There is something slightly breathtaking about the chutzpah required for Labor’s education spokeswoman Susan Close to declare the Liberal Government’s plans to expand private-sector contestability in the skills training market as “the beginning of the end for TAFE”.

After all, Labor failed to work out an adequate model for skills training in the 16 years it held government, and only five months ago Close, then minister, was in damage control over TAFE’s substandard courses, which a government-instigated review had failed to rectify.

But then, there’s plenty of breathtaking chutzpah on both sides of politics these days.

When the Weatherill Government first announced its Transforming Health capital works spend that would consolidate rehab services in a new facility at Flinders, then-Liberal health spokesman Stephen Wade was, predictably, the first to criticise.

“Labor has largely abandoned its election promises and will spend $159 million on largely replicating existing rehabilitation facilities that are being lost at the Repat and Hampstead,” he declared.

Last weekend, however, the now-Health Minister toured the new Technology Gym at FMC’s Rehab Centre, enthusing at the “state-of-the art technology”.

A media release said Wade declared it “a pleasure” to visit “one of the state’s busiest hospitals and meet patients [who are] using some of the most modern technology to aid their recovery”.

“It’s very exciting to get a glimpse of these machines today and see how far rehabilitation practices are progressing,” he said.

“It’s great to see FMC positioning itself as a centre of excellence for rehabilitation and ensuring its community has the best resources available to suit their needs.”

It’s quite an about-face for Wade who, in recent years, had become one of the Liberal Opposition’s most relentless attack dogs, ensuring there was rarely a day that the travails of the state’s health system were far from the public mind.

But if Wade’s bid to reinvent himself as a champion of the state’s health system shows some audacity, he’s far from alone.

Take Energy Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan, for instance, who this week enthusiastically sung the praises of Tesla’s big battery near Jamestown – surely the single project most synonymous with Jay Weatherill’s premiership.

“Within the first month of it being installed, it helped to smooth out two major trips,” DVHP told an Energy Storage Conference.

“I’m very glad Tesla is working with our Government – it’s a great partnership shining a spotlight on SA.”

Given the Marshall Opposition’s relentless attack on Labor’s “ideological” renewables focus, it’s a rhetorical about-face worthy of scrutiny in Elon Musk’s Pravda.

Investment Minister David Ridgway struck a similar tone at an Australian Energy Storage Alliance Market Update this morning, pumping up “SA’s reputation as the nation’s leader in renewable energy and low-carbon initiatives” which, he said, was creating “fantastic opportunities for investment”.

https://twitter.com/ridgwda/status/999803033662836736

“Simply, there has never been a better time to do business in South Australia,” Ridgway breathlessly told the gathering, rather bizarrely citing a KPMG report from 2017 – when Labor was in office – which found Adelaide outranked Melbourne as the most cost-competitive city in Australia.

Never mind all the pre-election guff form his leader Steven Marshall about the prohibitive cost of doing business in SA!

No, Ridgey is now a true believer.

“We’ve got a highly skilled workforce, cutting-edge research and development, competitive labour costs and a superior lifestyle,” he gushed – declaring SA the “renewable energy capital of Australia”, whose “vast natural resource assets are underpinned by a supportive State Government… and a respected regulatory framework creating an environment for low-risk, sustainable investment”.

He then went on to sing the praises of wind farms, helpfully not distributing to the gathered prospective investments his old pamphlet about how frightening they are.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that.

Governments are supposed to spruik for their state, and Oppositions are meant to provide a point of critique.

It’s just that almost the entire text of Ridgway’s speech could just as easily have been delivered by Weatherill, or Tom Koutsantonis, in 2017.

All of which has many Labor supporters unsure of what aspect of the Liberal agenda they’re supposed to be railing against.

Far from winding back many key tenets of Labor’s agenda, thus far most portfolio areas have been business as usual, with commitments to honour existing contracts or commitments in areas such as the Virtual Power Plant and promised transport infrastructure, including the city bikeway network.

So instead, the common claim is that they’re bereft of ideas, content to take credit for cutting ribbons at the openings of projects Labor put in train.

Presumably those peddling this line would be even more outraged if the Libs had simply canned some of these projects of principle?

If we take the partisan politics out of this for a moment – can we! – the emerging theme here is consensus.

Worthwhile projects carry on, and importantly there is some semblance of policy continuity and certainty for stakeholders.

The Libs will be putting their own platform into practice over the coming years, attempting to convince parliament on the merits of shop-trading deregulation and council rate-capping, while scrapping payroll tax for small businesses and reforming the age at which school children progress to high school.

These are points of difference which can be debated – or, in the case of the payroll tax policy, quickly conceded – by the Labor Opposition.

But criticising the Government for not scrapping the entire Labor agenda seems a triumph of partisanship over policy.

If the SA economy is to genuinely flourish, it needs some semblance of certainty – not the constant threat that projects will be announced, tendered and then jettisoned on political whim.

Does the rhetorical shift involve a degree of hypocrisy? Of course.

But hypocrisy is the language of politics.

Political rhetoric tends to last as long as the current electoral cycle.

The projects delivered in that time will stand for far longer than that, regardless of who you barrack for.

Tom Richardson is a senior reporter at InDaily.