Paul Starick: Peter Malinauskas unmasked in ruthless pivot from fixing ramping crisis to jobs and economy

What ramping promise? Premier Peter Malinauskas’s true colours have been revealed in a key moment that laid bare his key mission, Paul Starick writes.

From knifing a Labor Premier aged just 30 to shedding his shirt in the heat of an election campaign, Peter Malinauskas has long been an action man.

For better or worse, he’s now staking his first-term government on delivering results, rather than being condemned as a do-nothing leader.

But the key objectives of the Malinauskas government’s action plan have shifted from fixing the ambulance ramping crisis – the dominant platform upon which Labor was elected in March last year.

Instead, government intervention to create jobs, industry and economic complexity is now the top priority. Mr Malinauskas is casting himself in the mould of the state’s longest-serving premier, Sir Thomas Playford, under whose more than 26-year reign South Australia was transformed into an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse.

This was the inescapable takeaway message from the much-vaunted “State of the State address”, which Mr Malinauskas delivered at the Adelaide Convention Centre on Wednesday, before more than 750 people at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) event.

Mr Malinauskas used the occasion to release a 36-page South Australian Economic Statement, with the objectives of making SA a “smart, sustainable, inclusive” place with “an economy fit for the future, improving the wellbeing of all South Australians”.

Peter Malinauskas in 2011, when he was the SA and NT branch secretary of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association (SDA), arriving at his Unley home.

The central objective of transforming the economy is a more natural fit for Mr Malinauskas’s ideology and persona. Fixing the ramping crisis looks more and more like a cynical and unachievable sales pitch, as opponents decried and this commentator has argued.

Mr Malinauskas is a ruthless pragmatist – if genial and personable – who has spent most of his adult life engineering economic outcomes as a shop assistants’ union or political leader.

In 2011, the-then 30-year-old union boss fronted a two-person delegation to demand then-premier Mike Rann step down. A month out from last March’s state election, Mr Malinauskas created the campaign’s indelible headline imagery by stripping to his swimmers.

The headline from the Premier’s 34-minute speech on Wednesday, though, was irresistibly drawn from his clever political theatrics of a flirty-sounding demand for “a pre-nup” from resources giant BHP. This was ahead of next week’s release of a business case for a multibillion-dollar Spencer Gulf desalinisation plant to boost water supply for mining and hydrogen projects.

Peter Malinauskas with his daughter Eliza at the Adelaide Aquatic Centre, during an election campaign event. Picture: Brenton Edwards

But the strategic message was unmistakably buried in Mr Malinauskas’s closing remarks, in which he redefined the core election promise that “Labor will fix the ramping crisis” as “returning the health system to a better state of play”.

Health was “a problem that needs to be fixed”, he declared, but the decarbonisation opportunity spearheaded by Labor’s $593m hydrogen power plant “can change the course of the state”.

Mr Malinauskas clearly puts growing the economy and prosperity ahead of fixing health. This is a clear reversal of the prominence given in his platform and ideology during the election campaign, but more attuned to his longstanding objectives in public life.

In summary, he argues SA is ideally placed in the crucial next decade to capitalise on defence spending to counter geopolitical instability (particularly through building AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines) and a global switch to clean energy.

“The state’s moment is now. 2030 will be here before we know it and I’m not going to die wondering. My government was elected with a broad policy agenda. It is absolutely true that returning the health system to a better state of play is a key priority of my government. It occupies an extraordinary amount of effort, energy and government resource to address that issue,” he said.

“But the hydrogen program and the decarbonisation opportunity are central to this government’s platform. Young people rightly demand it of us. Health is a problem that needs to be fixed but the decarbonisation opportunity and program can change the course of the state.”

Premier Peter Malinauskas and UK Defence Procurement Minister Alex Chalk at the Barrow-in-Furness nuclear submarine shipyard, operated by BAE Systems, on March 16. Picture: Paul Starick

The premier he ousted, Steven Marshall, can afford himself a wry smile as Mr Malinauskas embraces the state and federal Liberal agenda of AUKUS, cyber, space, critical minerals and, then, spices up hydrogen with the power plant.

Unlike Mr Marshall, Mr Malinauskas is a natural politician, ruthless enough to sideline election vows to now focus first on creating jobs and prosperity, then tackle important causes like health and education.

Politicians like to say they can walk and chew gum at the same time. Mr Malinauskas can, but he has made his priorities starkly clear.