There is just one federal seat seriously in play in South Australia at the looming May election, but the Prime Minister and leaders of the two biggest states will be watching Mr Marshall’s attempts to win a second term, amid worrying signs for the Liberal Party of a Covid-related swing against the incumbent.
To an outsider, South Australia – and Adelaide in particular – has rarely had it better as it waltzes into the month they call Mad March after a mostly successful campaign (by US and European standards) against the coronavirus, but one that has taxed the community after it opened to the rest of Australia late last year.
Things look good in the southern capital.
The globally significant Adelaide Festival is smothering the city, the fringe events are taking up precious parkland space once used for the Formula One Grand Prix, the AFL obsession is about to be sated with the season’s start and there are tentative signs of an intoxicating Indian summer enveloping the city’s plains and hills.
Yet after only one term, the Liberal Party is nervously watching as Mr Marshall navigates an increasingly grumpy electorate after two years of pandemic fears and restrictions, a dynamic that is starting to hit leaders across the country and may well contribute significantly to the death of the Morrison government.
Liberal elder Grahame Morris, a former South Australian party director and adviser to John Howard, says during the first phase of the crisis in 2020, voters were generally prepared to give leaders “a big tick” but as time has passed, decision-making has been more heavily scrutinised.
“And that has tended to taint people’s reactions to governments a little,” he said. “The electorate has got a bit sick of it.”
Corporate and former senior Victorian and South Australian Liberal adviser Ian Smith agrees that people are stressed and tired because of the pandemic.
“Incumbency in Covid time is a different proposition to what it was a year ago. It is most probably more difficult to govern now as a result, as the management of the virus is not a binary proposition,” he said.
“The South Australian election will, in one sense, be an insight to voters’ minds about how we live with Covid as opposed to how we defeat it.”
South Australian Labor MP Leon Bignell is considered one of the nation’s best grassroots campaigners, having held his now ultra-marginal outer-suburban/rural seat of Mawson since 2006 in the face of desperate Liberal and minor party challenges and a hostile redistribution.
Mr Bignell’s silver 4WD is ubiquitous from McLaren Vale in Adelaide’s south to Kangaroo Island and he has noted that stress is common because of the virus, the impact of restrictions on some business has been harsh and there is deep unhappiness about the way the state reopened in November.
“There is huge anxiety around the electorate. It’s real anxiety. It’s been like being in an 800m race and within 10m of the finish line the Premier goes out and says you’ve all got to run another lap,” he says. “People are looking for hope, not more of the same.”
Adelaide University politics professor Clement Macintyre said the electoral climate had shifted in South Australia over the past year.
“Everyone sort of thought we had dodged a bullet,” he said, but confronted with the “terrible dilemma” of whether to open, Mr Marshall had effectively reinvigorated health as an issue.
“I’m glad it wasn’t me making that decision,” Professor Macintyre said. “Health has been a major issue for a long time.”
Enter Labor leader Peter Malinauskas, a 41-year-old walking torso who is still playing Australian football and has benefited in opinion polls from a less politically confrontational approach to the virus in 2020 and 2021.
By refusing to build a $662m entertainment arena as promised by the government, he has instead chosen to funnel that promised cash into health.
After two years of a fairly low-key Marshall, who ceded much of the pandemic media to a health boffin and the police chief, there is a possibility of something entirely different.
Ironically, while Malinauskas struggled for airtime during the pandemic, this might be exactly what people wanted, even if Mr Marshall had no choice but to run the state.
A senior federal Liberal said there were grave concerns that the Premier would lose in large part because of latent virus anger. “I think we are f--ked,” the MP said.
Professor Macintyre is more eloquent and less certain of the outcome but notes that a uniform 2 per cent swing would give Labor four extra seats in the 47-seat parliament, with the possibility of gaining support from Labor-leaning independent Frances Bedford in the seat of Florey.
This could deliver government, assuming no Labor losses.
The Liberal Party hopes a relatively strong economy and fear of an untested leader will hold back the apparent desire for something – anything – new.
Morrison will be watching. Not only to see whether the inner Adelaide federal Liberal seat of Boothby (1.4 per cent) can be held, but to learn whether the SA result will prove to be a referendum on incumbency.
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