One victim of the election debacle wryly reflects that the latest chapter in SA Liberal Party failure shows the same lessons of its troubled history going unlearned.
“You look back at the last 50 years of the Liberal Party’s history in government, and it’s an exercise in great promise being dashed – very, very quickly and spectacularly,” says Steve Murray, a former party president who lost his seat of Davenport in the Labor rout.
He likens the last four years, culminating in the now-widely panned Liberal campaign, to the plot of Disney’s , where an unsuspecting move unleashes an epochal swarm of unintended consequences.
“They’re like, ‘I didn’t see that coming,’” he muses.
Another senior Liberal says Marshall “deserves credit for broadening the state’s economic base” and addressing cost of living pressures.
“But the negatives are that he ran the Government as if he was running a business, not a political party,” they said.
“He wasn’t attuned to having contrary advice – and he was in a state of denial.
“He was getting market research that he just didn’t believe in and he was dismissive of it… he’d go out and people would take selfies with him, walk across the street to meet him and all that sort of thing, and he took that as enormous support for what he was doing.
“He didn’t have many people who would argue the point with him in his office, that he’d take any notice of. He was just dismissive of market research [and] wouldn’t believe it.”
The roots of this self-belief may well stem from Marshall’s 2018 success, which allowed some in his inner circle to believe they had cracked a new code for election campaigning.
After their shock defeat in 2014, a huge investment in data analysis ushered in a vastly different campaign style, which the then-Opposition Leader detailed to in 2017.
“The next campaign will not just be incrementally different, but a step change,” he said at the time.
“People are very cynical about billboard slogans – what they want to see is what’s going to be important to them.
“One thing we’ve got to do is understand the values of people in individual electorates, and that will inform what we’ll take to the next election.”
Marshall said that statewide messaging “didn’t resonate in 2014” and was “the old paradigm”.
“This concept of a statewide two-party-preferred vote informing strategy… xjmtzywthose days are gone… we made this decision in March 2014… to do that groundwork, hearing what these [individual] aspirations are and addressing those issues one by one.”
This might explain why successive statewide polls predicting a Liberal wipeout failed to shift his campaign trajectory.
One insider says the seeds of the downfall came late in 2021 – particularly a border re-opening which Marshall announced to his party colleagues via a WhatsApp message.
But other issues were digging into the Government’s poll standing, including a refusal to deal with the controversy surrounding his then-deputy Vickie Chapman and the erosion of the Government’s parliamentary majority.
“At that point, he wasn’t listening – and continued not to listen to the market research,” the source says.
“Dumping the V8s” was also seen as a major own-goal.
“That was a dumb decision, particularly in the north-eastern suburbs,” said one insider.
But the malaise went back much longer.
Marshall’s refusal to bring conservative MPs into the tent – instead leaving them marginalised – went against advice not just from the Right but from moderate confidants.
“He told that was one of the main issues he needed to address,” said one.
He never did.
A key insider said that had the election been held before October the Liberals “would have won easily”.
But instead, their support evaporated through the Christmas Omicron surge.
“When you look at it it’s an object tale of what happens in human nature,” says Murray.
“You give someone unfettered control, and they’ll act in a manner whereby they’ll pick their friends, they’ll pick their team – a bunch of acolytes and yes-people – and you see all sorts of weird things done as a result.”
Those, he says, include the “basketball stadium” – he pointedly uses the term adopted pejoratively by Labor – and a 2019 fight with many traditional Liberal supporters over land tax.
