In North Adelaide, as the street sweepers wind up their morning clean, Peter Malinauskas is fresh from his “hump day” park run around the River Torrens.
The 41-year-old Labor leader – who looks as if he has barely broken a sweat – has been inviting locals to join him for a weekly 6am jog as he casts himself as the man “running for the future” at Saturday’s South Australian election.
“We invite anyone from South Australia to come for a run and this morning I was joined by a whole bunch of young Libs, so that’s part of the political discourse,” Malinauskas says with an eye-roll.
“But I enjoy it. It’s more to clear the head than anything else.”
“Mali”, as he is known at his footy club and in political circles, has become the focus of Labor’s election campaign, the fresh face of the party that until 2018 had been in government for 16 years.
A golden boy of the Shoppies union for which he was state secretary, Malinauskas made a name for himself in state politics after being one of a small group who tapped Mike Rann in 2011 to inform him his time as premier was up. He was just 30 years old.
Commentators are near-united that Malinauskas is peaking at just the right time – poised to do what six months ago was almost unthinkable – ending Steven Marshall’s Liberal government after just one term.
Canberra will be watching closely. The state poll is shaping as the first test of incumbency since the arrival of Omicron, a barometer for the federal campaign that will follow in May.
Six months ago the state political landscape looked very different. South Australia was locked in the daily news cycle of Covid case numbers, and press conferences fronted by the chief health officer, Nicola Spurrier, (“Saint Nicola” as she became known) and the police commissioner, Grant Stevens, guided every turn.
Compared to the eastern states, South Australia remained relatively untouched by the pandemic: it had endured just one six-day lockdown, and had managed to keep a lid on community transmission with light-touch restrictions.
Marshall’s Covid team was widely commended for its handling of the Covid crisis, and Malinauskas chose a bipartisan approach.
“The judgment that I made early, at the beginning of Covid was that I said I was going to be a constructive opposition leader, and so this was an important opportunity to demonstrate I was serious about it,” Malinauskas says.
“So we backed the government all the way, (but) the problem for that for us politically – which is no one else’s problem apart from my own – is that it relegated us to non existence.”
Assuring South Australians that the state was ready to reopen, Marshall decided to forge ahead and reopen the border on 23 November. It was the day “to introduce Covid into SA”, said the police commissioner. This, unlike the decisions that came before it, was one squarely owned by the premier.
The next day South African health authorities reported the Omicron variant to the World Health Organization.
Quickly overwhelmed by the virus as the border reopened, promised Christmas freedoms didn’t arrive. Just as some families were reunited, others became divided by quarantine and isolation rules. Case numbers exploded and testing sites were stretched.
Amid what Malinauskas describes as the ensuing “calamity” over summer, Labor’s message on health policy reform targeting the state’s overwhelmed health system struck a chord.
Suddenly, Labor was back in the hunt.
Cutting through
In a buzzing cafe in Adelaide’s city centre, perched over coffee, Marshall is adamant the decision to open up in November was the right one.
“I stand by that decision 100%,” Marshall says.
“That was in line with the best health advice since day one. We’ve listened to the experts, we’ve listened to evidence we haven’t told people to drink bleach, and we’ve actually kept our state safe and at the same time, our economy strong.”
“We’ve had the fewest days of lockdown of any jurisdiction in the country, we have had our kids at school and people at work. And yes, it’s been tough. There have been plenty of people that have suffered because of it. They’ve had to make sacrifices but those individual sacrifices, those collective sacrifices are exactly and precisely what’s kept our state safe.”
Last Saturday, just a week before the election, most of the state’s restrictions were lifted: singing and dancing were back; the local daily paper, The Advertiser, heralded it was “time to party like it’s 2019”.
Marshall is hoping his government will get credit for its pandemic management, and is campaigning on the risk the change back to Labor would pose as the state embarks on recovery.
The Liberals released their costings early on Monday to zero in on Labor’s $3bn in new promises, warning that voters will pay more if Malinauskas is successful. The party’s costings for a promised new hydrogen plant have also come under fire, with the Grattan Institute suggesting the price tag to liquefy hydrogen would be “in the low hundreds of millions of dollars”, not $31m as Labor suggests.
“This election is about a stronger economy,” Marshall says.
“When we came to government, South Australia was considered as a backwater. I think that now South Australia has a spring in its step. I think people are proud to be South Australian. I do not think that existed under 16 years of Labor (when) each and every year we saw a mass exodus of major companies, capital, and most importantly, young people out of South Australia.”
