The Pragmatic Populism of Peter Malinauskas: The South Australia Leader as Crafted

( ABC News/ Che Chorley)

In 2021, a campaign in a suburban shopping centre of South Australia emerged from a collective of angry retail workers. The shopping centre had started charging workers $30 a day to park. It meant most were parking off site, walking late at night after work to their cars and feeling unsafe. The union wanted the parking fees scrapped for workers. The operator resisted.

Two years later, a recently elected Labor state government did something extraordinary: they effectively nationalised the car park.  They dictated what one of Australia’s largest companies could do with a sliver of their land and made sure that the parking would once again be free.

The narrative around the SA Labor Government of Peter Malinauskas is that it is centrist, that it is practical, that it is uncontroversial. But none of these labels quite fit.

On 21 March, Premier Peter Malinauskas won the largest majority in the state’s history, winning a projected 33 of 47 lower house seats. The conservative Liberal Party was reduced to as few as four, its worst result ever, outpolled on primary votes by the hard-right populist party One Nation.

Some commentators attribute the result to a hapless opposition, and a splitting of the vote on the right. Yet it would be wrong to write off Malinauskas’ win as a function of Liberal collapse and a split of the conservative vote.

Others critique the government for being too ‘centrist’.

Both criticisms are wrong: the Malinauskas model is one that elevates the state, intervenes when it needs to, takes on big fights, and offers tangible dividends to regular people, all while attracting record business investment.

In doing so, it has created a progressive governing model tailored for our age of populism and hardening far-right opposition.

When Malinauskas first won government in 2022, he beat a Liberal administration that was widely considered competent, after just one term in office. The then-Premier Steven Marshall had managed the pandemic capably and presided over no major scandals. Malinauskas was a relative unknown. Despite this, the then Labor opposition ran a campaign that talked about things that mattered to people, and offered a bold, optimistic agenda for the state’s future, pinned around elevating the state’s brand, delivering practical and material dividends for working people, and working to clean up the public’s perception of politics itself, with pledges to ban all donations.

Four years later, he has crafted an agenda that should grab the attention of every centre-left party in the Western world.

Consider the record.

When the billionaire owner of the Whyalla Steelworks, which produces three quarters of Australia’s structural steel, was caught sending hundreds of millions offshore while racking up debts and letting the plant decay, Malinauskas did not wait for the market to sort it out. He placed the company into administration and, alongside the federal government, assembled a $2.4 billion rescue package to save 1,100 jobs and keep domestic steel production alive.

When the previous government privatised Adelaide’s train and tram network, Malinauskas brought it back into public hands, negotiating the return without paying a cent in break fees. He has invested hundreds of millions in green hydrogen and renewable energy infrastructure. South Australia now generates 100 per cent of its electricity from renewables for roughly a quarter of each year. He banned political donations entirely, a world first, and led the national push to ban social media for children under 16. He is building new public housing for the first time in a generation, constructing a skills and training academy to funnel young people into well-paid jobs building submarines, and planning a major desalination plant to secure the state’s water supply for decades.

Malinauskas publicly describes himself as a ‘centrist’. But his government is not operating from the mushy middle.

It is both progressive and interventionist, while being attractive to business and private capital.

It is both populist — offering tangible dividends of growth, such as free public schools — and pragmatic, keeping an eye on the true drivers of sustainable growth in the private sector.

It is a government that believes the state has a direct role to play in running services, shaping industry, and deciding the economic future of the communities it serves. And, it is a government that has relentlessly worked to attract business and private investment into the state. Once the ‘sick man’ of Australia, South Australia is now viewed as the best place to do business in the country.

Malinauskas has managed to pursue a sizeable progressive agenda without attracting the “tax and spend” label that has sunk centre-left governments and oppositions for decades. His mandate, now even larger than before, means business has no incentive to undermine him: they are on the Malinauskas journey, and willing to back in his big picture vision for a more progressive, more prosperous South Australia.

This approach might best be described as “pragmatic populism”: a politics that centres concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary people, is delivered without culture war baggage, actively courts business, and communicates clearly and with discipline.

And on the big stuff, it is willing to take on fights.

The lesson here extends well beyond Australia. Across the democratic world, the centre-left is losing ground to populist movements that channel legitimate economic frustration into culture war grievance.

The traditional response has been either to adopt a small-target strategy and hope for the best, or to match the populists on vibes while offering little of substance. Neither works.

Malinauskas offers a third path. Acknowledge the frustration. Take it seriously. Then respond with a governing program that is tangible, ambitious, and clearly aimed at making people’s lives better so populists have nothing to run against except noise.

South Australia’s model of centre-left government that governs boldly from the left while maintaining broad electoral support in an age of populist disruption deserves to be studied by progressive parties everywhere.

 

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