead of the Malinauskas government, though.
For now, many voters will be revelling in the news of securing the AFL Magic Round.
This is a political coup, for which Mr Malinauskas can claim credit for knitting together a team that pinched the event from Sydney. Coupled with the looming Adelaide 500 return, it shows the power of sport to help people forget about their daily troubles.
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