Is the Premier’s Achilles’ heel angering older voters?
It’s been quite the week as anger over park lands trees being cut down and a ban on controversial fracking in the South East lifted. Mike Smithson claims he was just as surprised as the Premier when passions failed to be dampened over a “lost cause”.
A week is a long time in politics, as we all know, but the Premier must be wondering when life will return to normal.
He’s basked in a record-breaking election victory, capping off a prolonged ride down easy street, but the wheels have fallen off, perhaps by design.
He has almost four years to fix his current wonky jalopy, so he’s getting the show on the road as soon as possible.
Mass tree felling had to happen sooner or later under his upgrade plan for the North Adelaide Golf Course.
In his own mind, potentially losing the LIV tournament but picking up the Australian Men’s Open in tandem with the Women’s event was a good result, which I would fully endorse.
In following up with his election commitment and the so-called mandate to press ahead with the redevelopment plans, it all fitted his bigger picture, knowing that he would always hit the odd, controversial ball into the rough.
But the level of organised and prolonged anger over the tree removal has surprised most observers, with the Premier not yet out of the rough.
Let’s turn back the clock and drill down into the nitty-gritty of the past week.
Eight days ago, on May 10, around midday, the Premier stated at a media conference that he didn’t have an exact timeframe on when chainsaws would fire up and trees start crashing down.
“I’m not able to confirm,” he said.
“But I certainly know there was an intention to start that work before the end of May.”
It started less than 24 hours later.
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The following day, I basically questioned whether he’d told the truth, and nothing but the truth.
He stated that, because of the Sunday media conference, he’d then sought further advice and was told later in the day of the impending park land activity starting on Monday.
I also asked him if the green screening mesh on perimeter fencing at the golf course site was designed to keep out the prying eyes of the protesters.
He emphatically argued that such screening was standard practice and for safety reasons.
I accept that both answers were true to the best of his knowledge at the time because there is nothing to suggest otherwise.
Initially, he and I both thought the protest action would be short-lived and those involved would either lose the passion or quickly see it as a lost cause.
That theory was blown out of the water with the anger firing up rather than ramping down as the week progressed.
The site’s seen a suspicious fire and police resources have been constantly required.
We’ve also seen a massive protest outside parliament with a vast demographic of people wanting to loudly voice concerns.
These protesters weren’t NIMBYS (Not In My Back Yard) or a rent-a-crowd of troublemakers, instead they were fair dinkum and angry.
Friday saw eight people arrested, including a 78-year-old woman with a walking frame, in a direct show of defiance against the Premier.
Peter Malinauskas knows there’s no turning back with trees and wildlife either torn down or now without their territorial home.
He can promise more replacement trees until the proverbial cows come home, but that won’t erase the images of cracking timber, splintering bark, possums being grabbed by their necks or burly tree loppers giving protesters and assembled cameras a one-finger salute.
A well-connected North Adelaide resident, who’s also a veteran observer of SA politics, sent me an interesting email during the week.
He’s been reliably informed that all, or a large part, of the grass will need to be replaced with a different type of grass, which he sees as another step away from the park lands’ environmental heritage.
And over the course of the construction, he sees ongoing irrigation wasting a precious resource.
It currently utilises a sustainable recycled watering system, known as purple pipe, completed 16 years ago.
That diversion program involves piping treated water from the Glenelg wastewater plant to irrigate 163 hectares of park land and thus helping drought-proof the city’s green spaces.
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He fears that part of the golf course irrigation will need to switch to a potable “tap” water system.
Club president Kevin Naughton has confirmed the grass species will be replaced with a Couch variety which, he says, is far preferable to the current Kikuyu.
And he says the recycled water is only used sparingly because of its salinity, with most of the irrigation pumped straight from the River Torrens.
He says community myths about the redevelopment are plentiful but can often be debunked.
The Premier’s week didn’t improve on a country cabinet visit to Mount Gambier in his quest to lift the current ban on unconventional gas extraction, or fracking as it’s known.
He was entering a potential lion’s den with many farmers in prime grazing and growing country, unenthused about the prospect of exploration companies entering their properties to drill.
Fracking relies on a brutal method of drilling deep and then pumping water and chemicals under enormous pressure to crack the subsurface shale rock.
Those fractures release gas reserves that are currently unattainable.
So what, you may ask?
Such drilling comes with risks of the nasties being pumped down and then coming back to the surface with toxic consequences.
The ban doesn’t apply to the far north of the state as our conventional gas supplies start to dwindle, but the environmental fallout isn’t so obvious in arid, desert regions.
But it’s an argument Mali can’t win in the state’s southeast or on North Terrace because he won’t have the numbers.
His proposed change to current laws will be violently opposed in the Legislative Council by the Liberals, One Nation and the Greens.
In a politically charged environment of energy overload and concern, he can always say don’t blame him, knowing that he was never going to get his own way.
Instead, he’s likely to blame Ashton Hurn, the Liberals, Robert Simms, Cory Bernardi and perhaps even Pauline Hanson somehow.
The Premier’s ‘cool’ has taken a hit but he’ll be prepared to live with that.
He knows, or perhaps has learned now more than ever, that there’s rarely gain without pain.
But his Achilles’ heel is angering those, including older voters, who’ve previously seen him as a political beacon in whom they can trust.
If he loses that trust, it may be more difficult than he thinks to win it back.
And it’s all happened in just one week.
Mike Smithson is weekend newsreader and political analyst for 7News.
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