“That has been completely reversed in just four years and that’s why we need to have a continuation of a Liberal government to maintain that momentum, to build on that momentum and to create new and exciting opportunities for the next generation.”
He points to SA having the fastest growing economy in the nation “for the first time ever”, and record exports and investment that would be threatened by a Labor government “throwing money around like confetti”.
Marshall’s problem, however, is people don’t appear to be listening.
Healthy debate
As much as the Liberals want the election to be about the economy, at a pre-polling booth in Daw Park, in the key marginal seat of Elder, dozens of campaign posters make clear that the big issue at next weekend’s poll is health.
Labor has seized on a the perennial problem of ambulances ramping outside major hospitals to pledge to “fix the ramping crisis”, while defensive Liberal campaign material reminds people that Labor made cuts to the health system while it was in office and while Malinauskas was health minister.
Labor’s candidate for Elder, Nadia Clancy, is well versed on the ramping statistics as a slow trickle of voters comes into the uniting church hall to cast an early ballot.
“Ambulance response times have gone down – they were 85% on time back in 2017 2018 under Labor, for the life threatening ones, and now that response time for the first week of January is 33%. That’s significant.
“We want to increase hospital beds, increase nurses, doctors and also ambulance officers and ambulances, because we know that it’s not one thing that you change to fix it.”
The Liberal MP, Carolyn Power, known in Adelaide for being targeted by SA Labor for her former surname “Habib”, says the campaign is “just the usual scaremongering tactics”.
“The work that we’re doing on health is incredible. We’re upgrading every suburban hospital, Flinders medical centre has almost doubled in capacity, and we are reactivating the Repat (hospital).”
“So I think it’s just your usual opposition. They never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
Ramping is a decade-old issue in South Australia, but has worsened in recent years due to complex issues in the health system that lead to “bed block” and patients being treated in “ramping” ambulances waiting for admission.
The most recent data from SA Health shows an improvement since October last year when ramping peaked at almost 3000 hours, but January’s figure of 1,522 hours is still more than double the 653 hours waiting to offload patients in 2018.
Posters of Malinauskas plastered across Adelaide’s suburbs promise to “fix the ramping crisis”, while a union campaign has posters of Marshall as the face of a cigarette packet “hazardous to your health” warning.
The Ambulance Employees Association SA has tapped into the services of advertising guru Dee Madigan, running a stunningly effective campaign that has pitted the state’s paramedics against the government.
SA ambulances have for two years being cruising Adelaide’s streets with “chalked” messages of protest on them saying “lives are at risk” under Marshall.
On Tuesday, the ambulance union claimed that two people had died on Monday night waiting for delayed ambulances to arrive.
Hammering health as its priority on every day of the campaign, SA Labor has also promised to ditch the Liberals proposed new $662m Riverbank arena, which it derides as a “basketball stadium”, and divert the funds into health.
Political observers on both sides suggest Marshall is facing a “Mediscare” moment. The premier, who may have a positive story to tell about the investment being drawn into South Australia, is being overwhelmed by the campaign on health.
Marshall’s enthusiasm for the state’s burgeoning space and tech industries is reminiscent of Malcolm Turnbull’s “jobs and growth” platform while he was being hammered relentlessly on Medicare before the 2016 federal election.
Labor’s promise to fix ramping is caveated. The pledge is to reduce ambulance response times back to 2018 levels by the end of the next four-year term.
“It won’t happen overnight,” he says.
“We want to get ramping down to such a level that ambulances start rolling up on time, and we have said that will take us a full term to achieve.”
Front running
Malinauskas’s weekly park runs promoted across social media are part of a slick campaign that includes shared Spotify playlists (featuring tracks that spell out a campaign slogan), a topless photo opportunity that earned him the moniker “commander in beef”, and populist policies such as bringing back the V8 supercar race to the city and tearing up a contract with a property developer to allow for a new Adelaide Crows headquarters. Labor has $3bn in new spending promises, including the $590m hydrogen plant, which have become the target of a Liberal scare campaign.
The Liberals are finding it hard to blight Malinauskas, who is a centrist, a Catholic, and an Adelaide University football club veteran who has won support from within Adelaide’s business community. He is also eminently likable.
SA Labor under campaign director Reggie Martin has a reputation for being among the best marginal seat campaigners in the country, regularly pushing the boundaries of acceptable practice to win. It once dressed volunteers up in Family First t-shirts to try to snare back some votes. Its Habib flyer was credited with sandbagging Elder in 2014. It knows how to win.
