SA Liberals got the politics and campaigning wrong

Defeating a competent, first-term government that transformed a former rust-bucket, mendicant state into a dynamic, growth economy takes formidable political skill. We congratulate South Australian premier-elect Peter Malinauskas, 41, on an impressive win. Labor will probably have 28 seats in the lower house and the Liberals as low as 14, with five independents. A natural leader from his time as school captain at Mercedes College in Adelaide, Mr Malinauskas’s rise began when he filled a casual vacancy in the upper house in 2015. He won his lower house seat of Croydon in Adelaide’s northwest for the first time at the last election in 2018. In this campaign, shrewdly, he pushed hard on the issue of health, especially ambulance ramping. The problem has frustrated paramedics, left sick patients waiting in carparks and delayed emergency responses for others, some of whom died when help did not arrive in time.

While the result will boost Labor’s confidence in federal seats such as Boothby and Sturt, electoral experience shows voters clearly differentiate between state and federal polls and issues. Nor do they like one party dominating the political landscape coast to coast. The defeat of the Marshall government leaves NSW and Tasmania as the only non-Labor states, with Dominic Perrottet to face voters in a year’s time. Such domination has happened before, but it tends to produce a converse reaction. In March 2008, Campbell Newman was the most senior Liberal in the nation when he was Brisbane’s lord mayor.

Coming two months from the federal election, the resounding defeat of Steven Marshall, who will step down as Liberal leader, if he manages to hold his seat, was chilling for many in the federal Coalition, especially as he had a good economic record. But his side got the politics, the optics and the campaigning badly wrong. Amid concern over a 485 per cent increase in ambulance ramping in the past four years, his promise to build a large giraffe enclosure at Adelaide Zoo – on the same day Mr Malinauskas, a former health minister, promised state-of-the-art ambulance headquarters – was a prime example.

Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg have an even more powerful story to tell about the turnaround in jobs and prosperity across the nation since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Two years ago, it would have been reckless to predict that by now, the fiscal dividend from increased economic activity would be reducing the national debt and that unemployment would be at a 48-year low. The quality of the Coalition campaign in convincing voters about the importance of such achievements will be crucial. So will staking out Anthony Albanese on what he really believes about economic management, how he would change the country and finding clear, significant points of differentiation between the major parties. Unlike in 2019, when Bill Shorten ran a big-tax, big-spending agenda, Mr Albanese’s small-target strategy has made this hard, despite his Socialist Left factional roots and his support, decades ago, for inheritance and wealth taxes. Voters are entitled to know whether his socialist tendencies are now firmly in the past.

The budget on Tuesday week is the Coalition’s best remaining chance to reboot the national conversation and draw battlelines for the campaign. Two days later, Mr Albanese’s budget-in-reply speech will be perhaps the most important of his career so far. If he is dismissive of the budget, he must, for the sake of his credibility, set out alternatives. That is the least that voters are entitled to know. The Prime Minister must fight Labor over issues that matter. He and the Treasurer, while highlighting their strengths, must avoid arguing along the lines of “working families have never had it so good”, as John Howard did in 2007. He inadvertently gave Labor a line it used to devastating effect. Paying $200 to fill petrol tanks will not put voters in the best of moods.

Another lesson from the SA result, for the Liberals federally and in other states, is that the party, a broad church as Mr Howard correctly says, cannot afford to take its conservative supporters for granted. Some are attributing the collapse in the party’s vote in SA to outgoing deputy premier and attorney-general Vickie Chapman championing euthanasia and late-term abortion. It is part of the story; it did not help the Liberals that Mr Malinauskas, a former shoppies union official, is a social conservative. Nor did the Liberal Party help itself last year when several hundred people from Pentecostal Christian churches signed up, only to have their memberships initially suspended amid claims from moderates they were part of a branch-stacking exercise led by conservative SA Liberal senator Alex Antic. Similar disillusionment is rife in other states, including Victoria. Given Saturday’s meltdown, the party is in no position to alienate supporters from any of its wings.