Double, double toil and trouble, a vegan “solstice soiree” in beautiful downtown Semaphore remains the most unlikely of cauldrons to brew up a political coup.

It conjures up images of Stonehenge rather than Semaphore, of hippies in Birkenstocks and socks, or pagans wearing long dark robes and hoods, letting it all hang out.

Instead, the winter solstice knees-up at Sarah’s Sister’s Café on Semaphore Road was most likely just a ripping good night out in June 2010.

The gifted, now freelance journalist and film writer Penelope Debelle, whose career spans Fairfax, News Corp, InReview and many stops in between, broke the solstice yarn. She remembers the evening as “cold and wet and witchy”.

It was a good night out for the local member Jay Weatherill, then a frontbencher in the Rann Government, a government that had just limped home in the state election a few months earlier. It’s a night out that has relevance, and lessons, 25 years later, for another Labor Premier, Peter Malinauskas.

Weatherill used the solstice soiree to give what has been dubbed his “debate and decide” speech about the way governments communicate with the community.

“They call it the announce and defend versus the debate and decide model, and we have to be in the latter, we have to be in the debate and decide”, he said.

While it sounds innocuous, it proved incendiary back in 2010, lighting the kindling under Weatherill’s audacious, and successful, torching of his Premier, Mike Rann, a year later.

So what’s the big deal about this “announce and defend” and “debate and decide” business? Let’s backtrack a little.

The phrase “announce and defend” was increasingly being used to describe the Rann Government’s operating style. In brief, it was seen to be arrogant and out-of-touch.

While it retained majority government at the 2010 election, the result saw an 8.4 per cent swing against the government, erasing Rann’s 2006 landslide swing of 7.7 per cent. Labor skulked back in with a two-party preferred vote of 48.4 per cent.

Rann had been dogged during the campaign by the Chantelois affair – allegations he had an affair with a parliament house worker, Michelle Chantelois, which he denies. It didn’t help.

Weatherill argued Labor had to dramatically change how it connected with South Australians, at every level. His “debate and decide” pitch couldn’t have been more pointed, poking a stick at Rann’s much-vaunted mastery of spin.

In government, he largely practised what he had preached during that winter solstice, even if it sometimes bit him on the bum. His royal commission into a nuclear industry for South Australia came famously unstuck when a “citizen’s jury” he created to consider the commission’s findings said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to a nuke future.

It’s hard to put your finger on a particular policy model that marked the one-term Marshall Liberal Government, maybe because for most of it Premier Steven Marshall handed the reins to his COVID supremo, Police Commissioner Grant Stevens, and SA’s chief public health officer, Professor Nicola Spurrier.

Sometimes his own party room, and very often the public, seemed in the dark. His promise to build a $700 million city stadium – skewered by Labor as just a basketball stadium – appeared to have dropped into Adelaide from Planet Zork.

Perhaps we can call this the “announce and whatever” model – it was one that ended in tears.

Premier Malinauskas has a habit of congratulating his government on its wisdom and telling voters what they want from government.

It’s still early days, as the Labor Government has safely navigated its first winter solstice in office, but a definite policy style is emerging under Premier Peter Malinauskas.

It’s the “decide, review and congratulate” model, a modern tweak on Rann’s “announce and defend” style, but one that carries the same risks.

Since its election win, the Malinauskas Government has placed critical election policies, with price tags running into the billions, on ice while they are “reviewed”.

The big budget items now delayed include the $9 billion South Road completion (likely to cost much more), the $2 billion new Women’s and Children’s Hospital (now north of $3 billion), the $200 million Tarrkarri Centres for First Nations Cultures and the promise to extend pre-school to all three-year-olds, costs unknown but likely to be hugely expensive.

In all four cases, the government had made decisions before generating a “review”. It had decided not to swallow the former Marshall Government’s South Road plans, it had decided it didn’t want the new WCH built on an identified site next to the new RAH, it had decided it didn’t like the Marshall plans for a First Nations centre on Lot 14 and it had decided it couldn’t afford its promise of a pre-school free-for-all.

Having made these decisions, quite possibly while still in Opposition, it then set up the reviews. While the reviews may be justified, in each case they will result in significant delays to projects or policies voters thought would be well underway or nearing completion before the next election.

The Premier has launched an expensive royal commission into his pre-school promise, headed by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard for a fee of $450,000, probably a bargain these days.

Yet from a cold start, the former Liberal Education Minister John Gardner steered the transition of Year 7s to secondary school, the biggest education shake-up for 100 years in this state, and delivered it in four years. He didn’t need a royal commission to get the job done.

Opening the recent ALP state convention, the premier told delegates of his shock when told the new women’s and children’s hospital should be built on the historic Thebarton Police Barracks site, vaporising a swag of heritage-listed buildings.

“I thought ‘Oh shit, we have a fight on our hands’, but we made the decision,” he said.

How odd. The hospital review group, chaired by Jim Hallion AM, a former CEO of the Premier’s Department, also included senior representatives from the departments of Health, Infrastructure and Transport, Treasury and Finance and Renewal SA.

Did the Premier really have no clue at all, not even the slightest inkling, about the thought processes of his review group until his “oh shit” moment?

After the decisions, and the reviews, we have the final component – the congratulations.

Premier Malinauskas has a habit of congratulating his government on its wisdom and telling voters what they want from government.

Expanding on the new WCH decision to his captive audience at the ALP state conference, he said: “Since we’ve made the announcement, overwhelmingly, I think, the people of South Australia have said ‘that’s exactly what we elected you to do’.”

Watch for it and you’ll see the pattern of self-praise. For Mike Rann, this would have been seen as arrogance. Maybe, for an Instagram generation where ego outpunches humility, it’s just normal.

Still, it’s something for him to watch, just in case the decide, review and congratulate model ends up a little cold, wet and witchy.

Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.

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