SA election 2022: The Playmander, the Rannslide and the roots of Liberal implosion – ABC News

Among the more bizarre and gruesome rites of ancient Rome was the practice of killing an animal in order to examine its entrails.

The purpose of this sanguinary custom, known as "haruspicy", was not diagnostic, but to enable divination. Like those who seek revelation in tea-leaves, palm lines or the stars, the Romans believed that an animal's internal organs could offer insights into human destiny.

The consultation of oracles might not, at the moment, be foremost among the intentions of SA Liberal apparatchiks, but few observers would dispute that their party has just undergone electoral evisceration.

Four years after finally breaking Labor's stranglehold on power, the Liberals find themselves again in opposition and again in the political wilderness.

They are now in a predicament potentially worse than the aftermath of the infamous Rannslide of 2006, when Mike Rann was emphatically re-elected as premierand the Liberals occupied just 15 of the 47 seats in parliament's lower house.

At the time, political analyst Dean Jaensch wrote presciently of the impediments to Liberal unitythat would trouble the party during Mr Rann's term in office.

Jaensch notedthe Liberals' inability to resolve their chronic internecine hostilities:

"The party has to face a complete restructure, from the foundations up. And for that to occur, the factions will have to work together. On the basis of 40 years of internal warfare, that will require a miracle."

Over the next few years, the Liberals busily set about vindicating Jaensch's predictions, holding several leadership spills that demonstratedthat a diminished presence in parliament is not necessarily a deterrent to factionalrancour.

It wasn't always this way. In fact, during themiddle decades of the 20th century, the central question confronting members of the Liberal Country League (the precursor of the modern Liberals) was not how they would gain power, but how they might lose it.

Party leader Thomas Playford's 26-year reign, from late 1938 to early 1965, remains a record for an Australian premier.

Nicknamed "honest Tom", Playford was able to achieve such longevity by what were arguably dishonest means. A gerrymander, dubbed the "Playmander", gifted rural seats disproportionate electoral power. Playford himself did not devise the gerrymander, but nor did he repeal it, and it was not until he left office that the system was finally abolished by Liberal premier Steele Hall.

More than five decadeshave elapsed since the watershed 1970 election the first of the post-Playmander era, and the first of the so-called Dunstan Decade. Since the reform, the Liberals have won only four of 16 state elections, andheld office for less than a third of the time.

No Liberal premier has won two elections, let alone consecutive ones, since Playford himself last did it more than 60 years ago.

The question of why this is the case is an urgent one for Liberal strategistsas they prepare to inspect the entrails in the hope of uncovering clues about what went wrongand how to avoid it happening again.

Recrimination is an unedifying subject,but, within the remaining ranks of the SA Liberals, there will be much of it in the weeks ahead.

A year ago, Steven Marshall seemed a veritable shoo-in for a second term as premier: COVID-19 management had gifted him a formidable platform from which to plot a return to office.

Labor MPs would have been forgiven for privately dismissing the 2022 election as likely unwinnable, and instead postponing any optimism until 2026.

So what changed?

One obvious factor was COVID, specifically the Omicron variant. Those in search of a decisivemoment might do worse than selectingNovember 23, 2021 the day that SA's eastern borders reopened, allowing the virus back in.

As case numbers rose, Liberal popularity seemed to decline accordingly. Ironically, while they could not achieve unity within their own ranks, the Liberals did manage to unify their enemies during this time: voices of very different persuasions on issues such as social restrictions and vaccination formed a loose "coalition of contempt", united by fury towards the government's Omicron strategy.

Single-term governments occupy an awkward place in history books and in the popular consciousness.

For this reason, staunch Labor supporters may be inclined to unkindly deride the Marshall government as little more than an anomaly.

In certain respects, Labor's return to office represents a resumption rather than a renaissance: prominent MPs Tom Koutsantonis, Stephen Mullighan, Susan Close, Katrine Hildyard, Zoe Bettison, Kyam Maher and Chris Picton have all previously held ministerial portfolios.

The elephant in the room or in the ambulance is the matter of ramping, and the role played by the paramedics' union in the Liberals' defeat. The Ambulance Employees' Association became living proof of Billy Bragg's lyric, "there is power in a union".

