To claw back power, the Libs need to stop being a hot mess

At the same time, Albanese visited Whyalla with Premier Peter Malinauskas to announce funding for a hub to manufacture and export green hydrogen.

A few days before, Albanese chose Adelaide to announce an equally underwhelming inquiry into the nation’s pandemic response. On Friday, the government will announce in Adelaide its response to the Disability Royal Commission that Scott Morrison commissioned in 2019.

Busy, busy, busy. No Voice here.

One can expect a similar flurry in Tasmania next week. That South Australia and the Apple Isle just happen to be the two states which need to be hauled across the line if the Voice is to have any hope on October 14 is, most likely, more than coincidence.

With all hope lost in Western Australia and Queensland, and NSW and Victoria line ball, there can be no double majority without SA and Tasmania.

More broadly, however, Albanese and his team are casting their eye towards the next election, due late next year or early 2025.

Every seat everywhere is precious

With that looming as a contest between Labor retaining majority government or being reduced to a minority, every seat everywhere is precious.

More so if the ALP fails to make inroads in Queensland, where it holds just five of the state’s 30 seats, and drops one or two in WA following its atypically strong showing there in 2022.

At a caucus meeting in May, Albanese presented a mud map of Liberal seats Labor would target in 2025. These included the Perth seats of Canning and Moore, which is rather ambitious given Labor is already at such a high watermark in the west. Nothing wrong with ambition, though.

Further east, the prime minister nominated Menzies in Melbourne, Banks in Sydney, Bass and Braddon in Tasmania, and Sturt in SA. The latter, previously held by Christopher Pyne, is now held by fellow moderate James Stevens by a very tight two-party-preferred lead of 50.5 per cent.

SA is hardly a swing state. It has just 10 seats, of which six are Labor and mostly safe, three Liberal, two of which are safe, while independent Rebekha Sharkie has an iron grip on Mayo.

After decades of trying, Labor pinched Boothby from the Liberals at the last election. It is confident of holding that and now has its sights on Sturt. Lavishing attention on the state is part of that strategy.

Stevens is fighting hard but life for a moderate in SA is not easy at the moment. There’s friendly fire as well.

The Liberal division is under the control of the conservatives, led by hard-right Senator Alex Antic and the hostilities are not dissimilar to those which eventually rendered the Victorian Liberal Party, as Anthony Albanese called it on Tuesday, an unelectable hot mess.

For 50 years, the SA Liberal Party has been defined by a power struggle between the moderates and the conservatives, but veterans say it is now almost every bit as bad as 1972 when hostilities between moderate Steele Hall and country conservative Ren DeGaris resulted in the party splitting and Hall leading the breakaway Liberal Movement.

Conservative Christian stacking of branches, which have so polarised the Victoria and WA divisions, are doing the same in SA.

Others dispute it has reached 1972 levels but warn it could if shadow minister and member of the leadership team Anne Ruston is relegated below Antic on the Senate ticket.

Which, of course, helps Labor, but not necessarily the polity.

Good opposition makes for good government

This week’s resignation of Dan Andrews, after nine years as Victorian premier, led to many critical reviews of his legacy, the main one being the dire financial situation he has bequeathed his state and which will affect generations to come.

The point here is not to back the truck over Andrews again, but he was in large part facilitated by having such a risible opposition. Good opposition makes for good government, but when the opposition is tearing itself apart over ideological and factional differences, accountability hits the fence.

Politics is a binary proposition. When Andrews was criticised, be it over his handling of COVID-19 or whatever, his defenders could just point to the alternative.

Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto is trying to drag the party back to the centre and give it a semblance of electability. It remains to be seen whether Andrews’ departure will shift behaviour, or whether Moira Deeming will continue to consider her views more important than the bigger picture.

It’s the same in the ACT where the Liberals decided some years ago to move to the hard right in the most left-wing jurisdiction in the country. The Labor/Greens government, which has been in power for 22 years and is lining up for another four at next year’s election, rules with absolute power and impunity. It doesn’t care for mandates and implements bans and policy changes at will.

Against the urging of the police, the ACT legalised hard drugs for personal use. No-one ever voted for that.

The SA and WA governments face a similar absence of opposition but the former at least has not yet become drunk on power. That will come with time in the absence of meaningful opposition.

As for Albanese, Liberal dysfunction keeps alive the prospects of Labor retaining its slim majority at the next election, even if its means just one extra seat in SA and another one somewhere else.