David Penberthy: Why the SA Liberals aren’t the clear winners at the election
IF the SA Libs can’t win this election they should disband, or move to Brazil to lie low, writes David Penberthy. So why aren’t they miles ahead? The reason is in the past.
SA 2018
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IN the annals of sporting catastrophe, the name Moacir Barbosa Nascimento looms large. Barbosa was goalkeeper in Brazil’s 1950 World Cup side, which entered the decider against Uruguay as unbackable favourites on the sacred home soil of Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Stadium.
Before a vast and almost wholly Brazilian crowd of 199,854 — a record to this day for any sporting event — Barbosa conceded not one but two goals, the second a 79th-minute howler where he was off his line. Uruguay won the final 2-1.
Barbosa became a leper in his own land. Until his death in 2000, he lived the life of a hermit and was shunned by the football world and broader community. He was shooed away from a national training session lest he curse the entire team, banned from entering commentary boxes. He was the human embodiment of the squandered opportunity.
I am not sure if Steven Marshall follows the world game but in political terms a similar fate awaits should he lead the Liberals to their fifth successive defeat tomorrow. If the SA Libs can’t win this one they should disband, or move to Brazil to lie low. The law of averages holds that they are well overdue, but it is no sure thing that victory will land in their laps.
Far from it.
Why have the SA Liberals been so ordinary for so long, especially when SA Labor has been home to some notable mediocrities and not short on scandal? The biggest cause historically is, of course, factionalism. The Libs have held office for only 10 of the past 36 years in SA and spent much of that time at each other’s throats.
When they romped home in 1993 off the back of the State Bank collapse, they wasted a foundation for continuing government via a wasteful re-run of the divisions that saw the party suffer a formal split in the 1970s.
John Olsen left a perfectly good job in the Senate ahead of the 1993 election to return home to lead the Libs, only to be thwarted by the moderates who rallied behind Dean Brown.
As payback, and because Brown was a ditherer who lost key backers in his own faction, the conservative Olsen rolled him in his first term.
Damaged by this mess, the Libs barely won the 1997 election and Olsen later resigned after misleading the house over the Motorola affair, leaving the door open for Mike Rann to form a minority Labor Government after just two terms in exile.
It was a shocking turnaround for the Libs, especially given the State Bank had just lost a cool $3 billion on Labor’s incompetent watch.
You would think this devastation would have forced root-and-branch change within the SA Liberal division. You would be wrong.
The brawling continued, the leaders kept changing, the party was far too slow to weed out the factional stagers who had no policy smarts, nor the genial country types who liked coming to North Tce for what could be described euphemistically as conviviality.
It was only through the advent of Steven Marshall’s leadership just on five years ago that the party drew a line under this nonsense. Internally, the stability Marshall has presided over is his greatest achievement. The Libs argue also that there has been significant turnover of personnel.
With SA’s higher-than-average proportion of government employees, Marshall has been cautious to avoid the mistakes of past Liberal leaders in targeting the size of the public sector or advocating draconian changes to workplace laws.
He is leading from the centre, focusing on the smaller end of town with payroll relief for businesses paying up to $1.5 million in wages. Labor tries to paint him as some flint-hearted trickle-down economist but there is nothing in terms of cutbacks or industrial relations in his agenda that supports the characterisation.
Given Labor’s woes in child protection, the overblown cost and timeline of the new RAH, the chemo scandal and the Oakden disgrace, it is deeply disturbing for the Libs that they, and Marshall, are not ahead by the length of the straight.
Marshall remains the third-most popular candidate for premier, with Xenophon eating away at his individual standing and the Liberal base.
Why is this so? Part of it is voter psychology. If you’ve been losing for so long, people regard you as losers.
In that climate, a third-party campaign as per SA Best can sweep up disaffected voters who’ve had a gutful of Labor but are even angrier that the Libs haven’t taken the fight up to them. Then there is Marshall himself. One on one, he is a great bloke — something I would also say about Weatherill and Xenophon — but there is something about him that seems to grate with a sizeable number of voters.
Part of this is the perennial curse of the Opposition Leader — sounding like a knocker — but it seems that Marshall is marked down more harshly for this quality by voters who want him to outline a clearer alternative.
The Libs and Labor have both run a reasonable positive campaign, but the Libs have run far and away the best negative campaign. Labor’s ads attacking Marshall for forgetting the name of his party are lame, in my view.
Compare that slip of the tongue to the Liberal ads featuring chemotherapy bungle victim Andrew Knox and Oakden campaigner Stewart Johnston, the genuine human faces of two appalling scandals for which the government has no excuse. Those ads are powerful. I don’t know why the Libs didn’t use them more.
My hunch is that, this time, the Libs will actually get over the line. If they don’t, the party will bear the blame collectively for years of self-absorption, but Steven Marshall will go down as the man who led them to loss number five.
Not an outcome you want on your CV, albeit one that could be soothed with a stiff caipirinha as you look out over Ipanema Beach.
DAVID PENBERTHY HOSTS BREAKFASTS ON FIVEAA WITH WILL GOODINGS
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