Paul Starick: Why Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas dresses like a pastoralist

If clothes make the man, the R.M. Williams boots Malinauskas pulled on before striding into former Liberal heartland say a lot about our new Premier, writes Paul Starick.

If clothes make the man, they certainly illustrate a lot about the political priorities of the newly installed Premier Peter Malinauskas.

He was looking more country Liberal than new Labor when he swept through the South East on Wednesday.

His fashion choices, along with those of two key advisers, visually demonstrated the turf he is seeking to stake out as a new-age ALP Premier.

Mr Malinauskas and his advisers donned R.M. Williams boots, blue jackets and open-neck shirts – his was blue and one adviser chose white. The Premier more closely resembled the traditional image of a South East pastoralist rather than the reality – that he is the first former union boss to lead the state in generations.

But the stereotypical image of a thuggish backroom union chief does not, in any remote way, apply to the state’s 47th premier.

Premier Peter Malinauskas tours the Mount Gambier Hospital on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

As many Liberal supporters acknowledge, Mr Malinauskas is, on many issues, more right wing than the man he ousted in a landslide, Steven Marshall. The 41-year-old Premier has forged his political career in Labor’s Right faction, while Mr Marshall was a businessman embraced by the Moderates.

Ambulance ramping and building hospital capacity might have catapulted him to power but Mr Malinauskas’s longstanding core ideology is about working together with business to grow jobs and prosperity for working families.

His sharp intellect and political philosophy were demonstrated at a 2013 speech, when he was the shop assistants’ union state secretary, to a union national council branch dinner at Adelaide Oval.

Cost of living was, he emphatically declared, the one issue that stood out in people’s minds above all others, by a long way. Keeping wages up was, he asserted, the simple solution to tackling this problem, one that had consistently eluded both major parties.

Real wages growth, particularly for the low-paid, would underpin an expanding middle class, while enhancing future growth and prosperity. This would be economically sound and morally right.

Premier Peter Malinauskas with independent MP Troy Bell (right). Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

Only Labor had prosperity for all and well-paying jobs as its core business, he argued.

“The trick for Labor is not getting distracted by other ventures, albeit some of them very important, to the extent we forget the core business,” a 32-year-old Mr Malinauskas argued.

“If this agenda is not ideologically pure enough for you, if you need more social engineering in your politics, then join the Greens!”

Mr Malinauskas re-emphasised this stance in an interview with The Advertiser in May last year, in which he staked a claim for middle-class voters and pointedly snubbed “culture warriors”.

“In my humble opinion, when people make an assessment about who should govern the state and govern the country they legitimately ask who is best placed to provide decent working jobs for their family,” he declared.

Mr Malinauskas emphasised these principles on Sunday morning, in his first post-election press conference. “I said from the start that I was going to be a pro-business Labor leader,” he said, adding that he had already been in touch with some business leaders that morning and planned to speak to more in coming days.

“I do believe that our economy works best when we achieve the right balance between the interests of capital and labour … When you have a pro-business Labor Party, you see the interests of working people working together with the interests of business to ensure that our economy delivers for everybody, not just the few,” he declared. This argument underpins his argument on shop trading hours. It is more than arguable that going backwards on public holiday trade in the suburbs is against consumers’ interests. But Mr Malinauskas believes it is firmly in the interests of small businesses and the retail workers he represented as a union chief.

Premier Peter Malinauskas at the Limestone Coast Fishermen’s Co-operative Limited in Port MacDonnell. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

In some respects, Mr Malinauskas is mirroring former Liberal Country League premier Sir Thomas Playford, who nationalised the electricity network and ruthlessly pushed regional development, particularly in Whyalla.

Mr Malinauskas wants to put a $593m hydrogen plant at Whyalla in a bid to revive manufacturing in the Upper Spencer Gulf. On Wednesday, he talked up the economic potential of the South East, declaring: “I think this part of the state has been ignored by previous governments of both sides and I’m seeking to put an end to that.”

This is both an economic statement of intent and a political ploy. The Liberals have been depleted in the regions and Mr Malinauskas is striking at their former heartland in a bid to govern for years to come.