Covid iceberg sunk party floating in a sea of uncertainty

The election ended where it started when the Marshall government opened its borders in November.

The Liberal primary vote collapsed and never fully recovered, eventually handing Labor a win for the ages.

For months now, the Liberal Party has known it had hit the Covid iceberg and there needed to be a dramatic tightening that never came.

There were clear deficiencies in the Liberal campaign, where Steven Marshall lacked obvious support and an ability to speak to the suburbs.

Labor was strong and its strategy appeared a fusion of successful campaigns run previously in South Australia, Victoria and Queensland.

There is a clear and obvious trend emerging that Labor has discovered how to talk at a state level to the suburbs and the suburbs likes what it is hearing.

The South Australian Liberal Party has become terminally focused on the inside of the beltway. It talked to the inner east and inner south but even the inner east and the inner south didn’t like much of what it was hearing.

This is a long-term conundrum for the Liberals and the party urgently needs to work out what it stands for.

SA chief health officer, Nicola Spurrier talks to the press with then Premier Steven Marshall in the background. Critics say he spent way too much time there. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

It needs to find a way to end more than 50 years of tribal nonsense, embrace the regions and recruit and promote the best from all factions.

While Labor is focusing on health, education, infrastructure and returning the Adelaide 500 car race to its streets, Marshall focused heavily on business and the economy and pandemic management.

People didn’t buy it; they wanted more in an era of bruising cost of living pressures and the virus, even though SA arguably fared better than any of the major states that opened up in 2021, its streets now alive with activity and very few deaths in the global context.

Those critical of Marshall are pointing to his arm’s length management of the pandemic response as a key factor for the government’s political death.

Allowing police and SA’s chief health officer to run the show robbed the government of crucial mileage.

Now that borders are open, voters have savaged Marshall, blaming him for the discomfort.

It is quite possible that Labor’s campaigning on health and ambulance ramping – combined with the November border opening – created a perfect storm for voters to cast their judgment against the Liberal Party.

On one hand, there was anxiety about the virus; on the other, there was no guarantee that if you needed an ambulance, you wouldn’t face a lengthy wait to get into an emergency department.

Yes, Labor was slick.

But they had a lot to work with, much of it related one way or another to the global pandemic.