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Richardson: Weatherill keeps faith, but can voters?

Jul 10, 2015
Jay Weatherill: "I know we can do this."

Jay Weatherill: "I know we can do this."

South Australia: beautiful one day, in crisis the next.

If there’s one thing we love in this state more than talking ourselves up, it’s talking ourselves down.

Happily, yesterday’s dire unemployment figures provided ample impetus to do just that, fuelling statewide water cooler conversations about our impending doom.

It’s ugly reading, of course; after a spike the previous month, another 0.6 per cent jump to a nation-leading 8.2 per cent jobless rate is an intrinsically poor performance.

The real worry, though, comes in the national context – no other state recorded that kind of lurch. Some states improved, others flatlined. But South Australia’s performance was prominent, and significant. We not only have the highest unemployment rate in the nation, but it is worsening. And quickly.

Jay Weatherill’s response was, in effect, ‘I told you so’.

Which I guess he kinda did, with prognostications of impending catastrophe as the Holden earthquake threatened to unleash a tsunami of job losses across allied industries.

But then, he also told us he was happy to sacrifice the AAA credit rating in order to keep pouring Government cash into job-creating infrastructure projects.

Three years on, the credit rating is gone, but so are the jobs.

Today, the Premier will front a photo opportunity as CavPower expands its operation in Adelaide’s north-east. It was intended to be a good news story; mining services can continue to grow, even in troubled times. Instead, it will merely give the television cameras a potent image – a politician in hard-hat and high-vis talking up jobs that don’t yet exist.

If Weatherill’s response to yesterday’s figures appeared underwhelming, it was also perversely reassuring. Amid the standard clamour from political and ideological opponents to take “action now” – the Hawthorn legend John Kennedy Sr-esque exortations to “do something” – Weatherill was steadfast. He could have come out and said ‘this demands an immediate response’, and announced some new build or other. Instead, he merely held the line, putting faith in Labor’s long-term plan to “transform the economy”.

That is significant. But so is the fact the faith is not widely shared.

Mergers could help the auto component sector to survive after the closure of Holden in 2017.

It took the death of Holden for Labor to realise that the old manufacturing economy was done.

Last month’s budget was also significant, inasmuch as it was the first Labor budget without a marquee spending initiative. Rather than Government-created jobs, the investment was in business tax reforms, of varying significance. This, then, was the first Labor budget that wasn’t really a Labor budget at all.

I believe that Weatherill has a long-term plan, and a fundamentally sound one, to help reinvent the state’s economic base.

The problem is, we’re only in the fledgling stages of it, and this is a 13-year-old Government.

The structural problems in the state economy are nothing new, and yet only now does the Government seek to address them, to “transform” them.

The process will be long and arduous, and requires universal faith and trust in the path that we’ve chosen.

And therein lies the concern.

Labor has a credibility problem.

Symbolically, it wasn’t until Holden announced its closure that this Government really clicked that the era of “old manufacturing” was over. In reality, of course, it was over long before the ALP even took office.

Weatherill speaks of an economy in transition, but the Government he now leads spent 10 years devising expensive ways to maintain the old economy, or chasing alluring pots of gold at the end of rainbows.

In his youth, an anti-uranium Mike Rann famously described Olympic Dam as a “mirage in the desert”. As premier, he called it a project “of state, national and global significance which will bring enormous benefits to the state for generations to come”.

He was probably right first time.

Weatherill’s pitch is almost Churchillian, a rallying call that promises little reward but blood, toil, tears and sweat in a bid to “transform the South Australian economy”.

We need to work together to do that, he tells us, but we need to work to a plan. His plan.

His challenge, then, is herculean; not merely to fulfil that lofty ambition but to stay the course in the face of mounting evidence that a new tack is required. And to somehow convince despondent South Australians to stay the course with him.

The C-word – ‘crisis’ – is oft-overused in public discourse. But when even the head of the state’s chamber of commerce is liberally throwing it around – and Business SA is a body whose members thrive on confidence – it is fair to say faith in the Government’s capacity to engineer a solution is at low ebb.

“I know we can do this,” exhorts Weatherill.

The problem is, he is in a dwindling minority.

Tom Richardson is a senior journalist with InDaily. His political column is published on Fridays.

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