In the final of a three-part series on the future of the SA Liberals, party insider Tom Dawkins sets out the difficult balancing act facing the next director of the party.

Whoever takes over from Geoff Greene as director of the Liberal Party’s SA Division will need to hit the ground running.

Preparations for the federal election, due some time in the next 18 months, will need obvious attention but must not distract the party from the main reason the Greenhill Road office exists – to win state elections.

The SA Liberals will be hoping the next director lasts a little longer than Greene who has been in the role for just over two years and is just the latest in a succession of recent directors who have been short-term appointments.

Greene’s brief tenure has undoubtedly limited any meaningful legacy he could leave but, as it stands, history is not likely be kind to the outgoing director.

In the 2013 federal election he achieved a local result which was, to be generous, underwhelming. The Liberals had high hopes for claiming a number of metropolitan scalps at the election but the swing in the seat of Adelaide was very disappointing and in Makin, traditionally a bellwether seat, the Liberals didn’t even pose a threat to the Labor incumbent Tony Zappia.

Perhaps most frightening was the reality that highly regarded frontbencher Simon Birmingham almost missed out on a Senate spot. The Liberal Party failed to get a second quota in its own right and had to fight down to the wire with the Xenophon group for the sixth spot.

Greene’s only claim to success in the Federal campaign was Matt Williams’ victory in Hindmarsh, but even that result was knife-edge, to the extent that the western suburbs seat is now the most marginal in SA.

Greene will also be remembered for forfeiting last year’s ‘unlosable’ state election and for remaining at the helm for the disastrous by-election in Fisher and an unprecedented swing to the incumbent Labor Government in Davenport. These performances clearly made Greene’s position untenable and his departure ensures the state division can rebuild its strategic plan and campaign arsenal from a fresh slate.

New deal needed

Among the new director’s most critical objectives will be steering the party’s efforts to get a fairer deal from the SA Electoral Commission.

The NSW state election result, in which the victorious Liberal-Nationals’ primary vote was 45 per cent, has been cited in recent days as further proof that electoral reform in our state is needed. This seems self-evident given the SA Liberals recorded the very same primary vote in 2014 and remain in opposition, while Mike Baird’s team will govern with a 20-odd seat majority.

There’s no doubt one of the SA Liberals’ greatest handicaps in recent elections has been the electoral commission’s formula for calculating redistributions, especially for seats held by independents. The commission’s plainly baffling rationale was epitomized with its confirmation in 2012 that it would be placing Frome on the Liberal side of its pendulum ahead of the 2014 campaign.

The changes made to electorates in between elections are supposed to ensure that the party which received 50.01 per cent of the two-party preferred vote is able to form government via a majority of seats in the House of Assembly. But the Liberals have repeatedly failed to convince the commission that Labor-supporting independents should have their electorates classed in the ‘ALP’ column when it comes to determining redistributions. Highlighting how unsatisfactory the current formula is, Labor has won the past two state elections with a 2PP vote of less than 50 per cent.

To its credit, Labor has expertly played to the conditions and fully exploited the electoral circumstances by sandbagging key marginal seats, focussing resources on contests and candidates identified as defendable and cutting its losses elsewhere. It has meant the ALP has been able surrender the popular state-wide vote, but still claim enough Lower House seats to govern.

Meanwhile, the Liberal strategy has been broader in the hope of generating a wider swing. It’s made admirable inroads in the past two elections, picking up four seats in both 2010 and 2014 and enjoying strong swings in Liberal electorates. But the decisive electoral territory hasn’t budged – almost all of Labor’s sandbagging has worked.

It is up to the Liberal Party to successfully prosecute the case that Frome and Waite should now be considered as Labor seats on the commission’s pendulum. That it has failed to argue a compelling case in the past should not deter the Liberals, but serve as extra motivation to succeed this time.

The party’s 2PP state-wide vote of 53 per cent at the last election should go some way in helping to convince the commission that the current distortions need fixing. But to be fair, it is almost impossible for electoral commission to get it right when the whole system is based on a two-party scenario, because when independents entered the fray everything is thrown out of whack.

