David Penberthy: Marshall has got little credit for the good and copped the blame for the bad

Covid has been a vote-winner for every other Aussie state leader to face the polls, but the SA Premier will struggle to win credit for his pandemic efforts, writes David Penberthy.

Steven Marshall is desperate for the March 19 election to be about much more than the management of Covid-19.

He has a good economic story to tell. He can point to reduced taxes, lower water and power prices, and the new stability in the grid. He can hail the reversal of the brain drain to the eastern states.

But inevitably, the politics of the pandemic will loom large in the minds of voters on polling day. His detractors will say that, if he loses, it’s because he forgot how to lead.

A more charitable assessment would be to sheet any defeat home to the election timing. For, as the pandemic has gone on, and people have become less compliant and more questioning, the value of incumbency has started to vanish.

Across the past few weeks I have been reflecting not so much on whether Marshall led enough throughout Covid, but in a crude tactical sense, whether he led at the right times. It feels as if he got little of the credit for the good bits and too much of the blame for the bad bits.

Before November 23, when South Australia had recorded just four deaths through the entirety of the pandemic, so much of the decision making and public sell job was led not by the Premier, but the Police Commissioner and the Chief Public Health Officer. As a former businessman, someone with the wit and confidence to delegate to good people, Marshall clearly believed this was the right course of action.

South Australian premier Steven Marshall and Professor Nicola Spurrier. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

He would allude to the fraught relationship between then-US-president Donald Trump and his health chief Dr Anthony Fauci, saying surely the last thing South Australians wanted was politicians calling the shots on how to manage a public-health challenge not seen in a century.

The upshot of all this, though, was that Professor Nicola Spurrier was canonised, Commissioner Grant Stevens hailed as a thoughtful and pragmatic bloke who was trying to strike the right balance, and Marshall looked like he was along for the ride.

The success of Covid in the minds of many South Australians was thanks to Saint Nicola and a smart police chief, less so the bloke ostensibly running the state. (Which in a constitutional sense he hasn’t been anyway, due to the necessity of the emergency powers act.)

As a result, Marshall had no clear individual ownership of our successful battle against Covid, whereas in other states, for good or for ill, the entire management of the challenge was synonymous with state leaders. The two best examples being Victoria and Western Australia, where premiers Dan Andrews and Mark McGowan remain comfortably ascendant, despite the ferocity of their critics.

After November 23, when the decision was made to open the borders, it was Marshall who suddenly became the front man. I suspect he did so because at the time it looked like the Delta variant was ending and he was about to be the good-times Premier, announcing an ever-increasing easing of restrictions right through to Christmas and up to polling day.

We all know what happened next. Along came Omicron, which in an exquisitely bad bit of political timing for a government seeking re-election, was declared a variant of concern at the exact same time as the SA borders opened up.

The inevitable then happened – cases surged, the death count soared against what it had been, testing queues grew and grew and tens of thousands of people spent their summer holidays going in and out of isolation. This is a phenomenon that exists to this day thanks to the close-contact rules.

I have said before that Marshall did the right thing by sticking with the border opening despite the Omicron variant’s surge, especially as it is vastly less dangerous than Delta and hopefully signals the pandemic’s end. Reversing the border opening would only have delayed the inevitable, as WA is learning now with the reintroduction of social limits, concert cancellations and bans on business activity.

I think Marshall’s decision was a courageous one. But I also think he and the Liberal Party have failed to make the case for its courageousness.

I think they have been spooked or annoyed by all the debate around the general management of the pandemic and the wisdom of the timing of our reopening. Certainly there is huge antipathy in business about how it was all done.

I have spoken to many people who think the biggest mistake was not to lift restrictions before November 23, when there was no Covid in SA, to let people make money and do more shifts before the borders opened.

Equally there are many who thought it best to wait until after Christmas so the peak retail and hospitality season could have proceeded as per normal.

Former US President Donald Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Picture: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The biggest failing of the government in all this – and the Premier – is in his inability, or refusal, to stand up to some of the more curious and contestable rulings by SA Health. On this score Marshall has taken the Trump/Fauci construction way too far.

It is actually the job of the elected leader to say that the treatment of students at boarding schools is absurd when Queensland has a completely different and much more sensible set of rules. It’s the job of the leader to step in when weird decisions can be made allowing dancing and drinking at Womad but strict bans are still in place for outdoor Fringe shows and pubs.

On these issues, Marshall has sounded less like a premier than a press secretary, almost shrugging his shoulders saying he can’t comment on specific cases, or mouthing platitudes about deferring to the health advice. It’s reminiscent of his ambivalence to the death of the V8s, which may cost him northern seats. He tried to rationalise this as just an unfortunate outcome, one he was ruefully advised to do by the tourism people.

Given how SA has compared to the rest of the world, if Marshall does lose he will probably be wondering what he did to deserve it. To quote the great Clint Eastwood from Unforgiven in what’s one of my favourite quotes to explain politics: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”