Heave away, haul away

Critics of privatisation and outsourcing often complain you can go too far, that by hiving off "non-essential" functions you end up compromising some part of the organisation that is essential to its survival. Despite what organisational theorists say, there often is no clear line between essential and non-essential functions, and plenty of smart and experienced people have gotten that wrong.

So have the South Australian Liberals. Liberals in that state will follow their Queensland counterparts into history.

The old one-two

Nick Xenophon evolved a constituency that neither the Liberals nor the Democrats fully recognised: people concerned about the increased availability of gambling in a state where it had never been prevalent. He expanded his appeal to cover the spaces left by the dying Democrats, and vacated by the Liberals as they moved right. Now that the Liberals want to move back to the centre, it's too late; Xenophon owns that space now.

Part of the Liberal Party's shift to the right meant that they lost the ability to rein in someone like Cory Bernardi. A precocious young student politician, Bernardi modelled not only his policy outlook but his organisational structure on US brimstone-and-sodomy conservatives. Nobody becomes a Liberal Senator without backing from a substantial portion of the party, having worked the branches and other party structures assiduously (Bernardi was a protege of Nick Minchin, the party's State Director who stacked an overwhelmingly moderate state organisation in favour of conservatives). What made Bernardi different was building networks of fundraising and patronage independent of the Liberal Party, tapping into funds and support that the SA Liberals didn't know about and weren't obliged to declare.

By the time Bernardi took top spot on the Liberal ticket in 2007 the threat was implicit: put me at the top of the ticket or I'll run against you. Nick Minchin retired soon afterwards, knowing Bernardi was building a political superstructure taking him beyond the reach of the party, and beyond the discipline of people like himself. His setting-up of a new conservative party has been a long, long time coming. Finally, he's judged that his hour is at hand, and that he is free to drop off the Liberal Party like a sated tick.

Bernardi hasn't done this before now because the SA Liberals were always a more viable vehicle than anything he might cobble together, alone or with useful idiots like Family First. No longer: the SA Liberals are done. But the relative strength of left and right isn't enough to explain the collapse of the SA Liberals. They assumed they would have a permanent place no matter how little they did, how little they delivered for South Australia.

The franchisee

Labor has become the default party of government in that state. They actually focus on health and education and transport and all those other properly state-based issues. While they don't get every call right and have been in too long, they seem to actually care about congested roads or bad schools or whatever - they aren't diffident about those issues like the Liberals. Labor fights ferociously for every election and the Liberals are diffident about those too; the Liberals win the protest vote but fail to translate that to winning a majority of lower house seats, which underlines their diffidence and lack of the necessary political passion necessary to govern. They talk about economic development but they can't do it, and everyone knows they can't do it.

The leader of the SA Liberals is a nice man - Simon or Stephen or something like that - who acts like the franchisee he has always been, in office but somehow not in charge. If John Martin's department store still existed he would be standing in the window modelling what a suit might look like if a man were wearing it. When the federal government comes to town (rather than flying past Adelaide) they drag along what's-his-name to stand and nod.

He might have disagreements with Jay Weatherill - but Weatherill has imposed himself on his own party so ruthlessly you get the sense if Stewart ever took him on, Weatherill would leap over the Dispatch Box and rip his liver out. Even his "home" electorate is named after Labor's greatest Premier. Weatherill gets bogged down in the intractable difficulties of funding a growing state with a stagnant economy because he doesn't have to play politics with an opposition that is simply no good at that game.

It isn't like he stands before a band of seething rivalries, either; the Franchisee is the best they have. Conservatives spent years hissing at Vickie Chapman until they realised there was nothing for them to worry about. The years of backroom drama with titanic figures like Joan Hall or Nick Minchin having at one another meant that Liberal candidates tended to be no-fuss, inoffensive, even insipid. Minchin realised early, and schooled John Howard in the idea, that the lack of Liberal governments at state level helped ensure a Liberal government at the federal level. He smoothed the dying pillow over the careers of several promising MPs who might get in the way of his wider vision.

