Steven Marshall is taking care of business
Premier Steven Marshall is asking South Australians to back his plan.
In the aftermath of the 1993 State Bank collapse, the only busy place in South Australia was the Adelaide Airport departure lounge.
Steven Marshall was 25 years old when the bank went under. The direct financial hit of the bank exceeded $3bn. And while the economic pain was felt across the state, its impact was more personal for the South Australian middle class, taking the form of endless melancholy farewells for friends and relatives abandoning Adelaide for the east.
Marshall was one of those who stayed behind. After studying business at the old SA Institute of Technology (now UniSA), he took over the family furniture business, Marshall Furniture, helping his late father Tony transform it into a more modern and award-winning enterprise.
The same quiet indignation that drove Marshall from business and into politics in 2010 is the same indignation he now feels at the prospect of being driven out, despite the undeniable uptick in the state’s economic fortunes since he came to office.
Seriously behind according to The Weekend Australian’s Newspoll two weeks ago, both as a party and even as preferred premier, Marshall is urging a focus on the state’s economic transformation over the past four years, the Liberals’ first in government after he ended Labor’s marathon 16-year rule in 2018.
Marshall comes from humble but aspirational stock, born to parents Tony and Barbara in what in 1968 was the very working-class suburb of Semaphore. He attended Ethelton Primary School, mixing with the children of wharfies and barmaids from all over Port Adelaide, but his parents diligently saved to afford him a private education at the mid-priced Lutheran school Immanuel College near the beachside suburb of Glenelg.
Talking with The Weekend Australian over a couple of beers this week at The Cremorne Hotel in Unley, Marshall uses his childhood transition from a modest to middle-class life as a parable for his vision for South Australia.
“I don’t like to waste money,” Marshall says.
“I genuinely come from the school of hard knocks. Don’t get me wrong, I might have started at Ethelton Primary but I ended up going to Immanuel College because I had very supportive parents.
“But they were tough. And we never wasted a cent. We had to work the entire time. And that’s my approach to government. How can I attract more people into South Australia, how can I get more businesses to base themselves here?”
At a time when the word marketing has been rendered a pejorative by the Twitterati, Marshall is a reminder of the value of contacts, networks and face-time as a vehicle for making money and creating jobs.
His friends and business associates talk of a man who is driven to promote his state in the same way he was driven to promote his own businesses.
While running the family furniture business, Marshall befriended a man he describes as a “serial entrepreneur”, tech guru and trained rocket scientist Geoff Rohrsheim.
Among many interests, Rohrsheim’s principal business interest is Hatch Creations, headquartered at Marshall’s beloved dream factory Lot 14, a city haven for tech startups and advanced industry firms that has grown from the rubble of the old Royal Adelaide Hospital.
Rohrsheim befriended Marshall when the two were in their early 30s, and asked him to sit on the board of his then business Strategic Data Management.
“Like Steven I have always been determined to surround myself with good people and I wanted him on the board because I knew all about big data and what we were trying to achieve but nothing about marketing or business,” Rohrsheim says. “That’s where Steven came in.”
Rohrsheim says the growth of Lot 14 has been one of Marshall’s greatest achievements as Premier, helping to transform the state from its dependence on heavy manufacturing and agriculture into a diverse tech, space and cyber economy.
He puts much of this success down to one man for the work he does behind the scenes, with rare media access or public attention.
“He’s the one behind this, no one else,” Rohrsheim says. “He has wooed tenants here like you would not believe. It’s almost like he’s the tour guide – no, he is the tour guide. he takes people through Lot 14 and he convinces them to come here without any cash.
“It is changing the way SA is perceived now. The city has a real buzz about it. We used to be the butt of jokes. I’ve got to say, though, I was in Melbourne for work recently and there were tumbleweeds going down the main street. Things are humming along here. We are full at Lot 14, every day 1400 people call Lot 14 their place of work.
“I feel like the blokes must have felt at Holden in the 1950s, knowing what they built would sustain work for future generations.”
Marshall’s opponent in Labor leader Peter Malinauskas is running a family-focused campaign ahead of the March 19 poll. The young father of three was introduced at his campaign launch by his six-year-old daughter Sophie, is eating out with his family having counter meals in marginal seats, and famously jumped in the pool with his kids at his Adelaide Aquatic Centre announcement at the start of the campaign. In a bid by the Marshall team to correct any perception that family life has taken a back seat to politics, the Premier posed up this week with his mum, his two sisters and his daughter Georgie (son Charlie was interstate), showing family remains the centre of his life.
Long-term friend and pioneering food entrepreneur Rosalie Rotolo speaks with insight of how Marshall stepped up as a father when his marriage failed in the 2000s and brought up his kids as a single dad.
“When his wife left and remarried it was Steven who brought the kids up,” Rotolo says. “He really is an amazing dad. He really values those relationships, not just the special relationships with his kids but his friendships.”
Rotolo first met Marshall when they both won a Centennial Award for business achievements in the year 2000, she for the creation of the legendary Adelaide continental food business Botega Rotolo, him for his philanthropic work employing workers with Down syndrome and other disabilities to give them a trade.
“He does a lot of things like that under the radar,” Rotolo says.
“When he sold his business and I was running mine, we started having coffee together every week. He is a very modest guy and would ask me as many questions about his business as I would about his. The thing that really drove him into politics was just that huge sense of frustration at how Labor was not giving business opportunities during that long term of rule.”
Rotolo’s comments are not shared across the business sector in SA, especially in hospitality and tourism where lockdowns and restrictions battered their bottom line, and support for the Marshall government has cooled.
There was frustration in Liberal circles last week when the state’s peak business body Business SA and the Australian Hotels Association offered glowing praise to this newspaper for Peter Malinauskas, hailing him a good listener who was sympathetic to the needs of their industries.
In preparing this piece, there has been a rearguard action mounted against this sentiment by others in business, who are urging people to compare SA’s Covid record against the rest of Australia and the world, and to reflect on the new economic growth in SA.
Ray Borda is managing director of Macro Meats, the company he started in 1987 which is now the world’s largest exporter of kangaroo meat with 350 staff in SA and 1200 Australia-wide.
“Last year I increased our plant by 30 per cent and this year I am doubling it,” Borda tells The Weekend Australian.
“My biggest problem is getting people. We have got over 60 vacancies at the moment. So much of this has been driven by the help from the Marshall government through its trade missions, tapping into new markets we couldn’t access before and couldn’t access on our own.
“To anyone who is complaining about the management of the pandemic I would say compare SA to how we fared against the rest of the world. Sure, there are businesses that have done it tough, but there are others who are making more money than ever before.”
For Marshall, he just hopes that stories like these resonate enough with the voting mainstream to ensure he holds on next Saturday.
He is quietly philosophical to the point of being becalmed, ending the interview with a Joni Mitchell quote as he downs his second and final beer during this interview.
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone,” he says.
But he knows what he doesn’t want the state to go back to.
“For too long SA was punching below its weight. It was embarrassing itself. The State Bank collapse knocked the wind out of our confidence for a very long time. We were considered by the rest of the country as a backwater.
“Unfortunately, many South Australians joined in the bagging of their own state. I genuinely believe that the past four years have been a confirmation of our new confidence.”
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