Culture clash spells poll trouble for everyman PM

For many years, none more so than during the Howard era, South Australia punched above its weight politically.

Now there is a sense SA has gone from political powerhouse to political outhouse, and it is Scott Morrison who appears to be paying a political price.

The late 1990s and 2000s were a golden era for SA when John Howard had around his cabinet table the likes of Alexander Downer as foreign minister, Ian McLachlan and then Robert Hill in defence, Nick Minchin and Amanda Vanstone with major portfolios, and women such as Trish Worth and Chris Gallus as parliamentary secretaries. In the wings was Christopher Pyne, his unyielding ambitions rebuffed by Howard but coming to wield major influence as a senior minister and the Liberal’s leading moderate powerbroker in the Abbott and Turnbull governments.

All of these are now gone from politics. The most senior Liberal from SA is Finance Minister Simon Birmingham. The few other Liberals with any seniority, such as Anne Ruston, who added women’s safety to her social services portfolio in last month’s reshuffle, are largely unknown outside SA and not overly well known there.

The announcement by Liberal conservative Nicolle Flint that she would quit the toxic world of Canberra at the next election further reduces SA’s national profile. On figures published in this week’s Newspoll — with Labor’s vote up five points and the Liberal vote down six — Flint’s seat of Boothby would be a definite Labor gain under a 55-45 two-party-preferred split.

SA has long been a tough state for the conservatives, with a higher proportion of public servants in the workforce than the eastern states, few large rural towns to bolster conservative electorates and vast swaths of working-class suburbia to the north and south and in the Iron Triangle that habitually return Labor MPs. It has also long exhibited small-l liberal tendencies as an artsy town where a former premier in Don Dunstan famously wrote his own cookbook while in office and where the Australian Democrats were long regarded not as a comic throwback to the hippy era but a vital handbrake on the excesses of government.

Howard showed that SA is eminently winnable and holdable if you show it a bit of attention and love. Howard was a great federalist and would almost diarise the attention he demonstrated to those beyond the Sydney-Melbourne-Canberra triangle.

He did little things as PM that went unnoticed elsewhere but won him profile and plaudits in SA. He would summon the Adelaide Advertiser to his office every few months to offer his views on everything from the sanctity of the Adelaide Oval Test to the lamentable rise of anti-Christian blasphemy at the Adelaide Festival. He stared down the less pragmatic but ideologically pure free marketeers in his party to champion an Alice Springs to Darwin rail link. He even angered his own treasurer by rejecting the Productivity Commission’s car industry report and embracing a tariff pause, even if it only forestalled the industry’s inevitable demise.

Part of Morrison’s problem in engaging with South Australians is that you could not find a more Sydney bloke if you tried. Even the PM’s idea of a great weekend — having a Tooheys at Shark Park and cheering on Cronulla — is a sentence that reads like Swahili in SA where people wrongly refer to league as rugby and are too busy discussing new Clare Valley rieslings to sully their insides with something as plebeian as a middie of new.

Beyond that, his key issue is his federal team has lost clout and presence locally and nationally. And it’s happened in a state historically predisposed towards Labor, where despite losing power three years ago after 16 years of uninterrupted rule, the state opposition is almost level in the latest polls with the Marshall government.