Can't be fixed

Christopher Pyne was 26 when first elected to the very safe Liberal seat of Sturt in 1993. When John Hewson was replaced by Alexander Downer as Liberal leader soon afterwards, Pyne said to John Howard "why don't you retire?".

A decade after that, Howard was still Prime Minister and Pyne was still a backbencher. Pyne became chief source for breathless press gallery stories that any day now, any day, Peter Costello would challenge Howard. It was nonsense but it kept both Pyne and the gallery in work, and each was grateful to the other. Eventually, by sheer attrition, Pyne became the guy at the centre of it all, the fixer without whom nothing would get done. The press gallery applauded his childish parliamentary tactics, borrowed from the US Congressional Republicans. In the leadership turmoil following 2007 he switched his vote late, but decisively, ensuring his choice and the winner were the same, and that the winner was grateful to him.

Back in South Australia, the mining boom lulled South Australians into overconfidence about Olympic Dam and defence equipment and other big dreams to transition the economy away from the clearly failing vehicle industry. When the dream died with the mining boom, Labor went back to basics at the state level and lost the plot federally. The Liberals offered criticism but not an alternative. 2013 offered South Australians a change of federal government with one of their own, Christopher Maurice Pyne himself, where he had always wanted to be: at the centre of the action.

Pyne could have had the clout to kick the car industry along for a little while, but he didn't. He could have managed a vast transition from cars to military manufacturing (or something else), but he didn't. Goodness knows he's had time enough and resources to think of something. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero. Those of us who never believed in Pyne were vindicated at such a terrible cost; those who thought he deserved the benefit of the doubt are so far beyond mistaken, it's embarrassing all round.

As Education Minister, he might have found a way to channel more money to the state's creaking institutions - but all he did was propose $100k degrees (increasing the impetus for talented young South Australians to flee their state), and open gimcrack colleges that collapsed before students could complete their courses. South Australia backed Pyne for decades and had hoped for more from him than he could ever deliver. "We will support all Australian students to embrace the digital age" - yeah, right.

When the naval construction contracts went to Spain over Adelaide, the story made the news in Sydney but it did not carry the full anguish from South Australia. It went way beyond Port and the Crows bundled out of the footy finals. It was a realisation that their final hopes were dashed, despite doing everything they could within the system to get some sort of relief. He's blown it. All the consultants who claim they can help him un-blow it are just taking donors' money under questionable pretences.

Pyne has compromised and triangulated so much, like Hillary Clinton in this masterful examination of US politics, that it isn't clear who he is any more. Maybe it isn't even clear to him. He's Minister for Industry from a de-industrialising state, when the BCA and the IPA expect him to sell the unsellable and judge hm accordingly. The new Liberal candidate for Boothby would want to be a cracker because otherwise Adelaide will be an all-Labor city in Federal Parliament, like Canberra or Newcastle.

If there's a double dissolution, the top two Liberal Senate candidates will be Bernardi and David Fawcett, two right-wing goons (if the standard half-Senate election, just Fawcett). Next on their list is Senator Sean Edwards, former real estate agent and transactional pol who put together the painstaking case for frigates and submarines to be built in Adelaide. If Edwards loses (as well he might - your 3-3 half-Senate election results are less likely going forward) it will be another one in the eye for the standard politics of representing your constituency and having your voice heard in Canberra; it will be the government's own fault for failing to respect assiduous grass-roots politics.

The next state election is in 2018 and the Franchisee is unlikely to take things forward. Chris Pyne may well be a private citizen, and we'll see what his extensive experience is worth then. Xenophon's federal focus will see his party play a limited role. Bernardi will trash Safe Schools and abortion, but otherwise have little to offer education or health. People will still vote for those guys, though.

Holdfast

The seismic shift in SA politics places a heavy load on Labor's internal processes to keep the state government honest and vital, and stop them sending monkeys to Canberra. When Sam talks about 2036 he looks forward to a time when the children will indeed be the future but most of his party's current members will be dead. He may well be the last SA Liberal leader, or at least the last where the party is clearly the second-biggest party in the state's politics.

