‘We were right’: The Right

After four years of being marginalised in the state Liberal party-room, it’s hardly surprising that members of the Right faction are this week raising their voices the loudest on the Liberal side.

With the party in disarray – many frontbenchers still can’t confidently claim victory in their seats, while their two campaign figureheads Steven Marshall and Rob Lucas have moved on – new Premier Peter Malinauskas has a relatively clear run as the Liberals regroup.

Federal senator and Right faction figurehead Alex Antic has been among the former government’s most vocal critics, sending a scathing assessment of the campaign and its preceding four years to party members, which he then backed up in an interview on ABC Radio Adelaide this morning.

“There’s a lot of home truths that need to be flushed out once and for all,” said Antic, who led a recent charge to reclaim the party’s conservative heritage by the en masse recruitment of hundreds of members of Evangelical Christian communities around the state – a move revealed by InDaily and initially blocked by the moderate-dominated state executive.

“What do people expect from the Liberal Party? My view would be that when they vote for a Liberal Party, they vote for a party that will uphold Liberal values – and that’s not what we saw in the last four years.”

By which, he said, he meant not just “the egregious social policy agenda that our party facilitated” – against which he’s previously railed, and for which his factional colleagues blame ex-Attorney-General Vickie Chapman (for whom Saturday’s result has finally clarified whether or not she was still technically a minister).

He also cited 2019’s land tax debacle “that offended our base in the most shocking way” and the decision to scrap the Adelaide 500.

Antic and his faction are stepping into the Liberal gulf to demand “root and branch” renewal; unsurprisingly, with a focus on bringing in Right-aligned talent.

“The continual drift to the Left has not been a success,” he said, adding that it “almost feels sometimes like the Liberal Party bus has been hijacked”.

Employing a football analogy, the senator declared that “when you lose and come bottom by not winning a game for the year, it’s very rare that the coach survives and it’s very rare that the captain survives” – suggesting a thorough cleanout in both the parliamentary party and state HQ.

However, with the party-room already dominated by moderates, the party failing to pick up seats while losing several and the new additions in vacant Liberal strongholds hailing from the Marshall Left (the Premier’s former spin doctor Ashton Hurn in Schubert and ousted frontbencher Rachel Sanderson’s chief-of-staff Penny Pratt in Frome), the Right have a way to go before such calls are heeded.

Still, Antic had a withering retort to the suggestion that moderates consider his anti-Marshall advocacy ‘publicity-seeking’.

“Well look, there’s different types of publicity aren’t there?” he said.

“There’s the publicity that’s attracted by trying to bring the party back to its core values, the values of Robert Menzies [and] there’s the publicity that’s attracted by achieving a record loss in an election.”

Touche.

Party president Legh Davis didn’t respond to messages from InDaily today, but he did send an SMS to ABC interviewer David Bevan, which was read out while Antic was on air.

“I am confident that history will recognise the vision of Steven Marshall in leading the generational shift in the SA economy, attracting international and national business and providing jobs for the future,” it said.

“Compare that to the Weatherill Government paying companies to set up in SA…

“And then of course there is the regeneration of an organisation: as you’d expect, the party will be reviewing the state election result and all relevant aspects.”

Asked to comment on Davis’s buoyant assessment, Antic responded: “I wish the voters of the state shared his confidence.”

Legh Davis with Marshall confidant Paul Armanas. Photo: Tony Lewis / InDaily

Sisterly love

Some of Antic’s factional colleagues pointedly failed to enter state parliament, with conservative-aligned Rowan Mumford and Ben Hood both failing against ex-Liberal independents in Kavel and Mount Gambier respectively.

Hood’s loss was not unexpected, and seemed to be felt most acutely in the Labor camp – where his sister Lucy ran a successful campaign to unseat Sanderson in the seat of Adelaide.

Siblings Lucy and Ben Hood.

Lucy Hood was quite emotional when asked about Ben’s campaign in the election aftermath, revealing the pair had spoken around midnight on polling night.

“There were a few tears [but] they were happy tears,” she told reporters, as those tears resurfaced.

“Ben is my best friend; we speak every day… he was so incredibly proud of me, as I am of him.

“He’s a remarkable human being… he’s our family’s rock; he was there when mum would go to work late at night, he would cook us dinner, put us to bed.”

Ben was 20 and Lucy 15 when their stepfather Patrick died.

“He’s such a wonderful person in his community, and I’m just so incredibly proud of him and I can’t wait to see what he achieves,” she went on.

While the media formalities went on, she was watched proudly by husband Jarrad Pilkington – a former media adviser to Jay Weatherill. Their two kids Audrey and Ned, however, were more industrious: making a makeshift cubby house out of their mum’s corflutes, which had very much done their original job.

Audrey makes a corflute teepee for Ned, below.

Shitting it in

While emotions ran high, the overwhelming one in the ALP was elation as the election dust settled.

While Malinasukas welcomed some of his new MPs on Sunday in Prospect (more have since been added to the successful tally), returned Mawson veteran Leon Bignell wandered past – having stayed the night in town after the Adelaide Oval festivities.

Malinauskas greets Bignell amid Sunday’s afterglow. Photo: Tom Richardson / InDaily

After a brief exchange of congratulations, Bignell reflected on having turned Labor’s most marginal seat into a stronghold, with a new margin of around 15 per cent.

That’s from a predicted Liberal margin of 4.5 per cent after the 2016 boundary redistribution.

“I wear my heart on my sleeve: show the love, give the love, listen to people and go to people like Pete and Stephen Mullighan and try and get money for them to take to the election,” he said.

“To get all that love back yesterday – being on the booth and just having people walking past, going ‘Biggles you’re going to shit this in’…” he grinned.

SELFIE TIME: Malinauskas with new MPs Nadia Clancy, Olivia Savvas, Rhiannon Pearce, Erin Thompson, Lucy Hood and deputy leader Susan Close. Photo: Tom Richardson / InDaily

As indeed he did as, for the first time in 16 years, he finally finds himself a safe-seat MP.

“Jeepers,” he said. “I know how Mick Atkinson felt now!”