The State Government’s pleas for positive vibes about South Australia’s future would have a lot more credibility if its senior members didn’t flick the switch to partisan negativity so easily.

State Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis yesterday used his favourite avenue – Twitter – to have a crack at an InDaily journalist over a robustly argued article we published which contained some dire warnings about our state’s economic future.

Curiously, the journalist who copped Koutsantonis’s ire – business editor Kevin Naughton – had nothing to do with the article in question (the attack had everything to do with the fact that Naughton once worked for Martin Hamilton-Smith, the former Liberal leader who now, in a delicious irony, sits across the Cabinet table from the Treasurer).

We’re grown-ups here – and we didn’t lose any sleep over the exchange (in fact, it helped the article in question become our most-read of the day).

However, I do worry about the counter-productive stream in South Australian politics – indeed, in Australian politics – where debate is increasingly framed in black-and-white, us-versus-them, with-us-or-against-us, terms.

It’s an impoverished political culture that views all contributions to public debate through a party political lense.

In this myopic and increasingly narrow world view, if InDaily publishes something which raises serious and thoughtful concerns about the economy, then we’re automatically a bunch of Tories.

The Treasurer’s politics-as-usual attack serves only to illustrate one of the central points of writer Malcolm King’s thesis – that South Australia is complacent in the face of global forces that may seriously damage our economic well-being.

“People don’t rock the boat even when boat rocking is the thing to do,” he pointed out.

While I don’t agree 100 per cent with everything that King wrote – it’s his opinion after all – on this point he is correct.

Or, at the very least, not enough South Australians rock the boat.

And it’s not as if he is on his own in warning about the state’s economic future.

Last August, Business SA chief Nigel McBride gave a speech – reported only by InDaily – which highlighted the enormous challenges in front of us.

Looking back now, it’s admirably prescient.

“We are at the crossroads and it’s not working for us,” McBride said. “As a state, we have lost our mojo.”

McBride detailed how South Australia had missed the mining boom, failed to invest in adequate infrastructure and carried unsustainable state debt and public sector wage bills.

“Olympic Dam’s expansion was over-blown and then missed,” he said. “That window of opportunity has been missed.

“We’re in infrastructure catch-up mode.

“We should already have that deep water port in the Upper Spencer Gulf.

“We should have that power line going down the Eyre Peninsula.

“We should have the energy and water, the road and rail.

“We are billions of dollars of catch-up behind and we are running out of time. In fact we may have run out of time to catch up.”

Since this speech, South Australia’s economic prospects have worsened considerably.

McBride was speaking before the announcement of the Holden closure, before dark clouds starting appearing over the defence industries (although he warned back then that we were exposed to the potential for government funding cuts), and before our unemployment rate topped 7 per cent.

Economists like Richard Blandy from UniSA and Michael O’Neil from the University of Adelaide have written extensively about our economic problems (see this recent Adelaide Now piece by Blandy and this InDaily piece quoting O’Neil about how we’ve been asleep at the wheel).

No-one wants to wallow in endless negativity, but can’t we all just accept that in public debate on South Australia’s future, all of us have a vested interest in the state’s success?

We’re not fifth columnists trying to destroy the joint from within – we want South Australia to thrive.

King, for example, runs a business here which, among other things, tries to help people find employment.

InDaily survives solely on advertising – and the vast bulk of that comes from South Australian companies.

Isn’t it obvious that our state’s interests are never served by ignoring our obvious problems? Doesn’t serious analysis deserve a serious response?

The economy is not in good shape: too many people are out of work, our traditional employment sectors are in decline, and almost everyone agrees that the cost of doing business in SA is too high.

Despite these issues, we have some enormous strengths.

One of them is that group of South Australians who are deep, creative and independent thinkers, who eschew parochialism, who think analytically about the world and our place in it, and who have the courage to espouse unpopular and complicated ideas.

As King pointed out, there are – unfortunately – far fewer of these people than there once were, as the state continues to suffer from a brain drain.

Those critical thinkers who choose to remain here are the very people to whom the government should be listening – and these are the people who will continue to find space for their words in InDaily.

David Washington is the editor of InDaily.