All centrists get accused of being neither one thing nor the other. Most centrists muddle through with a bit of both and something else besides. The SA Liberals have none of that, not any more, and they won't be getting any in. They've abandoned the centre and the dingoes on the right have abandoned them. The state is stagnating economically, so any donor money is going to have to flow in from outside. The Queensland Libs struggled along as the branch office of a national movement for so long, and then gave up on themselves just as conservatives came to realise they needed the suburban south-east more than a shiny new civic centre at Woop Woop.

Whyalla isn't falling back on small business grandees, but on renewable energy - no help from the Libs there. The drought will exacerbate water quality problems in the Murray River, but the Liberal MP who represents that area has spent half a million dollars renovating his office. The SA Libs don't have Nationals but that's the least of their problems. They don't have enough to fall back on, and conservatives need something to be nostalgic about. Playford, Hall, Tonkin, Brown, and Olsen aren't a heritage: they're answers in a pub quiz.

The only future the SA Libs have is to show the rest of their party what structural decline looks like, and that majoritarian arrogance (what US Congressional Republicans call "the nuclear option") is a non-starter. Maybe lack of background will benefit the SA Libs, as it did for Tonkin and Brown, but only briefly - and it's too late for Saul. There may be a reconciliation of left and/or right after Xenophon or Bernardi, but you can't bet on the SA Liberals being led by broad-coalition community-minded people who could pull that off.

That car won't start

In this article, Misha Schubert takes Brian Loughnane on face value. She dutifully reports what he says and concludes that he's defining the Gillard Government. Brian Loughnane doesn't control the Gillard Government. Brian Loughnane is Director of the Liberal Party of Australia. That's the organisation over which he has some degree of control, and he's exerting that control to tell its members to shut up.

Consider Loughnane's audience: Young Liberals, full of energy and ideas amongst other things. Bri-Bri thinks he's helping them by showing them how modern politics works, and it works in the way that people like Bri-Bri like it to work. He and Peta Credlin*, Abbott's chief of staff, started out as junior staffers who weren't responsible for making policy decisions, but who took decisions that had been made and foisted them onto journalists and minor-party Senators. Along the way they picked up no experience whatsoever in analysing the strengths and weaknesses of policy options from the point of view of those affected by the policy (as opposed to "how it plays" in the media, or with particular interest groups), or projected into the future beyond the following election. Now they are in positions where they can and do stymie the process by which policy is developed, insisting that any and all such activity be suborned to a) media and interest groups and b) their predilections above all. They must be seen to "win", and if a good idea must die for the sake of that then it's a sacrifice the Liberal Party must - and does - make.

Over the past week we have seen a much-needed debate on donations to the vehicle industry (and because there is no link to performance by the industry, and no penalties for sixty years of underperformance, let us call them for what they are: donations). Joe Hockey is against further donations; Sophie Mirabella, Eric Abetz and Barnaby Joyce are for more donations, as is the Gillard government.

This is a bizarre situation: usually Abetz and Mirabella bristle at any attempt at bipartisanship. These are people who have spent their political careers emphasising that the Liberals should be a choice and not an echo of Labor. Whenever there is bipartisanship they shake their heads and claim they don't know what the Liberal Party stands for. If you think that pink batts or school halls are salient examples of government waste, wait until you see the sheer epic scale of nation-building opportunities this country has pissed away after years and years of donations to the shareholders of Detroit and Tokyo.

As I've said earlier there might be two seats up for grabs if you don't think about it too much, and I can understand Mirabella et al focusing on that; but everybody in either Corangamite or Wakefield who is really concerned for Australian vehicle manufacturing is going to vote Labor, because they believe in vehicle industry donations wholeheartedly. The right pride themselves on being hard-hearted realists when it comes to winning votes, but on this issue they are kidding themselves.