Over its four years in office, the Marshall government presided over a grave deterioration on the ramping front.

During the election campaign, Labor and the AEA which remained locked in industrial dispute with the Marshall administrationuntil the bitter end waged a relentless war of attrition over ramping, leaving the government moribund.

Campaign warfare, however, is only one part of the pictureand it is not the most important part. For there are deeper reasons as to why the Liberals imploded in Saturday's ballot. Happily, history can help us understand them.

In November 1996, less than a year out from an election, Liberal premier Dean Brown was ousted by factional rival John Olsen in a leadership spill. Mr Brownhad swept to powerin a Liberal landslidethree years earlier, withthe collapse of the State Bankensuringan end toLabor rule after 11 years.

The 1996 partyroom coup was the latest instalment of an intergenerational drama in which moderate and conservative Liberal factions adopting the roles of sworn enemies locked in self-destructive life-or-death struggle put their own fortunes ahead of their common interests.

Several ideological incongruities characterise this factional fissure. Moderates have tended to be reformist and socially liberal, and in favour of law change on matters such as euthanasia. Conservatives are believers in the value of tradition, and are often churchgoers. If not necessarily holding rural seats, they nevertheless are more closely associated with rural interests.

These internal antagonisms have festered within the party for years, and the Marshall government's attempts to resolve or quell them failed spectacularly. By the end, three MPs who had started their terms in 2018 as Liberals Sam Duluk, Fraser Ellis and Dan Cregan had migrated to the crossbench, leaving Mr Marshall at the helm of a minority government.

Admittedly,the departuresof Mr Duluk and Mr Ellis werenot of their own volition, but because of criminal charges being laid (Mr Duluk was later acquitted, while Mr Ellis who was among several MPsinvestigated as part of the country members' travel allowance scandal has not yetfaced trial).But it remains significant thatall three of the dissident MPs had been affiliated with the party's conservative wing.

Mr Cregan precipitated one of the more extraordinary sessions of state parliament when, after quitting the Liberals, heseized the speakership and emerged as a hostile MP. It is indicative of the disaffection among erstwhile Liberal voters that Mr Cregan and Mr Ellis have both been re-elected as independent MPs, with significant swings towards them.

Mr Cregan's defection was not a case of deserting a sinking ship, but a far more paradoxical phenomenon: that of a man helping to sink a ship by jumping overboard.

The act occurred only a few months after the Liberal Party had denied memberships to hundreds of applicants who were evangelical Christians. Characterised by moderates as an attempt to counter branch stacking, the move was instead described by federal conservative Nicolle Flint as the "most extraordinary and undemocratic act" in her time in politics.

"The party was, in the view of many, hijacked by the moderates back in 2013 when Steven Marshall and Vickie Chapman took over as leader and deputy," Martin Hamilton-Smith a former Liberal opposition leader and conservative defector told the ABC in September.

"Since then, conservatives have been sidelined, ushered out the door, marginalised."

But this is only half of the story, becausethe casualties weren't only on the conservative side of the ledger. The biggest of all was deputy premier Vickie Chapman, a moderate and an ally of Mr Marshall. In November, she relinquished her portfolios amid an ombudsman's investigation into her decision as planning minister to refuse a port on Kangaroo Island.

A month before this transpired, the premier had been subjected to parliamentary attack from Labor over the unrelated and seemingly trivial matter of whether it had been appropriate to allow a film crew into the Royal Adelaide Hospital, to make a video about its haematologyunit, at a time of significant ramping. In response, Mr Marshall quipped:

"Last time I looked, we weren't running blood-management units out of the Liberal Party in South Australia. Maybe some blood-letting."

It was a flippant remark that was said with a smilebutnow seems ominous. Just as there is nothing wrong with losing allies if you are recruiting them in equal numbers, blood loss matters less if it is countered by transfusion. But no party can withstand uncontrolled haemorrhaging.

Mr Marshall has already committed to quitting his position as Liberal leader, should he manage to hold the seat of Dunstan. What confronts his successor is a messy and bloody businessand it will take a person of rare staminato stomach it, entrails and all.

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SA election 2022: The Playmander, the Rannslide and the roots of Liberal implosion - ABC News