Greg Norman likes to stare at himself in the bathroom mirror each day while, ahem, bare-arsed naked.

The champion golfer revealed this in an ABC Australian Story profile back in 2013. The episode, no longer available on iView, is hard to track down, but golfing journalist Peter Stone recounts it in a piece he wrote on The Shark at the time.

“I always looked at myself in the mirror, to this day I still do, and not cleaning your teeth, not preening, brushing your hair or making yourself look good but actually standing there – if you want to do it bare-arsed naked, do it bare-arsed naked,” Norman said.

“Stand there and look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself two or three questions about something you may have screwed up that day. You look at the mirror and tell (ask) yourself: What did you do wrong that day or (was it) something you have been proud of?”

It strikes me as a worthwhile thing to do if you’re a bloke with a body like Norman, still ripped at 67.

I’m only a year older, but when trying to focus on the mirror after waking up, I no longer recognise the person staring back. I ask myself: Who are you and what have you done with Matthew Abraham?

We can only guess what a bare-arsed naked Norman thought when he stared into the mirror on Monday night. It’s a fair bet he might have said: “You little bewdy.”

That morning, he and Premier Peter Malinauskas revealed that Norman’s controversial, Saudi-backed LIV Golf outfit will stage tournaments at Grange Golf Club in a four-year deal.

The Premier won’t reveal how much hard-earned taxpayer cash he’s throwing at Norman, net worth $400 million, or the Saudis, net worth measured in Olympic swimming pools brimming with cash, due to “commercial-in-confidence”. Cue canned laughter at that old chestnut.

But the Premier did flag that after luring the AFL’s Magic Round, the Saudi golf deal had pretty well drained the rest of the dosh in the state’s $40m “special events” fund created in its first budget earlier this year.

Let’s imagine Premier Malinauskas, inspired by the latest new best friend we have purchased for him, also staring into the mirror that night, if not buck-naked then at least shirtless. What might he be asking himself? What might the mirror be saying back?

It would be saying, Peter, you’ve had a crap week.

As one political source put it to me this week, the Mr Smith Goes to Washington meets Borat dialogue has a limited shelf life.

The Malinauskas-Norman golf deal isn’t a “coup” for our state, it’s simply a bad joke.

The Premier can spin it all he likes, and he’s been spinning like a front-loader all week, but the bottom line is that this is an event that links our happy little state to the rulers of Saudi Arabia, a state with a lamentable human rights record, where homosexuality is a crime, where women aren’t even second-class citizens and where political opponents, dissenters and journalists are jailed or even murdered.

Little wonder that even his own Labor Caucus is spewing, with The Advertiser reporting that at least five female MPs criticised the Premier during Tuesday’s caucus meeting for not consulting his backbench on the LIV Golf decision.

Good on them if they did, because Labor boasts endlessly about its fine record on gender equality and the high number of Labor women sitting in parliament.

Greg Norman dismisses criticism that the Saudi-backed event is “sportswashing” – the practice of using elite sport not to launder money, but to launder your abysmal human rights record.

“That’s just white noise,” he said. “That’s somebody else trying to create another hurdle for us to jump.”

But before the term “sportswashing” was invented, this is precisely why South African sport, including golf, was put in the deep freeze by so many countries in the 1970s, as part of slowly mounting sanctions to force the nation to abandon apartheid.

Some 700 anti-apartheid protestors were reportedly arrested around Australia during the all-white South African Springboks Rugby Union tour of Australia, including in Adelaide.

This may all be water off a shark’s back for Norman, but he doesn’t have to worry about voters. Premier Malinauskas doesn’t have that luxury.

The Malinauskas defence was that he was “very conscious of the argument that all the establishment monopolist forces try and push around for their own benefit”. Establishment monopolist forces? Could we have that in plain English, please? Are we talking about Darth Vader or what?

And now we have the Premier trying to explain his use of the dreadful, sexist phrase “sloppy seconds” in a media conference last week, explaining why he’d wanted to secure the AFL’s Magic Round against other bidding states.

The Liberals and the Greens jointly called for an apology, explaining that the remark is a crude slang term for a woman who has many sexual partners. Greens MLC Tammy Franks says the term applies to group sex or gang rape.

The Premier told ABC Radio Adelaide he “actually thought it was a reference to leftover seconds on a plate in respect to food”, but having been made aware of its meaning wouldn’t use it again.

Having watched the Fox Sports video of the media conference, AFL chief Gillon McLachlan appears to smirk when the Premier uses the phrase, and people can be heard sniggering off camera.

It’s a struggle to believe that a political leader who has spent so many hours in blokey footy change rooms with his beloved Adelaide University Blacks, wouldn’t know what “sloppy seconds” means in a sexual context. As one political source put it to me this week, the Mr Smith Goes to Washington meets Borat dialogue has a limited shelf life.

But even if we accept him at his word, it’d help if he wasn’t smiling when apologising for the cameras.

What’s extraordinary is that while the Premier was gaily teeing-off with Norman’s circus, thousands of South Australians were struggling to deal with damage wreaked by last Saturday’s storm and an electricity outage described as the worst since the state-wide blackout of 2016.

Thousands of homes were without power, many still are, supermarkets and cafes had to ditch freezers full of ruined produce, houses and property were trashed, schools were closed and solar households were on notice to switch off their panels to avoid blowing a fuse in the grid.

The Opposition Leader David Speirs visited Seafood Works in Newton on Wednesday, one of the businesses struggling to cope with the blackouts, to at least fly the flag.

The Premier was missing in action, perhaps stuck in a sand trap on the ninth.

When I asked his office on Thursday morning if the Premier had visited any businesses or households knocked around by the storm, the reply came back that, coincidentally, he was doing so that very day.

His office explained they had an initial plan to visit on Sunday “but the advice was he’d risk getting in the way of the clean up”.

The man who hopped into the back of ambulances to witness the ramping crisis first-hand, and jumped into a golf cart with The Shark, should have jumped into a big white car to inspect the havoc wreaked on people’s lives by the storms, on day one. How bad does it have to get?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what do you reckon?

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.