Peta and Bri-Bri don't care what the policy is, as long as there is one - not several, one - and that all the Coalition gets 100% behind it, whatever it might be. They don't understand the process of policy development and they certainly don't want any of your broad-based input that theoretically comes with democracy, thank you very much. Bri-Bri thinks he's tough and clever by screwing down the lid on a simmering pot.

Geoff Kitney in The Australian Financial Review gave important historical context to the debate over public support for the Australian car industry in this article (you'll need to be a subscriber). He points out how the Fraser government in 1981 proposed a round of donations and the lone voice in Cabinet against them was the then Treasurer, John Howard. The then-nascent economic rationalist MPs in the Liberal Party hailed Howard and would form the core of his support during the 1980s, until they all gave up in about 1990 and were not replaced.

Kitney says that Abbott might follow in Howard's footsteps, but he has the analogy wrong. Abbott is leader of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, a position held in 1981 not by Howard but Malcolm Fraser. Howard was Treasurer then; today the Liberal equivalent is Shadow Treasurer is Joe Hockey. Hockey is arguing against car industry donations in 2012, just as Howard did in 1981 (and as he never did when Prime Minister).

Economists like to mock Hockey for his apparent lack of knowledge of their profession, but he's no worse than any other Shadow Treasurer (Swan included, and yes Keating for the month or so he held that job) in that regard. Where Hockey is good value is in the old-fashioned political skill of building a consensus, and sticking it to old-timers who think they can fudge away reforms whose time has come. In the late 1990s Hockey's work on corporate law reform got up the nose of the then Chairman of AMP, Ian Burgess, who went over Hockey's head direct to Howard. When Howard stood by his minister Burgess got the shock of his life and shuffled into retirement, leaving AMP far better off for his absence.

Hockey is right on vehicle industry donations, and chances are when it comes to Liberal decision-making forums he'll have done his homework and be armed with a strong case against an industry that's only holding this country back. He'd be an iconoclastic economic reformer if he got the chance; he has already achieved more in politics than Mirabella and Abetz have or will. I would have expected the IPA to come out as strongly for Hockey as they did for race-baiter Andrew Bolt; nothing so far, nor has the CIS (whose offices are in Hockey's electorate) rallied to his side.

There is absolutely no chance at all that the Coalition will come out against donations to the car industry. Abbott always dances with those who brung him, and the right want vehicle industry donations to continue. If you read Battlelines, and if you see Abbott's performance before he became leader, you'll see him sighing and eye-rolling at every instance of bipartisanship that supposedly played into Rudd's hands. He brought down Turnbull over the bipartisanship over the ETS; the passage on the carbon price in the very teeth of his most determined opposition shows the limits of his "choice not echo" position.

Now that he has to appear less confrontational to round out his image, it will be hilarious watching him try to justify falling into line behind Labor while at the same time burning his Shadow Treasurer's attempts to "cut the waste". You can expect those half-hearted statements by Judith Sloan, Hugh Morgan et al in favour of increasing unemployment benefits to vanish overnight if the right keep on insisting Hockey cut the budget while going into bat for their pet programs.

Kitney further disgraced himself in his second article in the weekend's AFR with this idle and defenceless throwaway:

... [in 2012] Abbott can be expected to prosper.

He'll get away with murder if the more obtuse members of the press gallery continue to give him a free pass, and that's most of them. Kitney runs the risk of becoming a nostalgia act like Tony Wright if he doesn't improve in relating the landscape before him to the way things were.

After the latter part of last year's parliamentary sittings, with vast amounts of legislation passed and Abbott reduced to a frothing mess (negating Bri-Bri's insistence that the Gillard Government doesn't have a record to run on). It could go either way: either they will take Abbott seriously and call him to account for inconsistencies and evasions, or they will indulge him as he hangs his elbow out of a Holden ute and rhapsodises about how he loved to watch Brocko beat Dick Moffatt on The Mountain.

