Battle lines drawn in South Australia’s election
What should be an armchair ride for a second term for the Marshall Liberal government is turning into hand-to-hand combat with Labor.
The Labor Party election posters currently covering South Australia look like a cross between American high school year book photographs and Soviet-era posters of revolutionary cadres looking off towards a brave new world.
Instead of the traditional corflute format where candidates look face-on to the camera, every Labor candidate and their leader Peter Malinauskas has been photographed gazing off into the distance, their eyes raised and heads tilted on a 45 degree angle.
Asked by Inquirer this week what he was looking at, Malinauskas replied: “The future.” To which the SA Liberals are asking: “We have seen the future, Pete, and we want to know how much it costs.”
What should be an armchair ride for a second term for the Marshall Liberal government is turning into a hand-to-hand battle where half a dozen key seats will decide the outcome of the March 19 poll.
With the first week of campaigning now complete, both sides have shown they are determined to fight the election on their preferred turf – the Liberals on the economy and Labor on health.
In terms of headline-grabbing moments, Labor has got the jump on the Liberals thus far, running a more energetic campaign with more announcements and ideas. The key question is whether all that energy is translating into credible promises that can be paid for prudently – and can also be believed given the very recent history of Labor’s 16-year rule.
In this battle, Steven Marshall has so far sounded more like a proud accountant than a dynamic leader as he sticks to a tightly-focused script framed around the revival of SA’s economic fortunes.
Marshall wants this election to be dominated about nothing else but the economy, pointing repeatedly to SA’s record in managing Covid better than other states, registering the fastest-growing economic growth, stabilising the energy supply, cutting taxes, and hailing the emergence of new industries in hi-tech, block chain, cyberspace and manufacturing.
He is passionate about the emergence of these jobs as SA transforms its heavy manufacturing base built up during what’s known in SA as the Playford era, after Liberal premier Sir Thomas Playford who governed continuously in SA from 1938 to 1965.
Marshall was joined on the trail this week by federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who echoed the Premier’s comments to The Australian that the turnaround of SA’s economic fortunes had been a joint Marshall-Morrison initiative.
“We have now got the fastest-growing economy in the nation and there is no doubt that Scott Morrison has worked entirely collaboratively with our turnaround strategy in SA,” Marshall told The Australian this week.
Tactically, the SA Liberals appear to have opted for a strategy of sitting back and waiting for Labor’s spending announcements, then corralling their wagons and attempting to blow them out of the water on budgetary grounds. But Malinauskas seems unfazed by their strategy. Labor has set the pace by trying to shift the focus beyond the economy and onto infrastructure projects that would better the state’s quality of life.
These proposals have brought an economic downside, allowing the Liberals to paint the opposition as reckless and naive.
Labor promised to review a decision made by the independent government planning agency Renewal SA to award a major property development to Melbourne’s MAB Corporation ahead of the Adelaide Football Club, which hoped to use the inner-west land site as the venue for its new club headquarters.
In this footy-mad town, Malinauskas – despite being a Port Adelaide supporter – moved to tap into the huge sense of disappointment among Adelaide Crows fans longing for a home base.
The downside was that it allowed the Liberal Party to accuse him of jeopardising investor confidence in SA by showing that an independent, merit-based decision could be shredded at the whim of government.
That was certainly the view of the SA Property Council whose chief executive, Daniel Gannon – a former chief of staff to Marshall – said Labor’s Crows call had been noted unfavourably across the property sector.
“A lot of our members are up in arms over it,” he said. “It sends shivers up their spines. And I’m a one-eyed Crows supporter. In simple terms, what is the message this is sending to the influx of interstate interests looking to invest in SA?”
Labor would almost welcome such top-end-of-town criticism and is happy to play the populist card on behalf of a football club which some 65 per cent of South Australians support. It also lets Labor tap into voter anxiety about over-development, with the MAB apartment proposal involving only one-third the amount of public green space as that put forward by the Adelaide Football Club.