Given Brock’s pivotal support of Labor and his subsequent Cabinet position, Frome should now be considered a Labor electorate in the eyes of the commission. This would make the political landscape a lot fairer leading up to 2018. The Liberals will also likely argue that Waite should also transfer into the Labor column given its local member, Martin Hamilton-Smith, is now a minister in the Labor cabinet.

The Liberal loss in Fisher won’t even help the party, because the commission usually only works on general election results, meaning Labor’s by-election win before Christmas won’t enter into calculations.

Decisive action not self-pity

Despite all that, it would be perilous for the Liberals to bank on any substantial electoral changes being made, especially given the commission’s apparent preference for a ‘steady as she goes’ approach. The Liberals still need to actually win the key seats it has failed to snare in the past two state elections. This will require campaigning more strategically and effectively than the ALP, something it does not have a great track record of doing in recent campaigns.

A major hazard for the party will be the willingness of MPs and branch members to start the campaign for the 2018 election immediately. Some Liberals are evidently prone to drift into a post-election malaise of self-pity, believing the ALP unfairly snatched another election. This attitude first emerged in 2002 when Mike Rann dealt his way into minority government and the ‘woe is us’ mentality has been hard to eradicate ever since, having re-emerged in 2010 and now, to an extent, post-2014.

Another key agenda item for the new Liberal director will be the identification and endorsement of suitable Liberal candidates for key winnable seats. Candidates in critical seats, including Frome and Waite, should be locked-in and set to work making the local members sweat as soon as possible.

The seat of Frome, where Geoff Brock is now preoccupied with his ministerial duties, is the perfect example of how an endorsed candidate could start making immediate and significant inroads into securing the seat for the Liberal Party in 2018.

Kendall Jackson, who contested the seat as the Liberal candidate last year, is perfectly positioned to recontest Frome.

The Liberals failed to recognise Jackson’s substantial political capital as a local candidate in the 2014 campaign and, as a result, probably underestimated their chances in Frome. Jackson has exceptional community recognition in the electorate, helped by the fact that she comes from a well-known local farming family, went to school in Port Pirie and is now a local councillor. She also spent many years as a local ABC Radio journalist and runs the Flinders Rest Hotel at Warnertown with her husband, with whom she has four children.

The Liberal campaign in Frome floundered because of secretariat’s tendency to take a ‘half pregnant’ approach in seats where the incumbent is an independent. The awkward balancing act of trying to not rock the boat with Brock while simultaneously trying to unseat him was hopeless from the outset. Not only was Brock re-elected, by the kid-gloves treatment afforded him by the Liberals did nothing to stop him from handing government to Jay Weatherill when the balance of power fell into his lap.

As it stands, Jackson was unsuccessful in her first attempt at Frome but remains the obvious choice for the party in 2018.

A difficult balance

The Liberals are learning, if rather slowly, that it’s almost impossible to win a battle on two fronts – namely trying to beat Labor in key city marginals, while fighting against independents in regional seats. The prevailing method of pouring resources into metropolitan seats while leaving country campaigns largely to their own devices and hoping for the best has yielded a series of profoundly unsatisfactory results.

It is an approach inspired by the ‘elections are won in the city’ doctrine which every recent Liberal director has regularly hammered into party faithful. The theory is not without merit, although it is inferior to what should be seen as the number one rule of Liberal campaigning in SA: ‘If you don’t win the bush, you don’t form government’. Plainly, when the likes of Rory McEwen, Karlene Maywald and Geoff Brock find their way to the green leather where Liberal MPs normally would sit, it makes the job of getting a Lower House majority all the more difficult. If a Liberal campaign team is too city-centric, it might overlook this most compelling point.

After four terms in Opposition, the State Liberals will demand of its incoming campaign chief a decisive win in 2018, no matter what electoral and political hurdles stand in the way. With three years to go on a political exile which started in 2002, repeating the same mistakes again would be worse than unacceptable. Quite clearly the new Liberal state director – whoever that is – has quite a task ahead of them.

Tom Dawkins is a freelance journalist and author based at Naracoorte. He is a member of the Liberal Party and a former member of the party’s state executive.

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