If the MSM do the latter Peta and Bri-Bri will consider their job done, and take no more interest in all that palaver about budget expenditure than most of us do - just so long as it doesn't blow up, so long as there is no public controversy over the expenditure of billions of dollars of public money. You hear that, Young Liberals? As long as everyone just shuts up, everything will be fine.


* The fact that Credlin and Loughnane are married is neither here nor there. A lot of people obsess over it but I'm not going there. The fact that they act as a team to stamp out what they don't understand and can't control, regardless of its merits, is what gets me. It can't last and within two years I expect both to be deposed.

Issue of the week II: Julia Gillard death-watch

The media have decided that Prime Minister Gillard has pretty much had it over the decision to end offshore processing of refugee applications. However much of a consensus this might be among the press gallery, they've been caught in consensuses (consensi?) like that before which have ultimately proven fruitless. You'd think they'd learn, and ought to have no sympathy for them if they don't.

Many journalists have been employed to create low-value non-stories around leadership speculation, an unsustainable business model if ever there was one.

How many hectares of screen real-estate (or hectares of actual forest) were sacrificed to Howard-Costello speculation? It began in about 1997, when the novelty had worn off Prime Minister Howard and a few hacks had not quite adjusted to Life After Keating. It did not end for another dozen years: Costello never challenged Howard for the leadership, he didn't even challenge after Howard had lost his seat (when he would've had no opponents: some challenge) and was accused of plotting up to the very point that the exit doors in Parliament House hit his backside on the way out. Every bit of reportage on that issue was wasted.

Then, Kevin Rudd went from having the shine taken off him to being dead meat within a few weeks. The entire US State Department knew that Rudd had become hated by his party, and having read Machiavelli they knew what it meant for a leader to be hated. The Australian parliamentary press gallery had no idea until David Marr's catty Quarterly Essay (i.e. not a daily news outlet, like the one that actually employs him), and then most of the action took place over a single night. It was too late for the press gallery to be getting new insights at that point so they all wrote the same story, faceless men ooh-ah.

If you could sum up the political situation in a sentence, it would be: Labor people are concerned about their polling but nobody is scuttling around doing any numbers to depose Gillard. There. I've written the story so journos don't have to. Now, can we get some journalists in to dig around for some other stories using some actual journalism?

At some point Julia Gillard will cease to be Prime Minister. It may be that there will be real moves against her. Until then, it would be nice if the fearless sleuths of the press gallery found out what was going on at the same time as the US embassy.

As for this, Gillard needs to do three things:

• Announce that refugees arriving here will be dealt with on shore, with full UNHCR input and access to those that want it;
• Call Abbott out for proposing a course of action that's illegal and cruel. Conservatives can handle the accusation of cruelty, it was water off a duck's back with Tampa in 2001 and it still is today. The impracticality and illegality, though, that's how you hit conservatives where they live. They believe in following the rule of law and being practical, not airy-fairy, so for Liberal policy to be illegal and impractical will be devastating and demoralising; and
• Say that she doesn't trust Abbott. Abbott says one thing and does another all the time, why should she negotiate with him? Call him a flake. Make that float-like-a-butterfly stuff count against him. Make herself out to be the responsible adult in this governing business, following the law and doing a difficult job under trying circumstances.

The Situation is not a given in Australian politics, he has to be cut down if the government is to be re-elected. If not, the government may not be re-elected. Now look at what the government offers, in its clumsy way, then look at what The Situation offers, and you tell me a) which is more important and b) why it's more important than education funding.

If, after all that, you're not as edified as billy-o, try one bogan from Adelaide picking on another, but without the beer and chunder. A man must have a hobby but I still think Hicks was stupid to alight on jihad; that said, for all his bluster, you know Kenny would snap like a twiglet after 48 hours in Gitmo. a) and b) above apply here too, in spades.

A leadership vacancy

According to this article:

Mr Weatherill has previously said that if there was a leadership vacancy he would be a candidate.

