South Australia January to June 2024

The first half of 2024 in South Australia marked the midway point in the current State election cycle. The Malinauskas government had been elected in March 2022, defeating the Liberal government headed by Premier Steven Marshall. Under the State's 4-year fixed-term electoral provisions, the next election will be held in March 2026.

In just two years, Peter Malinauskas has become the longest-serving current Australian Premier. While that is mainly a reflection on an extraordinary turnover in leadership elsewhere, it is also the case that the Malinauskas regime seems firmly entrenched in office. Events during the period under review reinforced an impression of a government enjoying solid electoral support while pursuing an ambitious policy agenda, alongside an Opposition struggling to define itself.

The March by-election in the inner metropolitan seat of Dunstan, triggered by the resignation of former Premier Marshall from Parliament, epitomised this political situation. For 116 years, no South Australian governing party had won an Opposition seat in a by-election. This was what Labor managed to achieve.

The seat of Dunstan had emerged from the 2022 election as the State's most marginal seat, with Marshall re-elected as the local member with just an 0.5% margin. The expectation was that the Liberals would retain the seat in the by-election. The demographics of the inner-eastern-suburbs seat seem to favour the Liberals, and they could also highlight the difficulty that the government was experiencing in delivering its most prominent 2022 election undertaking: the reduction of ambulance ramping outside of, and patient congestion within, public hospitals.

The by-election campaign was quite brutal in some respects. Labor disclosed that the Liberal candidate had, four years earlier, lodged an expression of interest for a position in the office of Labor's then Shadow Attorney-General Kyam Maher. Brushing aside criticism of the disclosure as a lamentable breach of an applicant's privacy, Labor claimed instead that it revealed her disdain for the Liberal government at that time. The major parties traded accusations that their respective candidates carried inappropriate associations arising from past family business matters.

The result was close but nonetheless swung the seat to Labor, increasing its numbers in the 47-member House of Assembly to 28. The Labor/Liberal two-party-preferred vote split ended up as 50.8/49.2, a swing of 1.4 percentage points from the March 2022 outcome. Both major parties lost ground (each by about 3%) in terms of first-preference votes, with the Greens picking up a 5.5% positive swing.

Premier Malinauskas was able to claim that the Dunstan result showed voters supported the government's “broad agenda to take the state forward” and were not focused on “one singular issue”—a clear allusion to the hospital ramping issue (Advertiser, 28 March 2024).

Geoff Brock, an Independent MP who had been serving as Minister for Local Government, Regional Roads and Veterans Affairs in the Malinauskas Cabinet, announced in early April that he would “step back” from the Ministry “in the best interests of my health, my family and my constituents” (SA Parliamentary Debates, 11 April 2024). Brock explained that he intended to continue to serve as the MP for mid-north seat of Stuart.

There has been a recent history of Independents serving in Labor Cabinets; Brock himself had done so in the 2014–2018 period under Premier Jay Weatherill. Premier Malinauskas continued in that tradition by arranging for Brock to be replaced by Dan Cregan, the Independent member for the Adelaide Hills electorate of Kavel.

Cregan had been elected as a Liberal in 2018 but had resigned from the party in October 2021. Soon afterwards, he had been elected Speaker of the House of Assembly and retained that position with the support of both major parties after the March 2022 election. As with his Independent predecessors but in considerable tension with conventional Westminster notions of responsible government, it was agreed that “as a Minister, [Cregan] will remain independent and retain a strong independent voice on legislation before parliament” (https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/the-team/dan-cregan-mp).

The vacant Speaker position was filled by Labor MP Leon Bignell. The stipulation in the Constitution (Independent Speaker) Amendment Act passed in 2021 that the Speaker can no longer be a member of a registered political party resulted in Bignell, in the words of the Premier, “temporarily leaving the Labor Party” (InDaily, 12 April 2024).

Immediately on Minister Cregan's agenda in his new Special Minister of State capacity was progressing Labor's 2022 election undertaking to put an end to donations to political parties. In June, Cregan and Premier Malinauskas released a specific proposal for public discussion.

Under the proposed model, an established political party would not be able to accept financial donations at any time (except for a membership fee of up to $100 per annum) or accept donations to any individual candidates intended for election-related spending. Overall election spending caps would be imposed: a maximum of $100,000 per House of Assembly candidate and a maximum of $500,000 for a Legislative Council group.

Parties could access public funding (paid at a similar rate per vote as at present) plus “operational funding” of up to $700,000 per annum (calculated on the basis of the number of MPs) of which half must be spent on party administration and not on election campaigns. Because new political parties and new non-party candidates would not be able to draw upon past vote tallies to qualify for public funding, they would be exempt from the ban on donations but a cap on the maximum donation (set at $2,700) would be imposed.

