Most would agree that South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas is an extraordinarily adept politician, perhaps even a generational talent. He possesses a considerable ability to communicate clearly and control the narrative, skills most apparent when his carefully considered strategies unfold as planned. However, when things go awry, the wheels tend to come off, at least temporarily.
Writers Week Controversy
Consider the fallout from the Premier’s role in the cancellation of Palestinian Australian author, lawyer, and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s appearance at Adelaide Writers Week earlier this year. Regardless of one’s stance on political censorship of the arts—this author opposes it—the Government’s response misread the moment and fell severely lacking. This led to the cancellation of the entire festival and a replacement event at Adelaide Town Hall that reinstated Dr Abdel-Fattah’s platform.
Some explain this stumble by noting that the Premier, more comfortable at a football match than a literary festival, misunderstood the politics and passions of the arts community. This may be true, but it is only part of the answer. The salient fact is that the politics surrounding the Writers Week cancellation, in the wake of the Bondi massacre, were febrile and moved extremely quickly. For someone who prefers long-planned, calculated politics, that environment proved extremely challenging. Considered positioning gave way to indignation, frustration, and uncharacteristic miscalculations.
Changing Political Landscape
This tendency is unfortunate for a leader in a time of significant upheaval. The teal wave of the 2022 Federal election has been followed by a surge of support for One Nation, upending Australian politics. While some see these as opposing forces, they are actually a mutual rejection of politics as normal. Across the spectrum, voters are frustrated by cost-of-living pressures, policy inertia, and a system seen to favour entrenched interests.
Energy Policy Mess
This brings us to this week’s energy policy mess in South Australia. The gas lobby held its big annual conference, humbly billed as a key national forum that “sets the agenda for Australia’s energy future.” With this backdrop, the Premier announced late last week that his government would pre-emptively lift a ban on fracking for gas in some of the state’s best farming land. With complete control of the lower house and an upper house stacked with a fresh crossbench of One Nation and Liberal MPs, the passage of his pro-gas bill might have appeared guaranteed.
What the Premier failed to realise was that the national conversation around gas has changed dramatically. The push for a 25 per cent gas export tax at the federal level has united an extraordinarily broad coalition, from Clive Palmer to the Greens, while showing Australians how comprehensively they are being ripped off by multinational gas companies. Australians increasingly understand that there is no gas supply problem, but a gas export problem. Around 80 per cent of gas extracted in Australia is sent overseas, producing massive profits for multinationals that pay little to no tax. More than half of exported gas is given away for free. The situation is so bad that the Japanese Government makes more money from taxing Australia’s gas exports than the Australian Government does from exporting it.
If a 25 per cent gas export tax were in place, it would raise around $17 billion a year for Australian schools, hospitals, and essential services. National polling shows voters are frustrated and increasingly supportive of such a tax.
Political Fallout
In this fast-moving environment, the Premier decided to do the gas lobby another favour. It took just days for the Greens, One Nation, and the Liberals to rule out backing his big gas plan, meaning a move that once seemed politically sure was effectively dead on arrival. This episode reveals how significantly energy politics has turned on its head in South Australia, where Labor now backs almost unrestrained gas expansion, while One Nation wants to go full Norway and nationalise the industry.
The larger question remains: will the Premier read the winds of change, or will he be caught flat-footed again due to his devotion to the politics of a bygone era where gas was good? The positive news for Malinauskas is that, after his resounding election win in March, he has nearly four years to demonstrate that his government serves South Australians, not the gas industry.
Noah Schultz-Byard is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at the Australia Institute. This article was originally published on The Point and republished under Creative Commons — Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International — CC BY-ND 4.0.
