Marshall will step down as Liberal leader when the party-room meets in coming days to elect a replacement, but has repeatedly committed to staying on as a backbencher for his full four-year term.
“It was of course a very close result – we took on a premier in a safe Liberal seat and turned it into the most marginal seat in SA… in a state Liberal seat that included the suburbs of Kensington Park and Kensington Gardens,” said O’Hanlon, noting Marshall began the campaign on a nominal margin of 8.1 per cent after a 2020 boundary redistribution.
“My campaign was fought on a positive message of meeting people and acting on the issues that affected people in their everyday life,” she said.
But she railed against a controversial campaign by the SA branch of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, the CFMEU, which ran several corflutes attacking Marshall personally – including one that depicting him as a rat, emblazoned with the slogan “Marshall doesn’t give a Rats”.
The poster’s design. Photo: Facebook
“I have no interest in disparaging my opposition, whoever that may be,” O’Hanlon told assembled supporters and luminaries of both major parties at the Norwood Town Hall today.
“The CFMEU election posters that were put up depicting Steven Marshall as a rat… were reprehensible.
“I stood against Steven Marshall but there are values we share [including] respecting the outcome of free and fair elections.”
She said when she saw the corflutes in the Dunstan electorate “I made several requests of the CFMEU to remove the posters”.
“Some were taken down, but not all – I find that lamentable,” she said.
The union’s Divisional Branch Secretary Andrew Sutherland told “Whilst wexjmtzyw have respect for the candidate, and believe that the people of Dunstan would have been better served with her in parliament than Steven Marshall, the CFMEU is an independent organisation and makes its own decisions about political advertisements.”
He said the posters were effective and played no part in O’Hanlon’s defeat, arguing: “The CFMEU deployed corflutes in a number of key marginal seats, and in the substantial majority of the seats the incumbent Liberal Candidate was defeated.”
“We received overwhelmingly positive feedback on the corflutes from the general public, and we believe they were successful,” he said.
“The CFMEU will not hesitate to campaign in our members’ interests in elections.”
O’Hanlon on the campaign trail. Photo: Supplied
Marshall himself did not address the controversy in his speech today, but congratulated O’Hanlon “on the way you conducted yourself [in the campaign] and also for the way you were obviously genuinely interested in this electorate”.
He reiterated his “love” for the seat, saying he had “probably neglected it” in the past two years as Premier, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m certainly looking forward to getting back out and making sure I represent the people of this electorate going forward,” Marshall said.
“I was probably the worst candidate in the history of the party, because I was basically out everywhere else… shaking hands in lots of marginal seat campaigns – as it turned out, I turned into a marginal seat campaigner.”
However, he noted, the seat was previously a marginal when he won it from Labor in 2010.
The former Premier reflected on the democratic process, saying: “If you look around the world at the moment, it’s a pretty sorry state.”
“We do need to stop and reflect how fortunate we are to live in a country and a state where we can have elections every four years, that are contested in a friendly and respectful way.”
