Political bastardry revives playbook for disaster in South Australia
Steven Marshall started the day by swallowing a fly. After that, things just got worse as rogue former Liberal MPs plotted humiliation of a different kind.
Steven Marshall started the day on Tuesday by swallowing a fly. After that, things just got worse.
As the stray insect lobbed in the SA Premier’s gob mid-sentence at a morning press conference on the vaccination rollout, a group of rogue former Liberal MPs was plotting humiliation of a different kind.
Late on Tuesday night, in an act of factionally inspired bastardry reminiscent of the nonsense that kept the SA Liberals out of office for 16 of the past 20 years, rebel conservatives sided with Labor to oust Speaker Josh Teague and replace him with a newly minted independent, Liberal turncoat Dan Cregan.
This midnight coup was one of several concerted acts of guerrilla warfare at North Terrace on Tuesday where former Liberal conservatives also targeted their enemies in the moderate faction by trying to kill their queen.
The same grouping of MPs sided with Labor to establish a conflict of interest inquiry into Attorney-General Vickie Chapman, a lifelong ally and friend of SA moderates such as Christopher Pyne and Amanda Vanstone, over her blocking of a proposed sea port on Kangaroo Island, where she has family links and property interests.
Marshall, who was losing his voice as a result of a coughing attack after his encounter with the fly, endured an entire day in parliament not knowing where the bombs were going to go off next.
For a man who should be coasting to an easy second term as he seeks re-election on March 19 next year, the optics of all this — quite validly — were that he had lost control of his party and lost control of the parliament.
The latter point is increasingly true. Since the defection of Cregan to the crossbench, the government now holds just 22 of the 47 lower house seats and relies on the support of four former Liberal independents to govern.
Other Liberal MPs have floated the prospect of quitting the party, including South East MP Nick McBride, who in September canvassed electors about whether to walk in protest at the city-centric management of Covid.
The internal political problems for Marshall are twofold. There are dark mutterings from his detractors about his aloofness, as if the former businessman is the SA version of Malcolm Turnbull in acting more like a chief executive than an inclusive leader.
There is ideological anger from the party’s Right over moderate policy domination on issues such as euthanasia and abortion; the ham-fisted ostracising of Christian conservative members; and, most of all, Marshall’s hands-off pandemic management that has seen businesses and border towns smashed by bureaucratic decree in a state where just four people have died from Covid.
In a moment of candour — albeit one for which he had no credible alternative — Marshall admitted the current situation looked like a political crisis. “Certainly it was a very extraordinary scene last night the likes of which I haven’t seen in my 12 years of parliament,” he said on Wednesday.
Marshall also conceded that as a relative newcomer to politics from a business background and with the distractions of Covid, he hadn’t invested enough time working with his MPs.
“Maybe I should have worked more on the politics,” he said.
The saving grace for the Premier is that the circumstances and motivation for Cregan’s exit now look questionable as a result of his elevation to the Speaker’s job.
In the space of 24 hours, Cregan went from looking like SA’s Ted Mack, the revered NSW independent who quit politics early to avoid receiving a pension, to more like Mal Colston, who quit the ALP in 1996 to secure the deputy Senate presidency.
Cregan’s reasons for quitting the Liberal Party were to champion the Adelaide Hills towns in his seat of Kavel, where infrastructure has failed to keep pace with growth and locals are crying out for a new hospital and railway line.
If it was meant to be all about them, on Tuesday night it looked like it was more about him, with his first act as an independent being to secure himself a $150,000 pay rise and a chauffeur-driven limousine, all under the guise of suddenly championing the need for an independent Speaker.
This will form the Liberal attack as they seek to destroy Cregan at the polls next year, with the first salvo being fired by the Premier with this reasonable question on Wednesday: “In what way were the people of the Adelaide Hills advantaged by Dan Cregan getting a big pay bump, a car, a driver, a big office and extraordinary new powers?”
The suspicions around Cregan’s motivations only deepened on Wednesday when in question time he failed three times to answer Liberal questions about whether he had discussed his possible elevation to the speakership with anyone in the Labor Party prior to declaring himself an independent.
Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas is publicly bemoaning the impact all this chaos is having on the state, while his MPs hold secret talks with disgruntled former Liberals and move parliamentary motions aimed at maximising the chaos.
The scary thing for Marshall is that in 2002 it was Mike Rann’s Labor government that was elected off the back of an alliance with former Liberal Peter Lewis, who was installed as an independent Speaker as part of the deal.
There is a recurring model in South Australia for extended Labor rule.
It is predicated on the chaos that saw Don Dunstan govern for nine years after Liberal premier Steele Hall split to form the Liberal Movement in the early 1970s, and Mike Rann and Jay Weatherill govern for 16 years after the internecine rivalry that marked the Dean Brown/John Olsen era through the 1990s.
This is the playbook — and yet again, it looks like the SA Liberals cannot stop reading it.