Let's leave aside the fact that the word "previously" is redundant because the sentence is expressed in the past tense. There is already a vacancy, with almost no prospect that it can or will be filled. Rann has been terminally undermined and anybody who ends up in the big chair cannot escape the perception of being there solely because of the backroom boys.

The much anticipated move on Mr Rann was made late on Friday, when he was given an ultimatum by two senior members of Labor's Right faction - stand down or be removed.

In a meeting in his State Administration Centre office, the pair, Right faction powerbroker Peter Malinauskas and Treasurer Jack Snelling, told Mr Rann the factions had agreed on a new leadership ticket that would see Education Minister Jay Weatherill installed as premier and current Deputy Premier John Rau continue in the role.

Mr Rann was told that the factions wanted the new leadership team in place before the start of the spring parliamentary session on September 13 and that he must stand down during the winter break.

The factional deal means that if Mr Rann opts not to stand aside and forces a leadership ballot, he would lose if members vote along factional lines.

SA Labor had been headed for defeat, but now it is bound for the kind of shellacking that makes those who care about such things fear for its future. Why aren't Malinauskas and/or Snelling running for Premier? If factionalism meant anything, both those guys would die rather than have someone from the Left in the job.

Kaeting fronted Bob Hawke in 1991 and told him the challenge was on. By contrast, from the above we can only assume that Weatherill will be carried into his state's top job on a sedan chair. He will never be able to escape perceptions the reality that he will not be his own man and he will not have the scope for action that leaders should have.

Not only is there the recent example of NSW Labor, where Rees and Keneally learnt that the top job isn't worth having unless they can have full scope within it; but there is the example of the SA Libs in the '90s, where Nick Minchin took a mannequin from the window of John Martin's and put that in place of a popularly-elected and decent Premier, scuttling a Liberal government so as to free up resources for the feds.

Rann's only hope is to campaign against Malinauskas and Snelling (and Weatherill, insofar as he matters), causing such a ruckus from one end of suburban Adelaide the state to another so that Labor MPs take a chance on popular support rather than publicity-shy factions. He can then return triumphant, sack Weatherill and Snelling, and cruise past Bannon and Dunstan in style rather than limping into the spring.

The Liberals are being very quiet and the SA media are too stupid to throw the spotlight on them at the very time when their victory seems more assured. Now that Minchin is spending more time in Action Town he will be playing a similar sort of role in determining preselections etc to that played by Malinauskas and Snelling. Isobel Redmond faces the very real prospect of being overridden and undermined by Liberal backroom boys.

Worst of all, the people of South Australia face being presented with two bunches of front-people; while those who make the decisions which affect voters, and who should be held to account in a democracy, can stymie democratic checks as well as the supposedly fearless media simply by refusing to answer phone calls.

Update: Rann quits - no doubt he's sick of all those jerks and he's well and truly had his go. However, if he stood and fought he coulda been so much more than Media Mike. Now we face a future where Rann will stand as a titan merely through longevity, and that's sad.

Colonel Lightweight

No wonder Adelaide is "crumbling", with advocacy like this. The article reads like a post-prandial rant: it's not a dispassionate dissection of decline, nor a considered and thoughtful piece needed to rouse people to action.

Smith mentions "the most modern and well-equipped [hospital] in the southern hemisphere" and SA's excellent education system in passing, while lamenting a succession of bread-and-circuses projects in suspicious length. He decries political neglect, while lionising politicians (including his own business partners) who contributed to - or did all too little to reverse - that neglect.

ADELAIDE is stagnant. While the cliches are true - including its relaxed lifestyle, being a great place for kids, quality schools, beautiful and accessible surrounds including the hills, vineyards and beaches - the status quo is no longer good enough; certainly not if we want national relevance to be a goal.

If they're true, Ian, they're not clichés. Clichés are words/phrases that have lost their descriptive power, and those descriptors haven't. Adelaide is indeed a fine city to live in, that much is clear. What isn't clear is what Smith means by "national relevance".