The proposal does not limit spending by “third parties” wanting to communicate their views about an election, though there would be disclosure provisions pertaining to any such spending. This provision is evidently an attempt to accommodate High Court decisions which have recognised an implied constitutional right of political communication. On the other hand, the proposed reform seeks to prohibit “associated entities”, groups which may be nominally separate from a political party but in practice directly support their activities, from becoming a backdoor means of circumventing the ban on donations to parties.

Premier Malinauskas argued that the reform was proposed notwithstanding that it is “not consistent with my government's own political interests” (InDaily, 13 June 2024). One of its effects would be to prohibit the trade-union affiliation fees that have been an accustomed source of funding for the Labor Party.

According to the Premier, the proposal placed South Australia “on the cusp of becoming a world leader in ending the nexus between money and political power” (Advertiser, 13 June 2024). Several independent commentators concurred with that bold claim. For academic lawyer Graeme Orr, the proposal marked SA as “the first democratic system anywhere to seek to ban ‘electoral donations’” (Inside Story, 25 June 2024). Another academic lawyer, Anne Twomey, placed the proposal within SA's enviable “tradition for innovation” in relation to electoral reform alongside such historical achievements as the expansion of the franchise to women, the removal of malapportioned electoral boundaries and “truth in electoral advertising” provisions (The Conversation, 18 June 2024).

The reaction from other political players was cautious. Deputy Opposition Leader John Gardner voiced concern that incentivising third-party involvement raised “the risk of Americanising our elections” via “American-style super PACs (political action committees) being accentuated”. Greens leader Robert Simms agreed with the need to combat “the corrosive influence of donations on our democracy” but reserved judgement on this specific proposal: “the devil will be in the detail here” (Advertiser, 13 June 2024).

Ambulance ramping, emergency-room overcrowding and elective-surgery cancellations continued to feature throughout the period under review notwithstanding Minister of Health Chris Picton taking every opportunity to trumpet the opening of new public hospital beds or the construction of new medical infrastructure. The “hours lost” measure of ambulance ramping hit a record level in May. While the June figure was lower, it was still considerably higher than in June 2023 (Advertiser, 3 July 2024). Premier Malinauskas had declared back in January that he did not regret the 2022 election promise to “fix the ramping crisis”. He added the rider that “I regret the fact that it takes time … [because] I can't change the laws of physics” (InDaily, 8 January 2024). The later Dunstan by-election result may signal that voters have become more inured to the intractability of health-policy problems.

Labor would clearly prefer the spotlight to land on other policy initiatives. One of these is housing policy. Housing Minister Nick Champion has been overseeing increased investment in public housing “for the first time in a generation”. The reprioritisation has been symbolised by the restoration of the “Housing Trust” nomenclature to the authority responsible for the provision and management of public housing. It was under the Housing Trust brand that SA had become a renowned provider of public rental accommodation. The brand had been subsumed under a broader “Housing SA” appellation in 2006 (Premier of South Australia Media Release, 23 June 2024).

The government has also been promoting a strong focus on increasing the supply of housing within the private sector to address affordability and access problems. A “Housing Roadmap” released in June aimed at facilitating “new levels of land supply, housing diversity, and affordability across Adelaide and the regions”. It envisaged a government/industry partnership across “all aspects of housing and land: labour, land supply, zoning, skills, affordability, critical infrastructure, legislation and more”. The now-familiar rider was added: “The housing crisis is complex and won't be fixed overnight” (Government of South Australia Housing Roadmap, June 2024).

Attracting military-related spending by the Commonwealth has been a centrepiece of the economic strategy of successive SA governments. In February came confirmation that six “Hunter class” frigates would be constructed at the Osborne naval shipyard near Port Adelaide, to be followed by the construction of air-warfare destroyers. A target of six frigates represents a cut from the nine originally envisaged. However, the announcement (in the context of previous commitments to nuclear submarine construction) was sufficient to enable the Premier to hail its “certainty” about the “comprehensive plan for continuous shipbuilding”: “I can't possibly overstate what this means to our state's economy” (Advertiser, 20 February 2024).

A different stream of job-creating investment has been encapsulated in the government's “State Prosperity Project”. This is a package of developments foreshadowed for the Upper Spencer Gulf region. It includes a government-owned renewable hydrogen power plant to be constructed near Whyalla, providing energy to enable the Whyalla steelworks to shift from coal-based to renewable energy for the manufacture of “green iron and steel”. It also includes a desalination plant on Eyre Peninsula feeding a 600-km water pipeline to support an expansion of copper production at BHP's Olympic Dam mine (Advertiser, 2 April 2024).

