SA Premier Steven Marshall is riding a COVID-19 popular wave. Can he hold on?
The border is (mostly) open and approval ratings are high but there’s still 18 months until the next election — can Premier Steven Marshall keep his lead?
Compared to the rest of our ramshackle federation, South Australia has been an oasis of calm and common sense throughout the coronavirus pandemic. For Premier Steven Marshall, who meandered to the end of 2019 amid a marathon, mismanaged brawl over land tax with the Liberal Party’s own base and backbench, COVID has also done him a political favour by giving him a renewed sense of purpose.
The question for Marshall in a state governed by Labor for 16 of the past 18 years is: has he entrenched himself sufficiently to secure the SA Liberals an elusive second term?
A former businessman who came to politics late after running the family’s furniture factory and then launching a restaurant chain, 52-year-old Marshall’s management of the pandemic has been informed by his commercial background — a cool-headed and methodical approach informed by data and a determination to surround himself with good people. Marshall’s team comprises his laconic, no-nonsense Police Commissioner Grant Stevens; COVID Transition Committee chairman Jim McDowell, a former cexecutive of British Aerospace Australia; and a chief public health officer in Nicola Spurrier who is so well-regarded by SA voters that she has become something of a rock star, with a cocktail named in her honour at Adelaide’s swish 2KW wine bar.
Despite criticisms from the business community over the impact of closures, and the draconian treatment of border communities that has now been addressed, Marshall’s team has been overwhelmingly lauded by the SA public for its COVID response, with the chaos and division in Victoria only heightening the contrast.
“Pride comes before a fall,” Marshall said dryly on radio in June in response to Daniel Andrews’ attempt to ridicule SA over its decision to open its borders. “I don’t want to be offensive to South Australians, but why would you want to go there?” Andrews had asked amid sniggers from the Melbourne press pack, in what was probably his last attempt at humour in the past three months. It was a moment of hubris which from that point was followed by an explosion in coronavirus cases that left Victorians prisoners in their own homes, while in SA, life was happily returning to normal.
That karmic exchange between the two premiers tells the story of why Marshall is widely assumed to be on target to win a second term. SA is in the back half of its fixed four-year cycle and as the Premier starts eyeing the March 2022 election, his handling of the health challenge brought by the pandemic is the ace in his deck. While governing SA comes with a lower degree of difficulty than a state like Victoria, SA has done an exceptional job on a per capita basis, with the second-highest rate of COVID testing in the world and a highly effective contact tracing regimen that means clusters have been identified and contained every time.
Only four people have died from a small total of 466 cases. Quarantine has been run professionally and without incident by SA Police, and Spurrier and SA Health have isolated and suppressed every cluster that has emerged. While business has often baulked at the impact of the lockdown, Marshall has struck a better balance than other leaders, being the first premier to open some borders to other states, and listening when cross-border communities fired up about the negative impact of the axing of exemptions for communities just over the Victorian and NSW border. SA has had none of the fortress mentality of Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania, none of the ham-fisted policing seen in Victoria and NSW. Even at the height of the lockdown, beaches and national parks remained open, golf stopped only briefly and, this being SA, there were even urgent discussions at the COVID management committee about the need to re-open cellar doors.
Marshall tells The Australian that he is aware that business and industry are demanding more by way of stimulus. But he urges a recognition that the government’s entire approach to COVID has been an economic one, in that he has sought to maximise business activity and workforce morale by minimising restrictions.
“We were the first state to lean in heavily to get students back to school,” Marshall said.
“Not only did that have good educational outcomes, it also meant that parents who were at home looking after the kids could get on with their work. We were the first state to allow intrastate travel, the first to get elective surgeries back up, which kickstarted 10,000 jobs in one hit. We are pushing to underpin university jobs by getting overseas students back. We have a 2m square rule for hospitality versus 4m square in the eastern states. We are trying to get every business back to a viability model as soon as we can.”
But is COVID alone enough to get him over the line at an election 18 months from now? After 16 preceding years of Labor rule, during which premier Mike Rann was knifed by Jay Weatherill, whose own government was often plagued by crisis, you would think the Liberals are on the cusp of a golden era and destined to govern deep into this decade. The reality is, the Liberals are never a sure thing in a state with few large rural and regional centres to underpin conservative country electorates, and with Adelaide being a government town with the highest national proportion of strongly unionised public servants in the workforce.
The Liberal cause has not been helped by an electoral redistribution that renders four reasonably safe Liberal seats marginal. This means that Labor, which was by no means wiped out in 2018, is now within striking distance of the five seats it must win to form government in its own right, or three with the support of two Labor-leaning independents.