Having once competed with Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane, South Australia's capital is more of a match for Geelong or Townsville.

Adelaide competing with Melbourne? For what? Brisbane and Perth overtook Adelaide in size, economic and demographic importance - and yes, in political terms, but I'll get to that later - because they became internationally important export hubs attracting people who could use lifestyle as an excuse. Geelong and Townsville, ironically, have lifted their game by emulating Adelaide, with a combination of lifestyle and higher education and research. Smith, however, pooh-poohs economic activity:

There are a number of successful niche companies led by many people who love Adelaide, too. They are in areas as diverse as renewable energy, biotechnology, health, new media and food, but the chances are their businesses will remain boutique or be picked up by interstate or international players.

Why even bother? That's the attitude, Ian. Small business doesn't deign to hire outfits like Bespoke Approach, even though it too is a small business and getting smaller by the day. No, in the second par Smith begs the question he seeks to answer:

Without action at all levels of politics, the city of churches' torpidity will remain in stark contrast to interstate vibrancy.

Yes, the cry of rent-seekers everywhere: never mind free enterprise, give us regulation and a suck on the public teat!

The "university city" tag was true more than a decade ago but we are now a long way behind others; indeed the University of Adelaide was 73rd in the world in this year's Times Higher Education World University Rankings. It was behind the University of Melbourne (36th), the Australian National University (43rd) and the University of Sydney (71st).

Not bad: no university in Queensland or WA is ahead of it. Such esteemed institutions as the University of Texas and the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology didn't make it at all. Education is the nation's third biggest export, and Adelaide should be making out like a bandit in that market - but universities too are among the many institutions that are not opposed to Bespoke Approach necessarily, but indifferent to it.

A string of councils has been unable to embrace metropolitan development and successive state governments' reluctance to reform local government has seen Adelaide languish as other cities thrive. It is here we should start.

The coming city council elections offer little hope for change; what should be a group one event would be lucky to qualify for maiden status with five candidates of little apparent consequence.

I don't even know what that means, if anything. The SA state government always runs the risk of being basically an Adelaide municipal council, and a Greater Adelaide Council would be a rival for the state rather than a co-operative partner: particularly as the state's economy requires opening the interior to an extent far greater than that of the pastoral days, a vote for a Greater Adelaide would strangle the state's growth.

Olympic Dam doesn't need Bespoke Approach either.

Better candidates [for municipal elections] were not forthcoming because there is little appeal in the job. The paucity of experience offers the chance for the Rann government to take control. It would be in the state's interests.

Better candidates for municipal elections is a common complaint in Melbourne, Townsville, Geelong and elsewhere. Why the Rann government should add to a workload it clearly cannot handle, given swingeing budget cuts recently, is unclear.

Brisbane did this many years ago and administers a budget of more than $3 billion,

Yes, but how well does it administer those funds, Ian? Brisbane City Council was set up by a state government that disdained its capital, in a way that no South Australian can afford. Smith then overdoes it with a self-serving reference to the place where he wishes he still was, Melbourne:

Melbourne brought together local councils across the city to form effective local government conglomerates that work more efficiently with the state government.

My old boss, Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, dissolved 210 councils, dismissed 1600 elected councillors and created 78 new councils through amalgamations. That is reform.

From once being a drawcard to the state, leading nationally in areas such as the arts, Adelaide risks becoming a negative to SA.

The state economy [in South Australia] is booming.

That's the bottom line: the SA economy is booming because of, or despite, local government. No case is made for local government reform apart from a few pathetic anecdotes (more on those later), but the booming economy busts poor Ian's case somewhat. If the state is booming, you'd have to be a loser to miss out, wouldn't you Ian?

The reference to Kennett is only to remind readers who Smith is, or was. A closer look at Victorian local government reveals a dearth of Periclean figures overseeing rubbish collection and civic planning in Warracknabeal, Warrnambool and Werribee.

