Goal posts shift for SA premier Malinauskas as new Lib leader faces ‘Everest’
First-term MP Ashton Hurn knows she has an uphill battle after being thrust into the SA Liberal Party leadership. Can she achieve the impossible over Peter Malinauskas in just 100 days?
In the space of one week and only 100 days from the looming state election, South Australian politics has been turned on its head.
Eight days ago Vincent Tarzia was still opposition leader and meandering towards the abyss, with the South Australian Liberal Party awaiting a likely shellacking at the March 21 election.
Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas – enjoying a daunting 60-point lead as preferred premier in the most recent poll – was expected to carry Labor to the easiest of victories and lock away a second term.
The trigger for this election eve Liberal upheaval came in the form of leaked internal polling showing the party’s vote languishing in the 20s, which would have the opposition retaining as few as two of the state’s 47 lower house seats.
That data, coupled with the party’s confused position on whether it would repeal or retain the Indigenous voice to parliament, made Tarzia – having hosted Christmas drinks the night before – wake up last Friday and suddenly decide it was all too hard.
With no forewarning of colleagues or staff and no leaks to the media, Tarzia issued a left-field statement on Friday morning saying he would be quitting the leadership that afternoon to focus on his family.
It is unclear whether his announcement elicited a holler of joy or a groan of despair from Ashton Hurn. But on Monday the 34-year-old first-term Barossa Valley MP was elected unopposed as SA Liberal leader, joining Victoria’s Jess Wilson and NSW’s Kellie Sloane as a potential female saviour for a struggling state opposition.
Hurn, a young mother with a one-year-old son, had long been touted as a future leader. Suddenly she was the leader, the role thrust upon her at a time not of her choosing, fuelled by panic in the party that in the absence of change there might be nothing left to fight over.
Even Malinauskas says the dynamics surrounding the state election are now different. But he insists the change in opponent will not alter his own approach as he seeks a second term, saying the one thing he has been warning his troops against is any sense that the election is a foregone conclusion.
“From the outset my view has always been that in South Australia elections are generally closer than they look,” Malinauskas tells Inquirer this week.
“I have maintained a drumbeat of telling my colleagues not to be complacent, and that every election is a contest, and we have got to put our best foot forward.
“In politics you can only really worry about the things you can control. Worrying about anything else is an act of futility. So there’s a new leader for the Liberal Party and that will provide a new dynamic, just as it has the last couple of times.
“From my perspective we just need to focus on being a good government and progressing the state as positively as we can.
“When you’re the leader of the opposition you think about what your opponents are doing, but when you are premier your job is to run the government and just do the best job you can. From my perspective it doesn’t change a thing.”
Malinauskas’s stated ambivalence does not mask the strange tactical challenge that has arisen for Labor on the cusp of the election. Because the SA Liberals have been so bad for so long, expectations are so low that Hurn does not have to do that much to look like a breath of fresh air.
For the past three years the Liberal Party has been a thorough disaster. It lost two historic by-elections to the ALP where the government gained Liberal-held seats. It has been ravaged by internal brawling between the Alex Antic-led conservatives and the remnant moderates from the Christopher Pyne-Simon Birmingham era. And it has been woefully led, lurching from a drug scandal that engulfed former leader David Speirs ahead of his resignation last August, to the ineffectual reign of Tarzia, who had no media profile against the charismatic Malinauskas.
Against that backdrop, it makes it easier for Hurn to impress, even though the party’s standing has been so battered she has limited time to mount a recovery. Hurn says she is under no illusions about the scale of the challenge with such a short timeframe to get the Liberals in shape for a campaign.
In the footy-mad state of South Australia, Hurn draws on the experience of her brother Shannon Hurn, who holds the AFL club record for West Coast with 333 games and who as captain led the Eagles to their famous 2018 premiership win.
“There’s an absolute mountain to climb in this role,” Ashton Hurn says. “Someone asked me what kind of mountain. It does seem like Mount Everest at the moment, but bit by bit my team and I are genuinely looking forward to the next 100 days.
“We are making sure that in us people know they have a choice on a number of issues that include affordability, health and making sure we actually have consequences for committing crime in South Australia which is getting out of control.
“It’s not over until it is over. Over the weekend I took the opportunity to speak to a number of people in leadership roles, including my brother who was premiership captain in 2018 when they beat Collingwood.
“They were basically down for the entire game. There was that last moment of play – Dom Sheed marked it and kicked that ripper goal. That’s the type of approach I will be taking to this role. I am under no illusions, it’s going to be tough, but you have got to be prepared to do it.”
Despite coasting in the polls Malinauskas has had his toughest year as Premier thanks to unforeseen events that have placed the budget under pressure.
An algal bloom that broke out in March is still affecting 30 per cent of the state’s coast; the Whyalla steelworks almost went under; and, despite record health spending, Labor has failed to honour its key 2022 election promise to fix the ambulance crisis and return ramping to 2018 levels.
It was this ramping issue that propelled Hurn into the public arena. The woman who headed former premier Steven Marshall’s communications last term made an immediate and effective transition in this one to the role of opposition health spokeswoman, turning the Liberals’ weakness on ramping into a positive by hammering Labor over its failure to honour its promise.
Malinauskas is honest in conceding his disappointment at the ramping numbers but says he believes the public recognises that the scale of Labor’s efforts on health has changed the system for the better.
“The people of SA know how much effort we have put into dramatically increasing the capacity of the health system,” he says.
“We have recruited way more doctors and nurses and allied health professionals over and above what we committed to. We have opened up hundreds more beds than we committed to. We have got ambulances responding on time, which was one of the core things we promised.