In May, the Premier announced a review, to be led by former High Court Chief Justice Robert French, into whether SA children under the age of 14 could be banned from having social media accounts, with those aged 14 and 15 needing parental consent. The Premier pointed to “mounting evidence from experts of the adverse impact of social media on children, their mental health and development”. Such a ban would be a novelty in Australia but the Premier maintained that “I don't want to sit around waiting for someone else. Let's lead”. As with the initiative on election funding, a potential Constitutional hurdle—specifically the Commonwealth government's responsibility for media regulation counterbalanced against State responsibilities in the field of mental health—may be an impediment here (ABC News, 13 May 2024).

A First Nations Voice to Parliament had been enacted in March 2023. A year later, March 2024 saw an election process to choose the requisite 46 foundation members of the Voice from regionally-based lists. There were 113 candidates overall.

The election produced a surprisingly low voter turnout. An estimated 30,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders had been eligible to vote, but just 2583 formal votes were lodged. Of the 46 elected, 12 received less than 20 first-preference votes. Four candidates did not receive a single vote, suggesting that these candidates themselves did not vote (Advertiser, 30 March 2024).

There were varied explanations for, and reactions to, this outcome. Attorney-General Kyam Maher noted that the election had taken place just six months after the comprehensive defeat of the constitutional referendum to create a national Voice to Parliament. “We had a lot of fatigue after the referendum,” he commented, and argued that turnout had been “pretty pleasing for a first attempt”. The Liberal Opposition, which notably had not endorsed the SA Voice initiative, had a different interpretation. Opposition Leader David Speirs described the turnout as “embarrassing” and as undermining the legitimacy of the elected body in being able to claim to represent its constituents. Speirs affirmed the “official position” of the Liberals as “we are very much open to repealing this” (Advertiser, 6 April 2024).

The 12-member State Voice, chosen from the 46 regionally elected members, met for the first time in mid-June. It chose as its two presiding members Tahlia Wanganeen (from the Central region) and Leeroy Bilney (from the West and West Coast region).

In early June, Treasurer Stephen Mullighan delivered his third annual budget statement on behalf of the Malinauskas government. Its main policy foci were, as expected, on health and housing.

In the health domain, around $2.5 billion of extra spending was foreshadowed, bringing Labor's total new investment in health up to $7.1 billion over Labor's three budgets to date. In relation to housing, the budget proposed, in addition to the previously announced expansion of public rental housing, the total abolition of stamp duty for first-home buyers purchasing newly constructed dwellings. Other spending proposals included expanded cost-of-living relief to vulnerable households and the introduction of universal pre-school availability for 3-year-olds (Advertiser, 7 June 2024).

The budget recurrent balance benefited from increased revenue from payroll tax, conveyance duties and land taxes, along with a better GST yield. This enabled the Treasurer to announce that there would be no tax increases beyond CPI adjustments and that there would be a recurrent budget surplus for the current and three subsequent fiscal years. The capital budget told a different story: an increase in State debt from $27.9 billion at the end of the 2023–2024 fiscal year to $44.2 billion by mid-2028 (Advertiser, 7 June 2024).

The Opposition's response to the budget was initially hampered by the decision of its leader, David Speirs, to take leave during the budget week to attend a family wedding in Scotland. In his absence, Shadow Treasurer Matt Cowdrey declared that “after three budgets, South Australians must ask themselves this question—am I better off under Labor? The answer is a resounding no” (InDaily, 7 June 2024).

Opposition Leader Speirs returned from his absence overseas to deliver the Liberals' formal response to the Labor budget statement 2 weeks after its delivery. His speech focused little on budget details. It instead comprised a peroration on “exactly what the Liberal Party of South Australia stands for and … what our values are”. Elements of Speirs' vision for his party included the Liberals being “the party of freedom”, avoiding “the cancer of identity politics”, being “the party of home ownership” (though “there is nothing wrong with renting”), being “the party of the family”, “the party of less government intervention”, “the party of less taxation”, “the party of small business”, “the party of regional South Australia”, “the party of our veterans” and “the party, I believe, of our multicultural communities” (SA Parliamentary Debates, 18 June 2024).

The party-focused tone of this speech might be explained by what, according to intermittent media reports, seems to be some dissatisfaction within Liberal ranks with Speirs' leadership. The unrest had become especially prominent in the wake of the Dunstan by-election result (Advertiser, 24 May 2024). According to one experienced journalist, some Liberal colleagues had described Speirs at that time as “a dead man walking” (Advertiser, 30 March 2024). Speirs' response: “My leadership is 100 per cent secure. I won't be challenged. … If I thought there was someone better to lead this party, I would stand aside” (InDaily, 28 March 2024).

The Liberals have just 2 years until the next State election to settle on stable leadership arrangements and, if possible, on plausible policy alternatives to those proffered by an energetic and evidently dominant Labor regime.

The author declares no conflicts of interest.