SA Premier Steven Marshall, left, and SA Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas (Image: AAP/Matt Turner)

Few people know South Australian politics like Tom Richardson, senior political reporter at InDaily. Crikey’s Kishor Napier-Raman sat down with him to have a chat about the upcoming election on Saturday and what the implications might be for the Libs federally.

KNR: What’s the go down in South Australia? There’s a poll that suggested things aren’t looking too good for Steven Marshall. What do you think might happen on Saturday? 

TR: Look, it’s still too early. The latest poll, the YouGov poll in The Advertiser, puts Labor I think 12 points ahead at 56% statewide. It’s certainly looking to be in a very comfortable position, but government insiders are still saying they’re not getting that sense on the ground that people are waiting with cricket bats to give them a smashing.

I mean, they’ve only been in power four years and two of them have been dominated by COVID. Most of that time, the Marshall Liberal government was really riding high in terms of how it dealt with the pandemic. It closed borders early and for much of the past two years South Australia’s been largely COVID-free. Now that sort of advantage, I guess, disappeared a little when they opened the borders late last year and then, against health advice, didn’t close them again when the Omicron variant became a variant of concern.

That led to, I guess, a fairly tense couple of months with the escalating cases, hospitalisations and, now, dozens of fatalities linked to COVID, which we just haven’t had in South Australia before. The electoral impact of that can’t be overstated.

Labor’s approached the election with a very forward-looking agenda, pledging big spending commitments as opposed to the government, which is trying to project itself as sort of a dour economic manager, if you like; it’s making a virtue of not promising very much and [of running] a fairly minimalist agenda for its first term as well. And whether that is the issue that has failed to resonate, they certainly have lacked a theme through the campaign. Whereas Labor has really hammered the health crisis and ramping across the state hospitals, without making much of the fact that ramping still existed and that the health crisis still existed when they were in government.

KNR: Marshall’s a first-term incumbent during COVID, which has tended to benefit incumbents. Why else do you think he is in such trouble? Is it mainly because of how South Australia handled reopening its border? 

TR: No, that’s not it. It probably should be said that of every election in South Australia since 2006, the pre-poll predictions haven’t come to fruition. It’s not because the polls are wrong; it’s because they’re not echoed in individual seat results. Labor in 2010 lost the statewide vote but had swings to it in some of its marginal seats.

In 2014, it lost the statewide [count] fairly comfortably but still managed to hang on to the marginal seats it required to eventually form government with the help of an independent. So we do have a history of the statewide results not being echoed in the election result.

At this point, that’s all Steven Marshall can hang on to until polling day.

But I think if they do lose — certainly if they lose by the magnitude that the polls are suggesting, if they can’t hang on to government after being only in for one term after 16 years of Labor — the closest analogy for me would probably be the last Liberal government in Victoria, which when it did its post-mortem on why it bucked the trend of not getting at least two terms after breaking a run of Labor governments, it just didn’t seem to be busy enough, it didn’t seem to govern enough, I guess. 

I think that’s something that possibly the state Liberals in South Australia will ask themselves if they are doing a post-mortem on where it went wrong. But they did spend the first two years in office kind of getting their feet under the desk. Then the pandemic came along, which gave them a jammed agenda … But probably after four years people are starting to ask, what have you done and what are you promising to do? And they’re almost deliberately not promising to do very much at all. 

KNR: Almost a bit like the federal Coalition government. You mentioned health, but what else has become a big issue during this campaign that might be swaying voters or weighing on their minds ahead of Saturday?

TR: Health has kind of blacked out the sun in terms of this campaign. Even now in the final week where the government’s trying to move things on to the economic management and the like, we’ve had deaths of people waiting for ambulances that didn’t arrive on time and that just keeps bringing it back to that theme.

Labor’s been very focused in terms of health, whereas the government has jumped around from issue to issue — its campaign has lacked a narrative, I guess, other than, things were kind of going all right and you can’t trust Labor.

One attack line is that Peter Malinauskas, the Labor leader, lacks experience as premier. By the same token, they’re trying to hammer him for his record in government as health minister. So that’s two lines of attack. I mean, maybe a bit of a nuanced point to make, but they’re not particularly compatible. 

KNR: Peter Malinauskas could be premier in a week or so. What do we know about him? What’s interesting about him? 

TR: Before he entered Parliament the most noteworthy thing was that he became the state secretary of the union that effectively runs the dominant faction of the South Australian Labor Party at a very young age, I think in his twenties. Not very long after that he was one of three people … to go into Mike Rann’s office and tell him the party had decided his time as premier was up. 

Malinauskas been a major player in the ALP factions for a very long time for someone so young, and he was elevated to that very key position at a very young age by his predecessor, Don Farrell, who is a long-time power player in South Australian politics.

KNR: Looking ahead, if Labor is able to win government in South Australia, do you think that has any messages for the federal Liberal government for the May election?

TR: They’d certainly be concerned about it. They’d be concerned already, looking at the poll numbers here in South Australia. There aren’t too many seats of particular interest for them, but really there is that one key seat of Boothby that is held by a very small margin. Even though there’s only one seat, it was a decisive seat at the last election. And they’ll be recognising that they’re going to struggle to hang on to that if those numbers translate into the federal poll, particularly since it doesn’t have any incumbent Liberal MP with Nicolle Flint having left.

The interview was edited for length and clarity.