Tony Abbott's South Australia problem: on the front line of the Coalition's war to win back votes
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Version 0 of 1. Perhaps the red line was crossed. After unemployment surged past 8% in South Australia last month – well above the relatively steady 6% national rate – the federal government’s emergency plan swung belatedly into action: send a plethora of cabinet ministers to Adelaide for three days and announce a range of measures to help save the economy they themselves gutted in the first place. Related: ‘When Holden leaves it’s crunch time,’ says anxious SA community In axing the tax or stopping the boats, the Abbott government might play populist politics at a national level, but the policies dragging it down in this part of the country are far too unpopular to be characterised that way. The Coalition suffers so in SA because of a series of politically brave decisions borne out of its free-market ideologies, not the musings of focus groups. Whether it is attempting to kill off the state’s nation-leading wind energy sector, withdrawing support for Holden and thus dooming Adelaide’s extensive car manufacturing supply chain, or even abandoning an election promise to develop Australia’s next generation of submarines in Adelaide by famously slagging the locals off as incapable of building a canoe – a rhetorical flourish that cost former defence minister David Johnston his portfolio – the unpopular calls have come thick and fast. Pile all those issues on top of the reasons the Abbott government is struggling in the polls nationally, and you have yourself an impending electoral wipeout. The discontent began in the working-class northern suburbs of Adelaide most reliant on manufacturing, but it has now permeated through even into blue-ribbon Liberal strongholds such as Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt, which the education minister held in the last election by a comfortable 10% margin. Unthinkably, the frontbencher is now in danger of losing his seat to Labor or a Nick Xenophon candidate, at least if you believe last week’s polling by the CFMEU, the results of which Pyne in typically colourful fashion dismissed as the work of corrupt, racist union thugs. The road back for the Coalition is long and windy, but not utterly impassable. Measures set to be announced during the federal government’s South Australian sojourn include support for car component companies and more jobs with the NBN and infrastructure projects, but the centrepiece of the trip is the guarantee of a $40bn defence shipbuilding contract for the Adelaide shipyard of ASC – the same organisation allegedly incapable of getting their heads around canoes. Related: Japanese submarine purchase would be historic and controversial In bringing forward the construction of a fleet of offshore patrol boats to 2018 and of nine frigates to 2020, Abbott will shorten the breadth of the “valley of death” looming ahead of South Australia’s shipbuilding industry when the current Air Warfare Destroyer contract winds up. The gap will not be closed completely, however – shipbuilding job numbers will fall from 2,000 to 1,000 before climbing back up to roughly 2,500 in 2020. For now the federal government is remaining coy about the far larger Future Submarines contract, although it appears South Australia will be involved in some capacity. Amplified by a hostile Labor state government tying every job loss it can to Tony Abbott, the anti-Coalition rumblings here are getting louder by the redundancy package, and these newly announced shipbuilding jobs will arrive too late for the upcoming federal election. Job losses from Holden’s impending closure, however, will really be getting underway by then – projections of a double-digit unemployment rate for South Australia are becoming steadily more realistic. Tony Abbott may have won power promising to stop boats in the north – time will tell whether pledging to build boats in the south will help him retain it. Max Opray is an Adelaide-based freelance journalist. He tweets at @maxopray |