The Guardian 22 March, 2006
South Australian elections:
Labor back, mixed bag for progressives
The Rann Labor Government was returned at last Saturday’s State Election in South Australia with an emphatic 10 percent swing achieved mostly at the expense of the Liberals and the Democrats. In the Legislative Council (SA’s upper house), it looks possible that the Greens will get their candidate, Mark Parnell, elected while the Democrats will probably lose the position held previously by Kate Reynolds.
The Democrats’ shameful federal record — including their votes in favour of the GST and various industrial relations "reforms" put forward by Howard — appears to have caught up with the SA representatives in spite of their generally progressive stance in SA.
Sandra Kanck MLC will most likely be the party’s only representative in the new parliament.
Mike Rann was the face of a Labor campaign that portrayed the Government as the defender of the community against corporate interests. He promised to return the privatised Modbury Hospital to public ownership. It looks likely that a long-term grass-roots campaign to get the hospital back will be rewarded with a significant victory. Struggling private operator Healthscope will look elsewhere for easier pickings as the health system is further privatised in Australia.
Ignoring the Government’s own record of outright sell-offs and its promotion of Public Private Partnerships, the Labor campaign promised not to carry out any further privatisations. It promised more spending and more staff in health education and — as one can now predict from a "law and order" state Labor Government — more police.
Labor presented itself as a defender of workers against the attacks of the Howard Government with its legal challenge to the WorkChoices legislation. For some time the Rann Government has been presenting itself as a victim in the ongoing fiasco that has followed the breaking up and privatisation of the ETSA electricity utility by their forerunners, the Olsen Liberal Government.
The Libs appear to have believed their own bulldust and trusted that an appeal to "aspirational" voters would save them from a wipe-out. They undertook to give private enterprise a boost by sacking 4,000 public servants from already understaffed services. They promised a grant to first home buyers to put towards costs imposed by the State Government, like sales tax. They committed themselves to major spending on roads and Highways.
In the end, Opposition leader Rob Kerin’s avuncular "nice guy" image went nowhere towards neutralising the hostility felt by SA voters to the anti-people policies of the state and federal Liberal Party. Labor now looks like getting 28 lower house seats, the Liberals 14, Nationals 1, independents 2 with 2 undecided at the time of writing.
In a count for the upper house, the Libs are struggling to keep pace with a team headed by No Pokies MLC Nick Xenophon. The 47-year-old lawyer was originally elected in a protest against the unpopular decision to allow poker machines into the state’s clubs and pubs in the 1980s. He has since championed a number of progressive causes including changes to the state’s asbestos laws. It is likely that he will be joined in the Legislative Council by running mate Ann Bressington.
John McGill of the Socialist Alliance received 203 votes in the seat of Port Adelaide.