As one piano-sized spacecraft zoomed past one under-sized planet on Wednesday night, it was hard to shrug off a deep sense of yearning.

Fanging along at 58,000 kilometres an hour, with its tiny nuclear reactor providing the juice, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft – a baby grand wrapped in gold foil and sporting a dinky satellite dish – has gone where no earthly piece of kit has been before.

After snapping Pluto, New Horizons is already zooming off into the wild black yonder, spending maybe the next 30 years poking around the Kuiper Belt, a junkyard of rock from the beginnings of our solar system.


How exotic. How heavenly. Beam me up Scotty.

Meanwhile, back here on Planet Adelaide, a small frozen asteroid on the outer reaches of Western Sydney, the limitless horizons of the Pluto mission seemed to mock the parlous state in which we, once again, find ourselves.

You know things are bad when the Premier and his Treasurer, finally, say it is so. Last week, faced with a 15-year-high unemployment rate of 8.2 per cent – the highest in the nation for consecutive months – Jay Weatherill and Tom Koutsantonis had their “this is the recession we had to have” moments. South Australia, to use just one more Keatingism, is being mugged by reality.

In a crisis, if you can’t fight and you can’t flee, you float. Maybe it is just the miserably cold weather speaking, but it increasingly feels like we are floating through this crisis, waiting to be rescued. Not drowning, just waving.

That strange floating sensation is compounded by the public personas of both the government and the opposition. Talk about attack of the killer zombies.

When is the last time you saw or heard a frontbencher, or a senior bureaucrat for that matter, who appeared energised, let alone vaguely enthusiastic?

You can count them on one hand.

Nobody doubts that Tony Harrison, the Education Department chief, is a competent administrator who takes both the education and protection of our children seriously. Nobody doubts that as a public servant and as a parent, he would be genuinely upset at the failings of his department to protect children, most of it before his appointment. Nobody doubts that he shares the pain our community feels over the death of poor little Chloe Valentine.

So why do his public responses on the issue have all the passion of somebody putting in an order for a new box of paperclips? Maybe it’s just all those years of police training that went with his previous job.

On Thursday last week, a good three months after the scathing findings of the coronial inquest into the handling of the Chloe Valentine case by FamiliesSA, he had a day of on-on-one meetings with six of the social workers quizzed by the coroner.


Mr Harrison said this was “counselling” and after a good discussion they could all now “move forward” in their important role of protecting children. Good luck reforming the culture in the department, then, a culture that the Coroner described as “broken and fundamentally flawed”.

Get angry, Tony. Kick the furniture. Yell at the cat. The Coroner, Mark Johns, has done all the hard work for you. This state has never seen anything like his final report in terms of its blistering language – an unambiguous call for reform of the busted culture of SA’s state-run child protection. He has given you all the ammo you need, and then some.

But this is not the modus operandi of the Weatherill Government. The media training for ministers must be all about vaguing out and calming down. Repeat after me – don’t fight, don’t flee, float.

For the government, vaguing out is working a treat. The latest Newspoll run for The Australian has Team Weatherill holding a 54-46 two-party preferred lead over Steven Marshall’s Liberals. Labor won the last election with those numbers almost reversed on 47-53.

If Labor carried its current Newspoll lead into an election, the Liberals might as well set up their head office on Pluto.

But, incredible as it may seem, life isn’t all about polls. Right now, SA really needs to believe in itself. And to do that, it needs political and business leaders who look like they believe in themselves. Or at least look vaguely interested in fixing the joint.

Writing for InDaily’s Business Insight yesterday, economist Professor Richard Blandy said that SA has “invented a sort of sook capitalism, a corporatist approach to economic development where an excessively-powerful State Government ‘leads’ business”.

“Like everybody else, the Government has no idea what specific businesses will succeed in South Australia. It just likes to fool the electorate with plausible-sounding generalities,” Blandy wrote.

Well, maybe sook capitalism goes hand in hand with sooky la-la politics.

A few years back, former NSW Labor Premier, Bob Carr, blogged his thoughts on a former Labor backbencher, Frank Sartor, who was exiting state politics.

This was shared by The Australian’s Strewth columnist James Jeffrey and I liked it so much I cut it out and stuck it in an old contact book.

Carr wrote of Sartor:

“From his start as a minister, however (and I brought him into the cabinet as soon as he was elected to parliament in 2003) he started presenting with such a hangdog air that one wondered whether he might have preferred a different job. I saw him on TV recently announcing protection for frog habitats. He had such a miserable, half-believing air about him I came close to shouting at the screen, ‘Liven up, Frank! That’s what environment ministers do! They save frogs! Do it and believe in it!“

Matthew Abraham and David Bevan present the weekday breakfast program on 891 ABC Adelaide.

Matthew is on Twitter as @kevcorduroy

InDaily’s regular political commentator Tom Richardson is on leave.

Help our journalists uncover the facts In times like these InDaily provides valuable, local independent journalism in South Australia. As a news organisation it offers an alternative to The Advertiser, a different voice and a closer look at what is happening in our city and state for free. Any contribution to help fund our work is appreciated. Please click below to donate to InDaily. Donate here Powered by PressPatron

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