It's also fair to point out that, during the '90s, Kennett had Liberal counterparts in SA. Nick Minchin nobbled the quietly effective Dean Brown and replaced him with a muppet named John Olsen. Smith should have mentioned that Kennett stole from Adelaide an event bigger than the Clipsal 500, the Australian Grand Prix. That is reform.

If Adelaide was such a negative to SA, why are all those niche businesses doing so well? What sustains the excellent health and education systems? Not Bespoke Approach, that's for sure.

While other capitals boast many global companies, Adelaide is starved of international business relevance.

Little has been achieved to woo new players to establish themselves in the city, to provide real corporate activity and, most critically, to provide employment alternatives for the state's young graduates.

They continue to flock west and east. Retaining smart people in their 20s and 30s is perhaps Adelaide's most desperate challenge.

"Little has been achieved" and less has been suggested, Ian. Any thoughts? You might get some clients out of it.

Federally, we have lost the depth of powerful SA politicians who served in the cabinets of prime ministers Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard.

The politicians Smith refers to here did bugger-all for SA during its period of decline, with the possible exception of Hill as Defence Minister redeploying defence assets to and near Adelaide.

Senator Penny Wong alone has real clout, but she is in a catch-22 situation as the toe-cutting Finance Minister. She must be wary of conflict in looking too much after her own state from such an exalted position.

Nick Minchin held the same portfolio, and he did bugger-all for SA too.

... Don Farrell, Parliamentary Secretary for Sustainability and Urban Water, is of obvious influence in the party, but ... a long way from muscling in on big decisions.

Farrell was one of the major movers in dumping a Prime Minister, Ian. That's a pretty big decision. Sustainability and Urban Water is no small issue, in Adelaide and beyond.

With Nick Minchin retiring, Christopher Pyne is our only voice at the federal opposition's top table.

Only in print can one say that with a straight face.

Contributing further to the slowly sinking feeling is the demise of local media. First, Adelaide is a one-newspaper town. A strong and bold press should be one fundamental ingredient of a city's development. The Advertiser carries the burden alone.

There was a newspaper other than the 'Tiser, but the company that publishes Ian Smith pieces and said paper itself shut it down. A bit rich using a News Ltd paper to cry for media diversity. Bet News Ltd don't need Bespoke Approach, either.

Time has been wasted in an extraordinary way on two urgently needed pieces of infrastructure.

What might they be? Oh ... some sporting facilities. Bread & circuses as infrastructure:

Despite the fact existing sports facilities consist of the god-forsaken, windswept AAMI Stadium and a quaintly out-of-date Adelaide Oval, the debate about a new stadium has been embarrassing.

Can't make the case for change, particularly when you only want to upgrade the corporate boxes and to hell with everything else, where the economic benefits are (ahem!) niche and the costs do not justify such outlays in straitened times. The Crows and Power could chip in to build a new Football Park as part of renewing their roots in the SANFL - but they don't use Bespoke Approach either.

A couple of years ago, the sandals and socks brigade prevented the upgrading of Victoria Park.

They would be the same people who put your wife into Parliament, Ian, thereby indirectly responsible for luring a high-flyer like you to said city, with its prosperous niche businesses.

However, in line with the demands of the protesters who took NIMBY politics to a new level, Clipsal buildings are temporary; put up and taken down each year during a nine-month period. Amazing, but a fact.

And great for the economy, too, Ian. You'd think the Clipsal 500, the Holden plants at Gawler and Elizabeth, and the universities would lead to a centre of innovation in stock car development - but no. If that were to happen, what need would they have of Bespoke Approach?

I've done what I can for the company with repeated mentions here, and here's a link to their website, but let's look to the principals. Downer is back in some public sector, global-elite role in some place plentiful in wine and olives. Bolkus is clearly exploring other opportunities. Mrs Smith is raising children on a public pension. This leaves Mr Ian Smith becalmed, stagnant, starving to death in a boomtown, keening for unnecessary 'reforms' and, like cousin Tony, facing the prospect of going from youthful promise to middle-aged decline without any intervening achievement.