The criticism also gave Malinauskas a chance for a handy rejoinder which goes to an issue that is still resonating massively with voters in must-win Liberal marginals in the northern suburbs – the government’s decision to tear up its contract with the V8 Supercars and cancel the annual Adelaide street circuit race.
More problematic for Labor was its $80m promise for the fully state government-funded redevelopment of the Adelaide Aquatic Centre in the must-win Liberal-held seat of Adelaide.
While Malinauskas won plaudits within the seat for the idea, those with a keener eye on state finances were dismayed when Treasurer Rob Lucas – the canniest operator on North Terrace, retiring at this election after a 41-year career – announced the Liberals would do the same for just $25m.
Lucas announced that the government had secured a three-way funding deal with the Adelaide City Council and the feds to complete the same project, saving the SA taxpayers a cool $55m.
“Mr Malinauskas has been played by the Adelaide City Council and South Australian taxpayers are going to foot the bill for his rookie error,” Lucas said in one of the best-landed hits of the campaign this far.
Labor again is untroubled by the criticism, which within the seat of Adelaide could actually help their cause. Only 7 per cent of the pool’s patrons live within the Adelaide city limits, prompting many to ask why they must pay through their council rates for something that is overwhelmingly frequented by people living elsewhere.
The Liberals are hoping that the cumulative effect of all these attacks is to make Labor sound light on financial detail. It plays into Marshall’s strengths as an ex-business man who came to politics late, versus Malinauskas as the former shoppies union boss who has spent his entire life in politics.
Beyond the key issue of the economy, there is one big infrastructure item the Liberals are promising which for them has almost become a source of shame. They aren’t even campaigning on it; conversely, Labor won’t stop talking about it.
Last year’s state budget allocated $663m for a new Adelaide Entertainment Centre to host concerts, conventions and sporting events in the city.
The announcement came in the midst of an ambulance ramping crisis in the state’s public hospital system, being aggressively prosecuted by the ambo’s union which has been condemned by Lucas for chalking anti-government slogans on vehicles even during this election campaign.
Shrewdly, if opportunistically, Malinauskas opted to block the announced entertainment centre, only ever deriding it as “a basketball stadium”, the full cost of which he says should be redirected to the public health system.
He has hammered that message every day this week, with daily announcements of new positions for doctors and nurses, upgrades of every major hospital in suburban Adelaide, and more money and beds for mental health.
This is where the Liberals are vulnerable, especially in a state with a higher than average elderly population and a higher than average proportion of public service workers.
Malinauskas is at pains to shake off his past as a health minister in the Weatherill government, conceding this week that ramping had been a problem under Labor as well, but countering it had risen 485 per cent in the past four years.
And this being South Australia, politics here often attracts a hint of homoeroticism, as evidenced by premiers in pink shorts and foreign ministers in fishnets.
Easily the strangest moment of the campaign so far was the hilariously swooning coverage by the Sunday Mail’s Matt Gilbertson of Malinauskas’ swimming pool announcement.
At the launch, Malinauskas changed into his boardies and had a dip in the pool with his young daughter.
The strapping 42-year-old – who runs weekly and still plays footy for Adelaide Uni – stunned onlookers with his ripped frame, none more so than Gilbertson whose alter ego is known as Hans, a sequin-clad Germanic cabaret chanteuse who got his start doing burlesque shows within Adelaide’s gay community.
Gilbertson’s coverage of Malinauskas chiselled abs featured a headline competition where readers were asked to vote for their favourite, such as “Leader of the Hotposition”, “Rigged Election” and “Commander in Beef”.
While Malinauskas seemed a little embarrassed and surprised by it all, it gave Marshall a chance to suggest a propensity for stunts on the Labor side, unfavourably comparing Malinauskas to Vladimir Putin, which no doubt rankled with the Labor leader given his Lithuanian heritage.
On balance, the attention did Malinauskas a lot of good, getting his profile up as a relative newcomer to the leadership, but also kicking him into the knockabout family man sphere of a Peter Beattie or a Steve Bracks, the type of leader he hopes to emulate in the event he pulls off the unthinkable in kicking the Liberals out after just one term.
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