TOM RICHARDSON: When Jay Weatherill first assumed the premiership, he made a point of eschewing the notion that South Australia ended at Gepps Cross.
He would, he implicitly insisted, be governing for all South Australians, a notion often posited by politicians in the romantic afterglow of electoral fortune but more often honoured in the breach than the observance.
Indeed, almost every utterance and action thereafter has reinforced the notion that South Australia does indeed finish up somewhere around Grand Junction Road, if not slightly further south.
Indeed, one of Weatherill’s fabled “seven strategic priorities” (and is it just me or does “Jay and the Seven Strategic Priorities” sound like a really bad childrens’ book?) is to create “a vibrant city that energises and excites”. Yep, one whole priority, just over 14 per cent of the Government’s entire policy agenda, is devoted to basically being a glorified city council.
Mind you, another such priority is to “realise the benefits of the mining boom for all”, and since it’s broadly acknowledged that there is not, and never has been, a mining boom, we might well use the Premier’s own turn of phrase and say we do not accept the premise of his strategic priority.
But really, Weatherill doesn’t appear to have a lot of personal zeal for mining or defence, his predecessor’s hobby-horses. Sure, he understands their importance, but they don’t appear to inflame his political passions. Increasingly, the rejuvenation of the CBD appears to have become the Weatherill Government’s legacy mission. They were at it again this week, outlining a supposedly new “vision” for the Riverbank precinct – Adelaide’s “great park”. Interestingly, it bore a remarkable similarity to the existing vision for the precinct (namely a holistically-designed cultural mecca), albeit with even fewer details. Scant specifics either for the next “announcement” (I use the term loosely), regarding the future of the Old Royal Adelaide Hospital. There is no plan per se, and certainly no money, but there will be (wait for it)…a design competition.
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Which makes it sound like not only are we going to participate in some sort of direct-democracy utopian experiment, we’re gonna have a heap of fun while we’re at it, goshdarnit!
"… the approaching winter recess will not bring Weatherill much warmth; the challenges ahead are formidable."
As if to sublimate the fact there is no real meat on these policy bones, the Weatherill team has taken to unveiling them at phoney media “briefings”, wherein cameras are banned and earnest public servants narrate us through reams of slideshows, while we wait for them to get to the point with the same hopeless determination that Vladmimir and Estragon waited for Godot to show up.
To add to the bureaucratic glory of the experience, we are expected to become quickly fluent in the unadorned public service shorthand for these various projects – the Northern Expressway, for instance, is the NEXY, and the Southern Expressway, presumably and ironically, becomes the SEXY; the New Royal Adelaide is the NRAH, and the existing site the ORAH. Which left me sitting through that excruciating power point presentation quietly reciting Mr Kurtz’s final breaths from Heart of Darkness: “The Orah, the Orah!”
But while riverbank feng shui may be the pinnacle of public policy in Weatherill’s mind, it does suggest his initial bluster about not leading a city-centric Government might have been lost somewhere amid the clamour of cranes.
How else could you explain the fact that a genuinely important big-picture reform of liquor licensing deregulation has somehow been condensed into a PR pitch for “small bars”, the sum purpose of which seems to be the enlivenment of a couple of esoteric lanes off Hindley Street?
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Surely Labor realises that Adelaide is but one seat, and a Liberal-held one at that?
The Government is aided, of course, by the fact the Liberals refuse to enter the policy fray, which means even Labor’s thought-bubble policy pronouncements are like sumptuous feasts compared with the Opposition’s ideological famine.
But the approaching winter recess will not bring Weatherill much warmth; the challenges ahead are formidable.
Former Supreme Court Justice Bruce Debelle’s report into the institutional response to child sexual abuse in public schools was handed to the Governor yesterday, and its findings will almost certainly rattle the Premier, a former Education Minister. Hopefully the work of the document itself is more impressive than the press release that preceded it, wherein Mr Debelle launched into a pious rant against the media, whom he pompously advised to respect the privacy of the “children, parents and staff” of the school involved, who had “already been subjected to too much media attention, in particular television”.
“Public officials, politicians and the media should…refrain from taking the opportunity to exploit their grief,” he ploughed on.
Good advice, thanks Bruce. He probably could also have mentioned that the media coverage thus far, while urgent, has been nothing but respectful, and that the parents who were interviewed did so not only willingly, but desperately, since no-one else seemed prepared to listen to their stories. Or that some were quite happy to be named and identified, but were talked out of it by their media interviewers to preserve the anonymity of the school community.
He might even have thanked the Opposition and the media for bringing this entire matter to light, since it was patently clear the Government had no intention of doing so.
Ah, well. The endgame, of course, is that departmental mechanisms are reviewed to ensure reporting lapses do not recur, and that process is already well underway.
The Debelle report will make for a rocky road ahead for Labor, but it will not obscure the path it treads.
As we have seen in Canberra this sorry week, the ALP is a singularly ruthless beast in its pursuit of power. Perhaps the realisation that it is not the natural party of Government has made it the lean, hungry political animal it is, just as the blissful assumption by the Liberals that they are has made them bloated and ineffectual.
Expect Labor to hit the ground running once the federal bloodbath is done. But Weatherill will need to aim higher than his current level of an overhyped Lord Mayor and, perhaps, even venture out occasionally beyond the realms of Grand Junction Road.
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