Paul Starick: Why Premier Peter Malinauskas is mimicking Liberal and Country League Premier Sir Thomas Playford
Premier Peter Malinauskas has likened his quest to remake the state to that of a long-serving Liberal icon who drove our car industry, Paul Starick writes. So what does it mean for SA?
Opinion
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On the eve of a triumphant comeback for the Adelaide 500 Supercar race, Premier Peter Malinauskas took to the stage to address a state dinner celebrating the occasion.
In a well-crafted speech, he sought to draw parallels between South Australia emerging from the twin catastrophes of World War II and the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first-term Labor Premier expressed his determination to remake the state after Covid just like the state’s longest-serving leader, Sir Thomas Playford, did by spurring industrialisation spearheaded by the car industry – Holden, in particular.
In the Adelaide Convention Centre audience were Zara Tindall, Rachel Griffiths, business leaders and several past premiers, Labor and Liberal. The man who axed the Supercar race, Steven Marshall, was a notable absence.
In his speech, Mr Malinauskas spelled out the rationale for an interventionist government: one which has restored Adelaide’s street circuit Supercar race; vowed to build a $593m hydrogen power plant at Whyalla; and bulldozed through laws to overcome heritage provisions to build a new Women’s and Children’s Hospital costing up to $3.2bn on the Thebarton Police Barracks.
In doing so, he effectively spelled out his own ideology through the prism of Playford – seeking to galvanise his audience by likening his own quest to that of the Liberal and Country League Premier who lead the state from 1938 to 1965.
This speech was notable, particularly for an observer of Mr Malinauskas’s rhetoric for more than a decade – since he was 30-year-old shop assistants’ union leader toppling Mike Rann’s premiership. It encapsulated the sense of mission that Mr Malinauskas has long harboured to lead the creation of jobs and prosperity for working people, to expand the middle class, and to back enterprise and aspiration. Now, though, he is the Premier, nearing the end of his first calendar year in office.
Mr Malinauskas set the scene by evoking the aftermath of WWII, when Playford was in his third term.
“It struck Playford at the time that he was essentially a leader of a small, still largely agricultural jurisdiction that did have a substantial question that demanded an answer: ‘What was the state’s identity? What is its purpose? And how does it contemplate itself in a seriously different future, post WWII?’ Playford understood that business as usual wasn’t going to be enough in that new post-WWII global economy,” Mr Malinauskas told the audience.
Further evoking Playford, Mr Malinauskas said the LCL premier understood there was a mood change in SA, “a growing degree of optimism”, coupled with a yearning and aspiration “to enjoy all the prosperity that an expanding and increasingly prosperous middle class could afford them – if they had the leadership and the government that would simply just provide them that most essential of Australian values – an opportunity”.
“Playford understood that the best chance of advancing the state would be to increase South Australia’s economic complexity. Playford saw that creating new opportunities meant creating new industries, lifting working people into the middle class to help transform their lives, and thereby transform the state. He saw it as a tipping point in the state’s history. He could have let the moment pass, but instead, he rose to the occasion,” Mr Malinauskas said.
Like Playford, Mr Malinauskas has sniffed opportunity in the aftermath of a crisis. Playford nationalised the power grid, creating the Electricity Trust of South Australia. Playford has been credited with driving industry to make Whyalla the site of Australia’s largest shipbuilding yards, a blast furnace and an integrated steel industry.
Mr Malinauskas seeks to nationalise the next generation of electricity supply, by creating the Whyalla hydrogen plant fuelling green steel production. After initial wariness at the AUKUS plan to build at least eight nuclear-powered submarines in Adelaide, Mr Malinauskas has seized upon the transformational economic and technology transfer potential with Playford-like zeal.
“We are embarking and set to embark on an exercise to dramatically grow the state’s economic complexity. This time not through building cars, but rather through building satellites and submarines, the most complex machines that have ever been built in the history of the world and it is happening right here – in our state, in our city,” he told the state dinner.
Mr Malinauskas has an extraordinarily long way to go to match Playford, both in time served and economic achievement. But he has staked out similar objectives and values, during testing geopolitical times that afford both opportunity and risk for South Australia.
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