By contrast, the Liberal party in SA are known for their ability to lose.
The Liberals have spent most of the past 50 years in the political wilderness, winning four of the 15 elections held in the state since the end of Sir Tom Playford’s near-30 year reign in 1965.
They are the least successful major political party of any state or territory.
Beset by bitter internal disputes between moderates and conservatives, the Liberals famously returned to a minority government just one term after its landslide victory at the 1993 state bank election.
Marshall, who was credited for successfully managing internal divisions to get into government, has now lost the support of much of his right flank.
Private members’ bills on abortion and voluntary euthanasia that were backed by prominent moderates, including Marshall, have angered conservatives, with SA federal senator Alex Antic decrying the “egregious agenda of social policy reform” in state parliament.
Marshall froze out conservatives while standing by his moderate deputy Vickie Chapman, who was finally stood aside after a conflict of interest saga that dragged on for months.
Three conservative Liberal MPs have joined the crossbench – one over a state Icac probe into expense fraud, another who was acquitted of assault charges but found to be a “drunken pest”, and a third, Dan Cregan who defected and did a deal with Labor to assume the role of speaker.
The disarray triggered by Cregan’s defection led Marshall to concede last year that while he had been focused on the pandemic, “maybe I should have spent more time on the politics”.
But Marshall rejects criticism that he has failed to maintain party unity, saying he is the longest serving leader of the party since Thomas Playford, while stressing he intends to “create a better balance going forward” with conservatives in his cabinet.
Voters, he believes, are more interested in outcomes than the political internals.
“I think people are over politics, they want actual outcomes for themselves and for their families. I think South Australians know they’ve got lower costs, they’ve got a stronger economy and most importantly, they now have a state pride that just didn’t exist before.”
“Labor are just political opportunists at every single turn and that has never served South Australia well.”
Marshall also downplayed suggestions that Scott Morrison’s unpopularity could harm his chances, saying the state had an “excellent relationship” with the federal government that had served SA well.
“We haven’t had that combative position that the previous state Labor government had, but that did not deliver for South Australia. Maybe it was good for them electorally, who knows, but it was certainly not good for South Australia.”
Poll position
The pendulum for the state’s parliament shows Labor – theoretically – has a straightforward path to victory. It needs a 2% swing to pick up the four seats needed to form a minority government with a Labor-aligned independent. If the only published Newspoll is correct, Labor is a shoo-in with a 5% swing.
Marshall is already in minority, holding just 22 seats in the state’s 47 seat house of assembly. Labor holds 19 seats. There are six independents.
But despite momentum clearly with Malinauskas in the run-up to the poll, confident predictions are few and far between given South Australia’s propensity to keep politics weird.
At the last election, Marshall scraped into power amid a three-horse contest with Nick Xenophon despite expectations of a hung parliament. In 2014 Jay Weatherill clinched victory with a two-party preferred vote of just 47% after a legendary pizza negotiation led to his minority government. A former leader of the state Liberals later defected to sit at Weatherill’s cabinet table, shoring up Labor’s numbers.
In 2010, Labor again defied expectations against an ascendant Isobel Redmond and maintained majority government, losing just two seats despite suffering an 8.4% swing against it.
And going back a decade, Rann formed minority government in 2002 with a former Liberal turned speaker, Peter Lewis, and later boasted a Nationals MP as a Labor water minister.
Former Liberal MPs running as independents have indicated they are prepared to negotiate, but given the state’s history, no one is ruling out one of the party’s defectors backing Labor.
Marshall suggests this election will be an “arm wrestle”, but insists he can still win a majority.
“People underestimated the Liberal party at the last election, people said there was no way we could form government, and three weeks out we were coming third in the polls,” he says.
“Elections are always tight in South Australia. I mean everybody would like to be 60- 40% up a week from election day, but it very rarely happens in South Australia. This is no different. It’s going to go down to the wire.”
Meanwhile, Malinauskas is talking down any suggestion of a landslide, insisting his task to take back the treasury benches after just four years in opposition is “substantial”.
“I think politicians who try to make predictions these days are foolish. I mean, who has predicted an election outcome correctly in the last decade?”
“What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to knock off a first term government, we’re trying to knock off a pandemic premier. It’s without precedent.
“On paper, the pendulum says our task is difficult, but here’s what we have got going for us: We’ve done the policy work, we genuinely have a vision for the future, my team is united, we’re hungry, and we actually like each other’s company, which is more than the other mob can say.
“And that gives us every shot.”
