Finance Minister Simon Birmingham claims some South Australian voters were “potentially tricked” by Labor’s state election campaign after the party secured a decisive victory.
The most senior South Australian politician in the Morrison government on Sunday sought to downplay the federal implications of the state Liberals’ stunning loss after just one term in power.
Liberal Party Premier Steven Marshall conceded defeat on Saturday night, with big swings towards Labor making Peter Malinauskas the first leader to defeat an incumbent government since the pandemic began.
The ABC’s election analysis is projecting Labor will win 26 seats and the Liberals 15, with five independents.
Appearing on ABC’s Insiders, Senator Birmingham appeared reluctant to concede there were any lessons to be learned at a federal level despite statewide swings towards Labor of more than 5 per cent on a two-party preferred basis.
He said he would work as closely as he could with Mr Malinauskas, but claimed Labor had run a singularly focused “scare campaign” on hospitals and ambulance ramping.
“I do think that Labor’s campaign was effective, but I also think, as the Electoral Commission found, that it was based on misleading statements and that of course is something that does mean that some voters potentially were tricked,” he told the ABC.
“But equally I think Covid-19 did play a very difficult role for Steven Marshall.”
A Labor election advertisement about ambulance ramping in South Australia was last week found to have breached the state’s Electoral Act because it was “inaccurate and misleading”.
Labor was ordered to take down the commercial, which featured an ambulance officer claiming ramping was “worse than ever”, because it contradicted SA Health data that showed ramping times had markedly declined.
Last week the state’s ambulance union said five people had died while waiting for paramedics to respond to calls for help in the fortnight beforxjmtzywe the election.
And the issues of ambulance ramping and hospital wait times seemed to resonate with voters.
Senator Birmingham claimed there was a possibility Labor would collude with unions on campaign “tactics” ahead of the federal election.
“I think part of the lessons are in terms of campaign strategy tactics and understand where Labor will come from,” he said on Sunday.
“The lessons in terms of ensuring that we define the questions for voters going into the campaign and in the federal election, we are facing some of the most uncertain global times that we’ve seen for a long period.”
However, he said no government was perfect and that the federal election was “always going to be a challenging one” for the Coalition.
