Dunstan poll puts Liberals in death spiral — and time is running out | Paul Starick

The by-election is the latest debacle for the SA Liberals, who are running out of time to figure out who they want to be or become irrelevant, Paul Starick writes.

The South Australian Liberal Party is in a long-term death spiral and is now on the brink of irretrievable collapse.

The Dunstan by-election is the latest disaster in an almost 60-year search for identity. Most of this time has been spent waging internecine warfare, mostly in Opposition.

Premier Peter Malinauskas is firmly occupying the centre ground and the Liberals are simultaneously stretching to the left and right.

But their moderate wing is being squeezed by the Greens in affluent inner Adelaide suburbs that were once blue-ribbon seats.

Dunstan Liberal candidate Anna Finizio with Opposition Leader, David Speirs. Picture Dean Martin

Greens state co-leader Robert Simms with Dunstan candidate Katie McCusker. Picture Dean Martin

On the right, they are under attack from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, as firebrand Senator Alex Antic correctly pitched when deposing former Cabinet minister Anne Ruston from top spot at Senate preselection.

This creates a schism that is extraordinarily difficult to reconcile. How does the party seize back the middle ground and the middle class, which founder Sir Robert Menzies famously targeted and successfully captured?

One Nation state upper house MLC Sarah Game with Pauline Hanson

Opposition Leader David Speirs wants to consider formalised factions, like Labor.

This is a pipedream of a severely wounded leader.

It has been anathema to a party founded on Menzian ideals that “individual enterprise must drive us forward” and of handing people a chance in life by making them “not leaners but lifters”.

At a state level, there is no modern period of history that can be drawn upon for inspiration. The Liberals have won successive state elections only once since Sir Thomas Playford’s more than 26-year reign ended in 1965.

Even then, having swept to landslide victory in 1993 after the State Bank financial disaster, they squandered that margin in 1997 before ultimately losing power in 2002.

There is, perhaps, one high point to which the SA Liberals can look for guidance and inspiration.

About 20 years ago, the federal SA Liberals wielded huge power in the Howard government, with four Cabinet ministers.

Mr Howard was a strong, decisive leader who famously embraced a broad church, skilfully managing and balancing factional rivalries.

The-then Prime Minister John Howard with his ministry on October 26, 2004. SA had four Cabinet ministers: Alexander Downer, Nick Minchin, Amanda Vanstone and Robert Hill. Picture: AAP Image/Mark Graham

The big question for the SA Liberals is: who is their base?

Is it conservatives successfully recruited in droves by Senator Antic?

Is it business, small, medium and large?

Is it affluent inner Adelaide, or those struggling with living costs in the middle and outer suburbs? Or the farms and regions outside Adelaide?

They are running out of time to decide. They are losing more and more seats, at state and federal level, and once-safe electorates are becoming marginal or lost to independents.

They are too busy fighting each other to win elections and, all the while, gradually sliding into irrelevance.

Originally published as Dunstan poll puts Liberals in death spiral — and time is running out | Paul Starick