Inside the failed Liberal plot to replace Vincent Tarzia with Ashton Hurn | Paul Starick

The runaway train of Liberal leadership turmoil is, once again, running the party right off the track, writes Paul Starick.

The putative putsch to destabilise Vincent Tarzia has been a disorganised, half-hearted coup that has further wrecked the Liberals and is poised to peter out to nothing.

The thus-far botched push is neatly described in Night of the Long Knives by AC/DC, septuagenarians who will blast Adelaide on Sunday night with more force and conviction than the Liberal rebels mounted in recent days.

“Who’s your leader? Who’s your man? Who will help you fill your hand? Who’s your friend and who’s your foe? Who’s your Judas? You don’t know,” the legendary rockers sang on the track from 1981’s For Those About To Rock album.

At risk of torturing the AC/DC theme, numerous South Australian Liberals recently have done some dirty deeds, with the aim of ousting Mr Tarzia for Ashton Hurn, but this has been a half-hearted push mounted on the cheap.

AC/DC’s Brian Johnson (left) and Angus Young peform at Sydney’s Accor Stadium on November 21, during their Power Up tour. Picture Thomas Lisson

In fact, it’s the most haphazard attempt at unseating a leader I can remember. It even exceeds the failed 2003 push to replace Simon Crean as federal Labor leader with Kim Beazley, that devastatingly resulted in Mark Latham becoming the alternative prime minister.

Ms Hurn, a first-term MP who has successfully attacked the government’s failed promise to fix the ambulance ramping crisis, is reluctant to take the leadership just months ahead of next March’s state election.

But some Liberals took until the final sitting week of state parliament, which rose on Thursday ahead of the election, to realise they faced annihilation.

This was despite The Advertiser in June publishing a YouGov poll showing Premier Peter Malinauskas storming towards a historic election landslide that would consign his Liberal rivals to a future-threatening two seats.

The Liberal lemmings’ sudden epiphany was triggered by The Advertiser on Tuesday exclusively revealing shadow cabinet had been briefed on Monday night by state director Alexander Hyde about disastrous internal polling.

Ironically, this internal polling showed a slight improvement in primary support from the YouGov poll, from 21 per cent to the high 20s.

But the backdrop was two Liberal women, with striking similarities to Ms Hurn, the previous week being installed as state leader in two well-organised coups, in New South Wales and Victoria.

Opposition Leader Vincent Tarzia and Liberal health spokeswoman Ashton Hurn appear together in a show of unity at a press conference on Wednesday. Picture: Russell Millard.

Both Ms Hurn, 34, and new Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson, 35, were elected in 2022, have one-year-old sons, and happen to be blonde.

Both Ms Hurn and new NSW Opposition Leader Kellie Sloane, 52, grew up in the Barossa Valley and attended Nuriootpa High School.

The plotters wanted to seize on these similarities and parliament’s final sitting week to destabilise Mr Tarzia and create overwhelming momentum to install Ms Hurn.

Thus far, they have failed spectacularly. If they are to move next week, as several privately have claimed to The Advertiser, this will require significantly more planning, strategy, courage, ruthlessness and clever execution.

At the moment, the rebels have further entrenched the Liberals’ reputation as the least successful performers of any major party in any of Australia’s nine jurisdictions – an unwanted tag handed to them in May by University of Adelaide emeritus professor in politics Clement Macintyre.

As The Advertiser editorial observed on Friday, if you can’t successfully launch a coup against your leader, then you probably can’t run the state.

Senior Liberal conservatives have recognised this and blamed their rival moderates, who control the party room numbers, for the bungled push to install Ms Hurn, a moderate.

“There’s no interest in changing the leadership and this continued speculation is just harming the party and our cause,” one senior conservative said on Thursday afternoon.

Exactly. Mr Tarzia has made a reasonable fist of a tough job since taking over last August from the lamentable David Speirs.

Whatever the outcome of the latest Liberal leadership turmoil, the party has been driven further down the electoral highway to hell.

Originally published as Inside the failed Liberal plot to replace Vincent Tarzia with Ashton Hurn | Paul Starick