Richardson: We may never see our leaders’ best
So is anyone sick of the election yet?
Wait, let me put that another way. Is anyone not sick of the election yet?
Awkward, even telling, gaffes about sexy candidates and rectal remedies may be great fodder for the news cycle, but they don’t tend to shift many votes.
I can only assume that planting smooches on those still almost two decades off voting age is a vote-winning strategy, since that’s what both party leaders seem to spend most days doing. Perhaps it suggests a warm, engaging persona, rather than the invasive and slightly creepy scenario most would envisage if an unfamiliar late-middle-aged man in a suit planted their pursed lips on your newborn’s face.
But the good news – the really, really great news – is that we still have more than three weeks of this awesomeness left!
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Three weeks of hard hats and reflective vests. Three weeks of policy “drops” to daily papers before obvious picture opportunities for the “embedded” media packs. Three weeks of debates about debates, and about who is dodging debates, and who is debating from notes as opposed to reciting carefully-rehearsed lines from notes.
And the really, really, really great news? Well, pinch yourself, South Australia, because in around six months we get to do it all again!
Even with the caveat that the federal result could potentially re-set the pendulum for the SA ballot, the state poll will only ever seem an awkward footnote after the massive clash of ego and ambition we have playing out on the national stage.
The great challenge for both Jay Weatherill and Steven Marshall will be to energise a weary electorate to give even half a damn.
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That’s a formidable task. Disinterest will be the curse of the next campaign; even if the Libs hold true to their pledge to enter the policy fray, it’s unlikely the public will be hugely receptive to their entreaties. True enough, though, there will be an appetite for change, with pretty much every one of the state’s flagship industries in the doldrums. In Sunday’s debate (did I mention we had a debate?) PM Kevin Rudd pronounced (from his notes) that the mining boom was over. I’m glad he cleared that up for us, because Weatherill has doggedly insisted that we’re still enjoying it, an assertion strangely redolent of former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf’s Gulf War prognostications that the Allied troops were on the brink of surrender, even as their tanks rolled into view behind him. No boom then, though not exactly a bust; more a dull plateau. Similarly defence, at the whim of a constrained federal budget. And auto manufacturing, well … it remains on life support, “too big to fail”, according to the Premier, in the stoic tone of a doctor trying to work out how to winch a morbidly obese patient out of his armchair and onto his deathbed.
So, yes, in such a jolly economic environment there will be an appetite for change, but it’s hardly likely to be satiated by the Opposition’s meagre offerings.
Marshall has been a surprisingly weak leader, in thrall to factional interests and abdicating his political judgment to a multitude of inexperienced advisors and cynical powerbrokers. Despite being ambitious, he didn’t (I think genuinely) want or seek the leadership in his first term as an MP. He wears his inexperience like a chip on his shoulder, and forfeits his natural instinct for action and transparency to the conservative counsel of those that facilitated and/or tolerated his ascension. This probably won’t hinder his tilt at power, for we live in an age of diminished expectation, and people are happy enough with variants of the status quo.
And of course, weak Opposition leaders don’t necessarily make for weak Premiers, though they usually do.
There is cynicism in the electorate, and with justification, but there is also some cause for optimism. Many punters appear jaded, uninterested in this federal campaign; many more again seem genuinely befuddled, unable not only to find a major party candidate worthy of their first preference but even a minor party alternative for whom they’d gladly cast a vote.
It has been a campaign … scratch that, it’s been two parliamentary terms, of simplistic slogans, petty politicking and bitter disillusionment. We do, at least, have the potential to rise above that level in the months after September 7.
Weatherill and Marshall have been underwhelming, but they are both in my experience genuine, decent and thoughtful. They may not be able to galvanise a politics-worn electorate, but they will at least provide a choice that may (perhaps) supersede glib slogans and soft photo-ops (but probably not by much).
As that rare beast, a Labor Premier who is a genuine left-winger, Weatherill is not really the man for an economic downturn; he could have been a visionary social reformer, but he appears doomed to lurch from crisis to crisis. And his administration is still toddling through the economic mire; public servants openly bemoan the lack of experience and gravitas in his inner sanctum.
Similarly Marshall is like the Liberals’ infant king, handed power before he knows how to wield it. He has a keen work ethic, but would have been a more formidable politician if he’d been allowed time to mature and hone his political acumen. Sadly, his party was too much of a basket case to accommodate that.
Both men, in fact, have the potential to become fine premiers; for now though South Australians don’t see the best of them. Sadly, I’m not sure they ever will.
Tom Richardson is InDaily’s political commentator, and political reporter for Nine news in Adelaide.
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