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July 6, 2009
The bare facts. There was a leadership spill in the SA Liberal Party on Saturday between the current leader Martin Hamilton-Smith and contender Vicki Chapman, the deputy leader. Hamilton won with a 11-10 victory. He told the fractured Liberal partyroom he would stand aside. Then he changed his mind. He then said there would be another leadership spill on Wednesday to sort things out.
The leadership contenders now Vicki Chapman, Isobel Redmond who won the Deputy leadership on the Saturday, and former frontbencher Mitch Williams, who quit the shadow cabinet a week ago after failing to convince Hamilton-Smith to stand aside for the good of the party.
What a mess. Why didn't Hamilton Smith just stand aside for Chapman? Make it clean? The SA Liberals are in no position to take the fight to the Rann Government in 2010. In the 2006 election the two-party result in Adelaide was 62.6-37.4 in favour of the Rann Government, with the statewide Labor 2-party preferred vote was 56.8% The Liberals face electoral destruction, due to the ongoing infighting from bitter divisions along family and factional lines.
The Liberals look like a bunch of clowns in a rundown fleapit circus who spend so much of their time and energy fighting amongst each other that they have forgotten about the show. They have little chance of gaining any of Labor's marginal seats in Adelaide in 2010 and may even have to set aside hopes of returning to government in 2014.
I have no idea what the factional agendas are in this current leadership tussle. I suspect they have little to do with public policy, and much more to do with the settling of old political scores. They do need some form of circuit breaker to rupture this self-destructive cycle flowing from the baggage of the past.
Surely a badly wounded Hamilton-Smith is finished as leader. He has bought political disasters on himself and has little credibility, now that the political drama, from the fallout from the fake ALP documents Hamilton-Smith used in late April to try to discredit the Rann government, has become such a farce.
Hamilton-Smith was assured of a clear run to the state election in March 2010 by those he thought posed the greatest threat: deputy leader Vickie Chapman and the man he knifed to get the top job, Iain Evans. Hamilton-Smith had promised Chapman that he would stand aside if he lost the election, to ensure a smooth leadership transition. Then Hamilton-Smith destroyed himself with the dodgy ALP documents affair.
Update
Martin Hamilton-Smith, who seized the leadership of the troubled South Australian Liberal Party just over two years ago from Iain Evans in a bloody partyroom coup, has announced that he will not stand for the party leadership on Wednesday. He let loose at the ill-disciplined party and the moderate faction forces he blamed for his demise--- a "factional stitch-up" he called it.
That leaves Chapman (former deputy leader), Redmond (current deputy leader) and Williams in the contest, with Williams given little chance of victory. This will be the third Liberal Leader since the 2006 election. What will happen next is female leader of the Liberal Party--- the first since NSW's Kerry Chikarovski was deposed in 2002. No doubt, many male members of the party will be deeply worried about having a female leader.
All this leadership conflict has pushed the solid work the Liberals did on water issues in 2008. Work on policy issues have been forgotten in 2009. Apparently the leadership contest was not about policy differences but about who was the best person to sell the message.
What message? All I know is that the Liberals proposed a stadium ( to give the SANFL a city stadium of its own) as the centrepiece of a western CBD redevelopment plan to revitalise the city. They proposed this in opposition to the Rann Government's planned new Royal Adelaide Hospital on the same site (at the Port Rd-West Tce corner). But they were never committed to the stadium.
But they are right in that this precinct, is the undeveloped jewel in Adelaide’s crown and is blighted by ugly rail yards; and with Victoria Square no longer the centre of Adelaide. Increasingly community events and focus have moved to the banks of the Torrens. So we must “look to the river” for the future----it is a site for a Federation Square (as in Melbourne) or a Riverbank precinct (as in Brisbane and Melbourne). These are good ideas.
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The Libs here seem to be marginally more relevant then Family Farce. It seems to me that they are more of a social organisation then a political one these days. Who ever heard of a serious policy out of the Libs in Adelaide?