Don’t take this the wrong way, because the woolly jumper has its place.

That place should be when working in the garden, perhaps matched with an old pair of Fletcher Jones wool blend trousers and a floppy hat.

That place definitely isn’t on the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, on television, on Wednesday.

Will someone please buy David Speirs a white shirt, suit and a tie or three.

Sure, I’ve been known to dash out to the shops in my favorite watermelon-red trackies from Lowes at Castle Plaza, orange Crocs and my old 891 fleecy windcheater with a broken zip.

But I don’t have an election to win.

Political leaders should look like they mean business. It’s hard to take new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seriously when he’s moseying aboard Air Force One wearing tight jeans or chugging a beer at a rock concert in a faded T-shirt like a grey nomad who should’ve gone to SpecSavers.

Which oddly enough brings us to the Report into Recent Historical Data, South Australian State Elections and The Marshall Government 2018-2022 (2022 State Election Report and an opinion of the results since 1970). Phew.

This title belongs to a report prepared and presented to the SA Liberal Party as an unofficial explainer about why the party keeps losing elections, why it lost the last one, and why it’ll keep losing them if it doesn’t start respecting its defeated, demoralised and downtrodden members.

Election post-mortems are a dime a dozen and most end up in a shoebox in the shed. This one is different and deserves wide circulation among the party membership.

What makes it unique for the SA Liberals is that it dissects the party’s many palpable failures, not from the usual top-down perspective of elected MPs, but from the bottom-up – how the party’s problems are seen by the members at the bottom of the pond. It’s not pretty.

This “unofficial” report was prepared by Christopher Moriarty, former party president from 2005-2007 and John Rowley, who’s been a continuous party member for 70 years. They say it was “presented at no cost to the Division”. It is an absolute cracker.

Neither gentleman had anything to do with their work finding its way into my hands.

When it first surfaced in the media last week, the focus was on a section dealing with “SA Liberal politicians and some perceptions of them by the voting public and Party members”. It is scathing.

The 23 pithy points include:

• not attending the party’s state council because of a “no votes for me at state council” mindset which is described as “insulting” to the party, the council and volunteers.
• not returning phone calls, emails or answering letters.
• only talking to other MPs at functions.
• some perceived as “being very lazy”, “talking at not to people” and failing to listen to voters with genuine concerns.
• arrogance of certain electorate staff.
• no parliamentary “attack dog” to match Labor’s Tom Koutsantonis.

It paints an appalling picture of elected MPs disengaged and aloof from their supporters. Members should be seen as the lifeblood of any political party, not plankton at the bottom of the pond.

Point 21 takes particular aim at the dress sense of Liberal MPs.

“The way that some MPs presented themselves (unironed shirts, pants, shoes not polished, hair unkempt, ties not done up etc) showed a disrespect of their position as leading figures in the community,” it says.

The final recommendations come back to this point, recommending that all MPs need to be “well dressed and groomed with a high degree of personal hygiene”.

Of course, their leader David Speirs has a “high degree of personal hygiene”. But he could ditch the Cardigan Man meets Puffer Jacket look, couldn’t he?

Many of these points, no doubt drawn from talking to members, make for entertaining reading. The well-presented data of previous and current defeats is particularly useful.

Members should be seen as the lifeblood of any political party, not plankton at the bottom of the pond

But the real value lies in the gritty exploration of the disconnect between the party’s parliamentary wing and its back office administrative “machine”.

It argues that rather than looking in the mirror, Liberal MPs always point the finger for electoral losses at the party’s state directors, describing this as the “most concerning excuse for failure”.

It lists the “Rolls Royce” directors the party has had over the years, including former federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin, Graeme Morris, who served as chief of staff to PM John Howard, Tony Nutt, who also served under Howard, Graeme Jaeschke, John Burston, another senior adviser to Howard, Julian Sheezel and Geoffrey Greene.

All have also served either as directors of the major Liberal machines in NSW, Queensland and Victoria, or as director or deputy in the federal machine, or both.

“Many of these directors have been scapegoated by the Parliamentary Party as a convenient shield against their own performance, decision making and ineffectual opposition,” it says. This is spot on.

The authors omit to mention the excellent Sascha Meldrum, who masterminded the high-tech data reform that propelled Steven Marshall to his one-term 2018 election victory, but who resigned after the March election defeat. Another convenient scapegoat.

By contrast, they point out the ALP rewards its state secretaries, giving its four most recent party bosses cosy seats in parliament. Attorney-General and Labor’s Upper Houser leader Kyam Maher, Ian Hunter and now Reggie Martin are in the cosy Legislative Council, Michael Brown is the MP for Florey – while another, John Hill, served as a senior minister in the Rann Government.

They should add former Senator and federal minister Chris Schacht to the list.

And another, Terry Cameron, nephew of Whitlam-era Minister Clyde Cameron, who was gifted an upper house seat vacancy, but sensationally quit Labor to support Liberal Premier John Olsen’s ETSA sale legislation in 1998. Don’t mention the war.

Why wasn’t an Upper House seat found for Ms Meldrum? It’s not like the party is top heavy with women in its blokey ranks.

The party is conducting a “formal review” led by Victorian Senator Jane Hume and Brian Loughnane, AO, hubby of Peta Credlin, columnist, Sky TV host of her own show and, of course, former chief of staff to former PM Tony Abbott.

They needn’t bother. The job’s already been done for them by Moriarty and Rowley.

Matthew Abraham’s political column is published on Fridays.

Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.