It was a tale of two campaigns - one slick and brutal, the other so pathetically amateurish and laughable it can be best told with a story involving giraffes.
On the crucial second week of the SA election campaign, just one day after The Weekend Australian had revealed how grim things were for the Liberals via Newspoll, Labor leader Peter Malinauskas launched what, in a campaign sense, was his Exocet missile.
Amid huge public concern over the 485 per cent increase in ambulance ramping during the four years of the Marshall government, and with campaign momentum clearly on Labor’s side, Malinauskas promised that if elected, he would build a state-of-the-art $120m ambulance headquarters in the CBD.
Steven Marshall was just down the road that same Sunday where he announced that if re-elected, the Liberals would build a large giraffe enclosure at the Adelaide Zoo, on the banks of the River Torrens.
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The optics were stark: Malinauskas flanked by hundreds of cheering ambos, consoling families whose loved ones had died while being ramped, Marshall extolling the marvels of what he dubbed “Adelaide’s own African oasis”.
Nothing underscored the gulf between the two campaigns better.
The Liberals had almost a year to see the freight train coming in the form of Labor’s all-out assault over hospitals and ramping.
Labor immediately vowed to scrap the $663m Adelaide Entertainment Centre when it was announced in last year’s state budget, turning that project into a symbol of Liberal profligacy, and pocketing the cash to (partially) prop up its $3.1bn in election promises.
The giraffes-on-the-Torrens promise played straight into Labor’s claim that the Liberals had warped priorities, yet the Liberals did it and announced nothing different on that Sunday to change the narrative.
Labor’s entire campaign was ruthlessly and aggressively framed around smashing the Liberals on health, which is almost hilarious, given the state the hospitals were already in four years ago when Malinauskas was actually health minister.
The Liberals had nothing effective to counter it.
Their insipidness can be traced back to a long-forgotten moment in the bleak recent history of the SA Liberal Party, which by 2026 will have governed for four of the previous 24 years.
About 10 years ago as it lurched into a second decade in opposition, the party scheduled an off-site “love-in” - the hallmark of any organisation that has mastered the art of failure - to analyse weaknesses and strengths.
There was furious agreement among MPs that unlike Labor, one of the Liberal Party’s strengths was that it did not have “career politicians” but attracted people from all walks of life who had developed an interest in serving their community.
A lone voice in the room begged to differ: former-student-politician-turned-staffer-turned-MP-turned-Education Minister John Gardner.
He told the room the Liberals were consistently outgunned by Labor when it came to organising and campaigning, and the party needed to attract more people who regarded politics not as a passing interest but a lifelong vocation.
His warning was borne out on Saturday, with an economically competent first-term government blown away by a bunch of young right-wing Labor blokes who learnt their craft managing union campaigns, state campaigns, federal campaigns and now this campaign.
Sure, the Liberals can complain about the Whatever It Takes quality of Labor’s tactics, best evidenced by their refusal to abide by the Electoral Commission’s 11th-hour ruling that elements of their ambulance campaign were misleading and advertisements had to be pulled.
Beyond that, they were simply flogged by people who are better at politics, work harder, have more supporters on the ground, and who seem to want victory more.
The fact Labor was led by a man now being hailed as a once in a generation leader - described by former premier Jay Weatherill as “the kind of candidate who was designed in a laboratory” - makes the Malinauskas landslide seems every bit as predictable as Newspoll said it would be.
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