There were no audible gasps from either floor or gallery as Governor Hieu Van Le enunciated Jay Weatherill’s vision statement for what’s left of the current term, a vision variously described (by one J Weatherill, primarily) as “bold” and “radical”.

My socks managed to stay on throughout.

That’s the thing about setting people up for big things; things, indeed, so big they will leave them barefoot and short of breath with their audacity.

There were audacious moments, of course; none more so than the bit about a Government that believes “South Australia can be known as the place where you age but you do not grow old”, hereafter known as Weatherill’s “Sarah Palin moment”.

That nugget prompted Greens MLC Tammy Franks to quickly dub SA “the Peter Pan state”, a moniker that hopefully sticks.

There were also aspirational nods to a low-carbon future with driverless cars patrolling our leafy streets, though given the parlous state of SA manufacturing many might prefer the Premier was committing to actually build driverless cars, rather than merely legislating to allow them should someone else get round to it.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with exercising what George Bush Sr once dismissively referred to as “the vision thing”; it’s just that punters in this state, where unemployment has just spiralled above anywhere else in Australia, are looking for something a little more tangible than a notional utopia well beyond the forward estimates (and indeed, the life of the current Government).

Talking about options for tax reform or expanding our role in the nuclear fuel cycle are not bold or radical; actually committing to action is.

But that’s not to say these debates aren’t important or significant, albeit a tad overspruiked.

It’s significant enough that the impetus has come from a Labor Premier, and a left-wing one at that.

I’m not one of the many who subscribe to the (justifiable) view that these reviews are mere distractions to the ongoing debate over Transforming (ie downsizing) Health.

Governments can walk and chew gum at the same time, and it’s condescending to presume the media and indeed the electorate can’t. This site has still managed to carry several new stories about the health debate (not to mention the Gillman land deal fallout) despite the so-called policy “distractions”.

Serious, sober policy analysis should never be seen as a distraction; these are important debates. What I’m not convinced about is that they’ll yield important reform.

Weatherill pointedly didn’t unveil any of this “vision thing” before either of the recent by-elections in Fisher and Davenport. One surmises, then, that he considers them genuinely contentious – potential vote-losers. It’s safe to assume, then, he won’t be pushing, say, the land tax on every home line or a nuclear waste dump ahead of the 2018 election. Good Government and popular Government are very different things, and if the Premier seriously believes there are tough choices to be made, the time for making them is now, in the second and third year of his four year term. Delaying decisions until you’ve tested the populist water is subverting government and institutionalising inertia.

But while Weatherill might not quite have delivered on his “bold” policy agenda, he has nailed the politics.

I’ve long critiqued Steven Marshall’s Liberals for a lack of policy urgency (“We can’t enter the policy debate proper until the last mid-year budget review before the next election,” is their constant refrain), but if there was one barrow they’ve consistently pushed, it was tax reform.

And yet, within minutes of the Government even floating the notion of trading off stamp duty for land tax, the Opposition Leader was out effectively killing off the debate.

“That’s something the Liberals will never support,” he huffed, insisting he’d only ever advocated for fewer and lower taxes, as if state governments can just pick and choose between a wealth of revenue sources.

For his entire, albeit brief, political career, Marshall’s one item of faith has been the need for tax reform, and yet here he is refusing to countenance a debate about just that.

Weatherill has now symbolically adopted a broad sweep of Business SA’s policy wishlist, on issues the Liberals should have been out there shouting from the rooftops, if they allowed themselves to actually engage in policy debate. Nuclear? They could have led the charge. Timezones? The idea’s got people talking – a canny Opposition could have made the debate its own.

It didn’t though, because the Liberals have long been too afraid of sacrificing any votes, even votes they didn’t have in the first place.

We’ve now got a situation where the state’s peak business lobby is telling the Liberal Leader of the Opposition to cool his heels; Weatherill has divided Marshall from his natural constituency.

It’s wedge politics at its finest … just in case anyone thought this week was all about ideological purity and bold visions.

After the Governor delivered his lengthy address on Tuesday, pushing back Question Time to the very media-unfriendly hour of 4pm, Attorney-General John Rau tabled a stack of formerly-confidential documents relating to Gillman. The pages numbered more than 1000, unindexed. Then, on Wednesday, the Premier announced a select committee into electoral tactics employed in the recent by-elections; its terms of references read like a Labor vendetta.

This petty politicking sat uneasily juxtaposed against Weatherill’s lofty pretensions for the week, which is a shame because, bold or not, he has at least hinted at a certain reformist zeal no doubt wrestling with the political timidity rife within his own party and his own populist predilections.

He may never get round to following through on that promise, but again this week he’s reminded us — for better or worse — that he’s a consummate politician.

Tom Richardson is a senior journalist at InDaily. His political column is published every Friday.