Battle-tough new SA Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia sizes up Peter Malinauskas

New South Australian Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia knows a thing or two about uphill battles.

New SA Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia. Picture: Dean Martin

New South Australian Liberal leader Vincent Tarzia knows a thing or two about uphill battles.

At the 2018 state election, Mr Tarzia found himself pitted against the most popular politician in South Australia, beloved political maverick senator Nick Xenophon, who had quit Canberra in a high-profile return to state politics.

At the time Mr Xenophon was commanding one-quarter of the SA Senate vote in his own right and without party support. The polls didn’t just have Mr Xenophon winning Mr Tarzia’s seat of Hartley, they even had him as preferred premier ahead of Labor’s Jay Weatherill.

Mr Tarzia defied expectations and won the seat in a landslide. Now, elected SA Liberal leader on Monday following the sudden resignation of David Speirs, Mr Tarzia faces an equally gargantuan task, taking on another popular and charismatic leader in Premier Peter Malinauskas.

In his first outing as leader this week, Mr Tarzia said something probably no one else in SA believes: that at the 2026 state election the SA Liberals will defeat the Malinauskas government.

Mr Tarzia believes Mr Malinauskas is vulnerable in that his perceived strength is his weakness – his passionate advocacy for SA as a major events destination through AFL Gather Round and LIV Golf has come amid the neglect of public services.

He says that of these, none is bigger than health, with Mr Malinauskas’s central 2022 promise, that “Labor will fix the ramping crisis”, being a total failure to date with ambulance ramping at levels never seen during the one-term life of Steven Marshall’s Liberal government. In addition, the unwell are being further battered by the mass cancellation of elective surgeries and a GP shortage, and bulk-billing crisis forcing poorer people into emergency departments, further fuelling ramping.

“Everybody is beatable,” Mr Tarzia told The Weekend Australian. “This is a very bad government that is letting people down on a whole range of fronts.

“Health is a significant weakness in terms of their credibility and they know it. They’ve now had over two years. How can you trust a government whose sole focus was to fix ramping and it’s never been worse?

“Everyone loves a circus. A weekend of golf or a weekend of football is great, but what about the rest of the time? You are going to see some clear battle lines being drawn here.”

Mr Tarzia and Mr Malinauskas share some common history – both were head prefects at middle-class Adelaide Catholic schools (Rostrevor and Mercedes respectively), both hail from European migrant backgrounds, and both became leaders of their party at the age of 37. Both are married with young families.

Mr Tarzia also possesses a more combative quality than predecessors Mr Marshall and Mr Speirs, with the former becoming frustrated at business criticism over his management of Covid, and the latter accusing his own party of treachery in leaking details of his overseas trips amid persistent rumours he regarded opposition leadership as a thankless, unwinnable job.

Mr Tarzia, who spent much of this week denying public hints from Mr Speirs that he might have been one of the leakers, says he has no interest in dwelling on the past and will not let the Liberals slide back into the factional squabbling that’s seen them spend just four of the past 26 years in office in SA.

“I want to be a galvanising force,” Mr Tarzia told The Weekend Australian. “I want to bring the different parts of the broad church together. I have made it very clear to the pockets of the party that I’ll be doing everything possible to galvanise the team and to focus on what is important. We will not be looking inward but looking outward.”

Mr Tarzia says the Xenophon campaign in 2018 taught him that nothing was impossible in politics, whatever the predictions of outsiders or the pessimism of colleagues.

“That was a brutal, tough campaign,” he said. “His popularity was through the roof. But what that campaign taught me was that first and foremost you have to be a tireless advocate for your local community. It also provided an opportunity to develop resilience like no other challenge could have before me.

“Everything I have had to achieve politically I have had to work really hard for and fight for. There is no silver spoon here. I’m from a migrant family that came out after the Second World War. That toughness is a part of the journey. It allows you to appreciate opportunity and relate to people’s struggle.”

Mr Tarzia’s first week ended well with Mr Speirs abandoning his threat to quit the Liberals and serve from the cross bench, which would have made him the fifth Liberal MP to declare themselves an independent in the past two terms in SA.

The Liberals’ hopes of returning to power have been damaged by these defections and were made worse when the party lost Mr Marshall’s seat of Dunstan in March, the first time an opposition had lost one of its own seats to a government at a by-election in SA in 116 years.