Frustratingly for Marshall, there are signs that the factional peace he presided over in his seven years as leader is starting to strain, with a re-emergence of the squabbling that was so bad in opposition that the Liberals came to be regarded as a rabble. In SA, where the Liberals famously split in the 1970s under former premier Steele Hall, and where their post-State Bank ascendancy in the 1990s was squandered in a byzantine battle between Dean Brown and John Olsen, it can often feel that Liberal Party factionalism is another virus for which there is no known cure.
The catalyst for this latest flare-up was a parliamentary expenses scandal involving four country MPs, three of them from the party’s conservative faction. While the four all resigned, Marshall made it clear he would have sacked them if they didn’t walk. Their departures have bolstered the conservative view that the government is factionally imbalanced towards the moderate camp. More ominously for Marshall, the expenses scandal has been followed by a spate of internal sniping. The Premier was ropeable when this newspaper reported last month on the internal tensions over a Liberal Women’s Council function, catered for 600 people at the Adelaide Oval, at a time when tough lockdown measures had been reintroduced for the rest of the community with weddings and funerals capped at 100. Moderates also blamed the party’s Right for the revelations about Liberal MLC Jing Lee over her support for Beijing and closeness to Adelaide’s Chinese Consulate, and felt bolstered in that view when federal Liberals Tony Pasin, Nicolle Flint and Alex Antic wrote a joint letter to Liberal HQ demanding an independent investigation into her activities.
“The factional stuff won’t hurt him because it won’t be sustained, it’s hardly some widespread revolt,” one party figure said. “The expenses scandal was a distraction but he didn’t get hurt by it because he neutralised it quickly by ensuring they all walked.
“The thing that matters most for voters is how he has steered us through COVID. In a way it did him a favour because at the end of last year it looked like the government was drifting.”
The polls support this analysis. Having started the year with a shock Adelaide Advertiser poll showing Labor leading the Liberals 53-47, a second post-COVID poll conducted last week completely reversed that trend, with the Liberals ahead 53-47 and, most tellingly, an approval rating for Marshall of 68 per cent.
While Marshall is clearly winning plaudits for his handling of the health challenge of the pandemic, the biggest challenge yet will be the economic one. It is here where the opposition, led by the Right faction’s Peter Malinauskas, a protege of conservative powerbroker senator Don Farrell who came up through the Shoppies’ union, is planning to go after the government. Unlike Victoria, where the best thing Andrews has going for him is his seemingly unelectable opponents, Marshall does not have the luxury of a divided and poorly led opposition. Malinauskas took the shrewd decision early in the pandemic to muzzle his frontbenchers from taking daily potshots over the management of the pandemic at a time when every South Australian was anxious and willing the government to succeed. Malinauskas even spoken publicly how proud he was as a South Australian at the way the state responded to the health challenge of COVID.
“My focus is on jobs,” Malinauskas told The Australian. “The question families in SA will be asking themselves at the next election is which leader and which party will give them the greatest chance of finding a job.”
Now, Marshall is under increasing pressure from some of the very industry leaders he’s been blueing with to do more on the infrastructure front and get public money washing through the economy to underpin jobs.
In business and industry circles in SA, one of the most-read news stories of the past month was The Weekend Australian’s report about Josh Frydenberg wanting the states to do more on the stimulus front, with SA listed as the nation’s lowest contributor of gross state product to the cause. Even though jobs are being created in SA, they are not coming fast enough, with the state topping the nation’s unemployment rate last week for the second time running.
Marshall says he is happy to fight Labor on the economy, saying that despite the current jobless rate, the state had weathered the COVID storm better than anticipated. He also flagged continuing stimulus spending to support business activity, saying the government was making decisions every month as to which areas needed more support.
“The major focus coming out of the coronavirus will be jobs,” he said. “We had doomsday predictions four months ago of where we would be in SA. We are nowhere near that, we are just 7000 jobs down from where we were at the start of the year. It’s been a combination of looking at every single restriction and seeing what the effect of those restrictions would be and trying to minimise them, and coupling that with economic stimulus and support.”
One of the best-placed analysts of his performance is his former director of media and communications Daniel Gannon. He now heads the SA Property Council, where he had a major falling out with his old boss last year during the land tax battle.
“SA is arguably the nation’s safest and most resilient state, and the state government must receive its credit for this enviable position,” Gannon told The Australian.
“The Premier has maintained public faith in his ability to manage this crisis, and largely government-imposed restrictions have been seen as a partnership with the community. It’s hard to say that about other jurisdictions at the moment.”
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