“And I have been candid about the fact that we would like to see ramping numbers improve more given how much extra capacity we have put into the system. There are reasons for that, that are well documented, particularly around a lack of aged-care beds at the federal level.
“But from my perspective I have always been honest about it.”
Malinauskas’s other big policy failure this year was the shelving of his green hydrogen plan, increasingly derided as a pie-in-the-sky concept as private companies from Woodside to Fortescue all walked away from their own projects.
But the Premier says his shelving of the project was made necessary by the near-collapse of the Whyalla steelworks that would have rendered the hydrogen project obsolete anyway, and the funds from which could be shifted across to the steelworks bailout.
“In respect of hydrogen, the simple reality was that we chose to put a hold on the hydrogen ambitions to save the Whyalla steelworks,” Malinauskas says.
“Overwhelmingly people support that. It was the right thing to do. If you spend five minutes in Whyalla, ask anybody whether the government did the right thing. While I accept there is a political point to be made from a political opponent about why haven’t we delivered on hydrogen, I think most South Australians say: ‘Well, I’m just glad they sorted out (GFG boss Sanjeev) Gupta and the steelworks.’ ”
Having spent precisely five days in the job, Hurn says her team is reviewing all the policies outlined by her predecessor and will make key announcements ahead of the new year as polling day starts to beckon.
She tells Inquirer she will target the two key weaknesses of SA Labor – its failure to address ramping and the affordability of power – while also getting the Liberals’ own policy house in order.
Although Hurn hails from the moderate faction, her first policy act as leader was to clean up the mess from last week over the Indigenous voice to parliament, taking aim at what is Australia’s only legislated voice with a clear promise to scrap it forthwith.
It was an important move internally. While Hurn has friends across the factional divide and holds down a conservative rival seat, some party conservatives regard her with suspicion because of her closeness to Marshall throughout Covid and her initial political association with former moderate supremo Pyne.
By killing the voice issue straight away she won important plaudits internally, especially after the chaos of last week.
“I made our team’s position clear on the voice,” Hurn says. “If a Hurn Liberal government is elected we will repeal the voice. The people of SA spoke really clearly about how they felt about the voice. That’s something that was ignored largely by the Premier.
“We will take a different approach there, but of course we need to do a lot more in terms of improving the lives of Indigenous South Australians when it comes to health and education. But with the voice there will be a very clear choice.”
The two trump cards for Malinauskas remain the relative strength of the SA economy compared with other states and the widespread view that Adelaide and SA have changed for the better under his leadership through major events such as AFL Gather Round, LIV Golf and the return of the V8 Supercars.
For the second year in a row the Business Council of Australia has rated SA the best state in which to do business and the state also has the second highest credit rating in Australia, second only to the resources and GST-driven powerhouse of Western Australia.
Malinauskas is aware that his detractors hold up his pursuit of major events as a sign of warped priorities but says he is unfussed by labels such as “Party Pete” bestowed on him by the opposition.
“They try to paint me as a lot of things,” he says. “Our major events policy generates a lot of attention, but in terms of the amount of time and the size of the investment it is small beer compared to the major priorities of the government – housing, health and completely revitalising the education sector to set kids up for the jobs that are coming SA’s way.
“That’s where all my time and effort goes. Negotiating a deal with the AFL or LIV or Supercars is a modest draw on my time compared to dealing with Whyalla or the drought or the algal bloom or AUKUS.
“But most South Australians would acknowledge that these events are economic drivers within their own right that have been good for business and have economically paid off for the state.”
As an AFL tragic and sports nut who played junior girls netball for SA, Hurn is the last person to run down the popularity of Gather Round, which has become a tourism drawcard in her Barossa Valley seat of Schubert with games now played at the new football complex in Lyndoch.
But she says there is an argument about priorities that can be made over the government’s focus on key services and spending, and whether it is aiming to coast to victory off the back of bread and circuses.
“The next election is really important for our state because we have got a government and Premier who frankly is not focused on the things that matter to people,” Hurn says.
“I honestly worry that the Premier thinks he has got the next election in the bag. He talks a lot about the importance of democracy. Of course that’s really important, but at the heart of that is making sure people have a choice. If the Premier has some form of unchecked power than that’s not good for anyone regardless of what your political stripes are.
“It is my job as the Leader of the Liberal Party to make sure that people have a clear-cut choice on the issues that matter to them.”
The biggest challenge for Hurn will be to wrest back two key constituencies who rate Malinauskas highly: the business sector, which praised him for calling for intervention over the health bureaucracy during Covid; and traditional Liberal-voting blokes who are so sports mad that they have come to regard “Mali” as something of a hero.
Malinauskas’s leadership on social media reforms also has won him plaudits from parents, with the push for age limits starting in Adelaide last year before NSW Premier Chris Minns and Anthony Albanese joined the campaign.
“It’s a massive deal because it’s a really important reform that is now generating attention around the world,” Malinauskas says.
“When we were standing alone last May saying SA was going to do this, if you told me then that by the end of this year the federal government would adopt it and we’d see the rest of the world pick it up and run with it, I would have been humbled.
“This is a real-world challenge that has caught up on society over the course of the last decade. We needed someone to show leadership and do something about it. The fact that effort started in SA is something we can all be proud of.”
Hurn is right when she says the Liberals have a mountain to climb. As yet it is unclear whether it will be the size of Mount Everest or Mount Lofty.
But after three leadership changes this term and with the party’s internal polling pointing to an electoral apocalypse, the expectations for the Liberals have become so bleak that under new leader Hurn, winning more than two seats will be an improvement on what might have been.
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