Author: Bar Beach Swimmer

On Saturday, the Marshall Government went the way of the dodo with a significant swing to Labor on the 2pp. Interestingly, both Liberal and Labor commenters, Nicolle Flint (Lib-SA) and Amanda Rishworth (Lab-SA), on the Sky News post election analysis agreed with each other that it was the loss of the V8 Supercars to Adelaide in 2020, which was the dominant and deciding factor. On his show on Sunday night, Paul Murray also agreed – “it was the Supercars wot dun it,” he asserted.

I could not help but be a tad sceptical that a car race, which in its final year (2020) had attracted only 206,000 fans over the four days made all the difference, considering what the entire country, including South Australia, had been through in the last two years.

To me, the rationale for the election loss seems all too convenient and, besides, if Marshall’s polling through the last two years could be put down to one issue, surely he would have had enough nous to do a back flip and ensure the race returned to Adelaide post pandemic? Was this issue, as Murray and those South Australian HoRs were contending, really front and centre in this election?

InDaily, an Adelaide independent on-line news site reported 7/9/21 that a statewide poll conducted by Dynata, an on-line market research company, in July, for The Australia Institute – an organisation not known for leaning “right” – had the Liberals in front 51-49 on the 2pp, with health reported as the ‘…dominant issue of the campaign’ and noted that the polling ‘…mirror[ed] the last statewide poll taken in SA, a Sunday Mail-YouGov poll published in March.’

Nowhere in the polling reported by InDaily did the V8 Supercars decision make it as a concern of electors. In fact, InDaily noted that ‘[T]he Australia Institute’s SA Director Noah Schulz-Byard said the polling suggested “voters can expect a strong campaign with a focus on health [38%], the economy [24%] and climate change [(12%] over the next six months…In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, health is shaping up as the key political battleground in South Australia.”‘

Continue reading “It’s Hiding in Plain Sight.”

What did we learn from Scott Morrison’s mea culpa and precis of his Government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic at the National Press Club on Tuesday?

While referring to the up-ending of lives and livelihoods and how exhausting ‘…financially, emotionally and psychologically’ the last two years have been for Australians. Primarily, the decisions made, he said, were about ‘…getting the balance right [between the] twin goals to save lives and to save livelihoods, [and to] balance health objectives with our broader societal and economic wellbeing.’ What seemed the only concession was that ‘decisions are made in real time but with hindsight the view does change.’

Continue reading “The Prime Minister’s mea culpa?”

At the beginning of November, and after former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian had announced previously that on 1 December unvaccinated residents of NSW would be able to re-join the social fabric of the State, the new Premier, Dominic Perrottet, reneged, saying that the date would be changed to 15 December. In doing so, Perrottet explained that the delay was designed to ‘Unify the Community.’  The Government’s reasoning was that in certain LGAs/geographical areas vaccination rates were not as high as it wanted them to be. I remember thinking at the time that if some people had decided against being vaccinated – and had held out until then – what difference would another 15 days of F…ing them over make to get them to change their minds, apart from reducing to ten days their Christmas celebrations’ organising.  Basically, the decision seemed both petty and desperate to me. And, I thought, if a reasonable minority of residents of one LGA had made the decision not to be vaccinated, why would their vaccinated neighbours or perhaps another LGA’s residents see their decision as being anything like a Continue reading “It’s all about unifying the community”

Continue reading “Scott Morrison’s fig leaf”