Is Party Pete more interested in AFL than fixing ambulance ramping?

Five days out from the Dunstan by-election, Peter Malinauskas revealed every exciting detail of the AFL’s Gather Round in Adelaide. But what about the ambulance ramping crisis?

A relaxed Peter Malinauskas shares a joke with the Labor Candidate for Dunstan, Cressida O'Hanlon, on Friday. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Kelly Barnes

It was a political stunt almost admirable in its audacity. Five days out from the by-election in the South Australian state seat of Dunstan, Peter Malinauskas travelled to its heart at Norwood Oval this week to reveal every exciting detail of how the AFL’s Gather Round will transform Adelaide’s inner east into party central.

Flanked by AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon, Malinauskas declared SA’s second AFL Gather Round would be a true “festival of footy” showcasing the best of the state’s food and wine culture, with the seismic added news that it would even feature a free concert by cult indie rockers The Temper Trap.

Footy-mad Malinauskas has handed AFL House an estimated $60m to $80m in public money to secure the AFL Gather Round for four years, where all nine AFL games are now played in Adelaide and regional SA over the weekend after Easter.

SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, right, with AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon in Norwood this week. Picture: Supplied

The coveted event, which the NSW government also lobbied to secure, has injected millions of dollars into SA’s hospitality economy, with many in business thrilled with the post-Covid injection of life and spending in a city many Australians had never got around to visiting.

Malinauskas and his comparatively low-taxing, low-spending Treasurer Stephen Mullighan argue events such as the Gather Round deliver serious return on investment, changing perceptions of a state where the most recent ABS data showed SA had the ­nation’s second-fastest-growing economy behind the ACT.

For the SA Liberals, Malinauskas’ obsession with the Gather Round is symptomatic of wrong priorities from the man they seek to paint as “Party Pete”.

SA might be a great place to live. Thanks to the Gather Round, LIV Golf and the return of the V8 Supercars, it’s a great place to watch sport and party. But it’s not always a great place to go to hospital, unless your idea of “going to hospital” means waiting indefinitely in the back of an idling ambulance due to a shortage of beds.

Fixing ambulance ramping was the No.1 promise by Malinauskas ahead of his unfancied election win in 2022, rendering the Liberals’ Steven Marshall a one-term premier amid growing public division over his reopening of state borders in the dying days of the pandemic.

It is Marshall’s belated exit from politics that has forced Saturday’s by-election in the ex-premier’s seat of Dunstan. Thanks to the Liberals’ woeful statewide performance in 2022, Dunstan went from being a safe Liberal seat to one the party holds by an ultra-slim margin of just 260 votes.

The by-election looms as the first official test of the Malinauskas government. There have been no opinion polls or significant by-elections to gauge voter sentiment since 2022, and while many South Australians feel excitement and pride at the new spark and energy the place now has, others want a steelier focus on bread-and-butter issues over bread and circuses.

For this reason, Opposition Leader David Speirs has declared that Saturday’s poll should be about one thing and one thing only – a referendum on ramping.

Labor’s 2022 promise was wholly clear cut, with every second telegraph poll in suburban Adelaide affixed with posters reading “Labor will fix the ramping crisis” and bearing a smiling photo of Malinauskas.

Two years on and the reverse has occurred, with ambulance ramping spiralling to levels never recorded during the life of the Marshall government as Labor struggles to get more medical staff and more beds into the public ­hospital system.

But even with Labor struggling to deliver on its grandiose health promise, the biggest political danger from Saturday’s by-election is all on the Liberal side.

Labor is sitting pretty thanks to its 2022 triumph, holding 27 of the state’s 47 seats, another six held by independents, four of them former Liberals holding traditional conservative rural and regional seats.

The most that can be said about the Dunstan result for Labor will be that it is indicative of performance and that they need to lift their game. Any significant swing against the government will show that the voters are sending Malinauskas a message over his failure to deliver on public health reform.

SA Opposition Leader David Speirs. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Morgan Sette

But for Speirs, a poor result could be a matter of political life or death. For all his energy and his noble attempts to prosecute the government over core policy issues, Speirs exudes the vibe of the doomed seatwarmer who was tapped on the shoulder to nurse the party through another of its lowest ebbs. There is already talk that eastern suburbs MP Vincent Tarzia could challenge, albeit with no significant numerical support in the partyroom. In the medium term, many regard first-term MP Ashton Hurn as a strong candidate for leader, particularly due to the tenacious job she’s done as shadow health minister pursuing Labor over its ramping promise. Hurn, who is about to have her first child, has no appetite for such talk and if she does hold ambitions they are currently on hold.

Defeat for the Liberals will trigger a bitter new round of infighting in a party that has patented the art of political self-harm.

Tensions are already high within the SA Liberal division after last weekend’s stupidly timed Senate preselection where conservative Alex Antic rolled moderate-backed Anne Ruston, SA’s most senior female Liberal, for the No.1 Senate spot.

The fight was essentially over nothing – both the No1. and No.2 Senate spots are winnable – but it reflected the enmity between the party’s surging conservative membership base after four years of moderate-dominated leadership under Marshall.

The enmity between these groups is such that calls for the ballot to be delayed until after the Dunstan by-election were ignored, so itching for a brawl were some within the party.

Should Dunstan fall to Labor, some Liberals will be asking whether the gender dimension to Ruston’s defeat and the generally dispiriting spectacle of fresh factional brawling had turned off ­voters in this largely affluent, middle class seat.

Dunstan – named of course after Don, the pink shorted, safari-suited ex-premier who held it when he led SA through the swinging 70s – is a seat that has changed hands a multitude of times in the past 20 years.

It was also the same place where the Greens’ vote surged to unforeseen levels at the last federal election. As with the collapse of the Greens’ vote at the last month’s Dunkley by-election in Victoria, another poor showing in Dunstan will suggest the Greens’ vote is reducing and normalising as the memories of the Morrison era recede for Australia’s swinging small-l liberal voters.

At the local level, the campaign has been nothing more than a tedious slanging match between Labor’s Cressida O’Hanlon, whom the Liberals have targeted over her links to her husband’s business and alleged favours from government, and the Liberals’ Anna Finizio, whom Labor has attacked over her directorship of a failed family company, and the revelation that only a few years ago she applied for a policy adviser’s role with Labor Attorney-General Kyam Maher.

None of this political game-playing has resonated with voters in Dunstan, or indeed anywhere around the state.

The bigger picture is the result will show whether Party Pete needs to get back to his day job, or whether a fresh circle of hell has opened for David Speirs and the SA Liberal Party, which has now been in opposition in the state for 18 of the past 22 years.