SA Premier Peter Malinauskas playing to a more traditional Labor audience
A battle is brewing in South Australia, where cash-splashing Premier Peter Malinauskas is up-ending the theory that Labor has become the party of the inner-city elites.
It’s emerged as a battle between the bogans and the bourgeoisie, a political fight in Adelaide between a sports-mad, cash-splashing Premier who is up-ending the theory that Labor has become the party of the inner-city elites.
In an unusual twist in SA politics, Premier Peter Malinauskas is under attack from middle-class and progressive voters over his pursuit of V8 Supercars, a multimillion-dollar AFL football carnival and, most controversially of all, winning the rights to host Australia’s first-ever Saudi-backed LIV golf tournament.
If the new SA Premier has a historic parallel, he looks less like Don Dunstan than Peter Beattie, the league-loving Queensland everyman who enjoyed a decade as premier.
Upon his victory, Malinauskas broke with SA tradition by not also appointing himself arts minister, a move that befits a man whose main passion outside of politics is playing Aussie rules for “The Scum”, the most lowly ranked team at the University of Adelaide Blacks Football Club.
His knockabout manner and obsession with sport became a major issue this week when he partnered up with gold legend Greg Norman to announce that next year SA would play host to the first LIV tournament at the exclusive Grange Golf Club.
There was a tense moment at caucus when two left-wing MPs challenged the Premier over his wisdom in cutting the deal given the human rights abuses and mistreatment of women in Saudi Arabia.
Malinauskas replied as he has done publicly – given the trade and strategic relationships that exist across the Western world, whatever the Saudis’ flaws, it seemed odd that the job should fall to the game of golf to show moral leadership not found elsewhere.
Beyond that, he argued that the economic benefits of hosting the debut event would be vast, especially for the tourism and hospitality sectors still battered by Covid.
Some Labor MPs remain unnerved by the deal and fearfully cited a recent interview on ABC radio where the Premier was pounded over the Saudi deal.
In a craven political sense, Malinauskas is untroubled by this, as he has been busily doing other interviews with much bigger suburban audiences including Triple M, SEN and FiveAA, where listeners have been hugely supportive of the deal.
Their chief concern is that the estimated $40m spent on all this fun stuff cannot undermine or distract the government from its key tasks of fixing ambulance ramping and funding better hospital care.
But, beyond that, many people are up for fun, especially in seats such as the northern suburbs revhead enclave of King, where Steven Marshall’s axing of the V8s was rated the number one issue on polling day.
It’s the golf deal that has proved the most contentious. The LIV tournament is part of a three-pronged tourism and events strategy that has also seen the return of the V8 Supercars and the snaring of next years debut AFL “Magic Round”, where all nine AFL matches will be played over the same weekend in Adelaide and the Barossa.
Many in the leafy inner suburbs loathe the car race due to the disruption it causes, others dislike it on environmental grounds, and the footy festival has been rubbished by Phillip Adams types who regard footy as a moronic pursuit and think the money could be best spent propping up visual artists who produce installations that the general public has no interest in attending.
The Saudi deal has kicked the criticism into a new realm, especially among progressives already unhappy with Malinauskas over heritage issues with his planned construction of a new children’s hospital on designated parkland that is home to the historic police barracks.
The unusual nature of politics in SA was best demonstrated this week when a weird unity ticket emerged between the Liberals and the Greens over the use of some locker-room language by the Premier.
While signing the footy deal with AFL boss Gillon McLachlan, Malinauskas said it was important that Adelaide did not lose the first bid to Sydney and “go sloppy seconds” on the event.
Malinauskas insists he did not know the foul origins of the term – a reference to sleeping with a woman who has just had sex with someone else – and says he thought it related to eating leftover food. But his opponents seized on it as a gaffe, even making the over the top claim that he was legitimising rape culture.
Their prosecution of Malinauskas was made stronger by his mid-campaign quip when, while being chased on a morning run by a bunch of Young Liberals, he chirped “keep up, girls” as the eastern suburbs youngsters chased him along the Torrens.
So the consensus among ABC types and their listeners is that the Premier has had a shocking week.
I’m not so sure. He’s had a bad week in the inner city, but a pretty good week with the many people well beyond the Adelaide square mile who want to go to the V8s and then head into Gauchos for an Argentinian mixed grill, six beers and a bottle of 389.
He’s had a bad week with people who obsess about gendered language and a good week with people who think you can’t say anything these days without walking on eggshells.
And, as unpleasant as the Saudis might be, it is notable that on the same day he was copping it over the LIV deal, Anthony Albanese was in talks to restore trade relations with a country that’s accused of genocide in Xinxiang, has baselessly detained an Australian journalist for two years and won’t let its citizens talk about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, suggesting that moral purity can prove somewhat elusive.
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