Political commentator Robert Godden returns to The Adelaide Show with a thesis that cuts to the bone: The South Australian Liberal Party has no realistic chance of winning the forthcoming election. But his essay raises an even more unsettling question: can they realistically ever win another one?
This episode doesn’t feature an SA Drink of the Week, allowing more time for a forensic examination of what’s gone wrong with liberalism itself, and the party that bears its name.
In the Musical Pilgrimage, Steve shares “Spring Gully Road”, his song chronicling four generations of the Webb family’s beloved pickle company, from Edward McKee’s small brown onions in 1946 to the recent appointment of administrators, drawing a tenuous but poignant parallel to the Liberal Party’s own decline.
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Running Sheet: Do The Liberals Have No Chance Of Winning This Forthcoming South Australian Election?
00:00:00 Intro
Introduction
00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week
No SA Drink Of The Week this week.
00:05:07 Robert Godden
Before diving into party politics, Steve and Robert tackle a fundamental question: what is liberalism itself? Drawing on American political philosopher Patrick Deneen’s work (as sampled from the glorious podcast, Econtalk, episode July 9, 2018), they explore how liberalism originally meant self-governance within community, where individuals held themselves accountable within the framework of church and society. Deneen argues that modern liberalism, both classical and progressive, has fractured into two economic camps: classical liberals claiming government interferes with freedom, and progressive liberals arguing that economic inequality prevents people from achieving liberty.
Robert offers his working definition: liberalism has always been about “the bigger pie theory”. Classical liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stewart Mill championed free markets as the path to prosperity for all. But as Robert notes, these philosophers wrote their treatises while people lived in gutters within ten miles of them, suggesting their definitions had blind spots about who they actually represented.
The conversation turns to neoliberalism, which Robert describes as taking the apple of classical liberalism and focusing on its core: free market capitalism, fiscal austerity, individual responsibility, and globalisation. The problem? Many neoliberals benefited from generous government support before pulling up the ladder behind them. As Robert puts it, they’re “more like a wild jackal in a wolf’s clothing”, presenting themselves as something more palatable whilst pursuing fundamentally conservative ends.
When Steve asks about the overlap between liberalism (lowercase L) and the Liberal Party (uppercase L), Robert’s answer is stark: “The Venn diagram of liberalism and the Liberal Party is not a perfect circle. It’s more like a third overlap.” John Howard’s famous declaration that the Liberal Party is “a broad church” marked both the high point and the beginning of the end. Where Howard allowed diverse opinions united by shared values, today’s party demands conformity. Robert observes you could “literally interchange” Angus Taylor with five other Liberal members and several Nationals, they’ve become so ideologically uniform.
Robert shares a revealing personal story from his childhood in Whyalla. At age 12 or 13, he wagged school to attend a lunch where Malcolm Fraser was speaking. After enduring mumbled warnings about Bill Hayden, young Robert lined up afterwards and asked the Prime Minister where he could find out what the government would actually do if re-elected. The dismissive response and perfunctory policy booklet were Robert’s first disillusionment with political rhetoric over substance.
This leads to a broader discussion about accountability’s erosion in Australian politics. Robert identifies a turning point: when Jay Weatherill wasn’t held responsible for abuse discovered in South Australian schools because “nobody had told him”. This represented a complete rewriting of Westminster conventions about ministerial responsibility. Compare that to Barry O’Farrell resigning as New South Wales Premier over failing to declare a $300 bottle of wine, or John Howard’s principled approach to the GST, admitting he was wrong, explaining why he’d changed his mind, and taking that position to an election.
The discipline of the Fraser and Howard years came from a culture where the party room would discuss issues on merit, then Fraser or Howard would determine the right course, and the party would follow with discipline, not through fear but through shared purpose. Today’s Liberal Party has abandoned that model for something closer to authoritarianism without the competence to make it work.
When discussing South Australia specifically, Robert doesn’t hold back about Vincent Tarzia’s challenges. Beyond policy positions, there’s the fundamental problem of presence. Robert recalls a body language seminar by Alan Pease where five people were cast for different film roles based purely on appearance. We can’t help making these visual judgements. Tarzia, Robert notes, is “one of the 5% of the population that never blinks”, creating an unfortunate vampire quality. He looks like “a Muppet version of Dracula”. Combined with a voice lacking joy, he presents as “the joyless undead” when facing off against Peter Malinauskas’s considerable charisma.
Robert’s assessment of the Malinauskas government is admirably even-handed for someone with Liberal roots. He calls it “the best government in Australia” whilst adding the qualifier “a totalitarian dictatorship that makes you feel good”. Everything is done Malinauskas’s way, but unlike Putin or Trump, he’s careful never to say anything that isn’t actually true. He might make predictions that don’t pan out, but he won’t barefaced lie, and if an idea isn’t popular, he simply doesn’t voice it. The result is what Robert calls “preshrunk jeans” of political messaging.
Robert’s father, a lifelong Liberal voter and member, has only been impressed by two political figures: Gough Whitlam, whose charisma was “absolutely off the chart” despite taking four people to dinner when a Whyalla event was mistakenly under-attended, and Peter Malinauskas, who regularly visits the Whyalla Men’s Shed. This speaks to something fundamental about political success. As Robert observes, great Labor leaders have consistently been better communicators and sellers of vision because their message is easier: “you’re being ripped off by the system, and we’re going to sort it for you” beats “if we govern ourselves, all will be great” in almost any contest.
The federal picture offers one glimmer of hope: Victoria’s new opposition leader, Jess Wilson. In her thirties, a lawyer and former business advisor to Josh Frydenberg and the Business Council of Australia, she represents exactly the kind of moderate Liberal who should have been in the party all along but whom the party’s rightward drift has made anomalous. As Robert puts it, “the idea that Jess Wilson should be in the Liberal Party is an idea that is eight years out of date. She should be a teal.” The teals, after all, are liberal party people who haven’t gone down the right-wing rabbit hole.
This raises the central question: are there eight to ten members of parliament the federal Liberals could have had? Yes, the teals. “All of those teal candidates could have been Liberal Party candidates and would have been 15 or 20 years ago if they had not wilfully taken this blindness about the climate.”
Speaking of climate, Robert dissects Susan Ley’s recent positioning as if she’s discovered that abandoning net zero and embracing fossil fuels will bring electoral victory. The polling suggests otherwise. Among diverse Australians, Labor’s primary vote sits at 46%, the Coalition at 17%. Gen Z voters break 51% Labor, 10% Coalition. The Liberals are “aiming at the wrong target”, trying to chip 10% from groups with 10% when they should be targeting Labor’s 46%. They should be saying “your ideas are great, it’s a pity you’re not smarter, we’re going to get to where you want to get but we’ll do it better.” Instead, they get their facts from Facebook.
The cognitive dissonance is staggering. National Party MPs stand up claiming farmers don’t want renewable energy whilst farmers lead the way with innovative approaches: solar panels in fields that collect water, provide shade for sheep grazing underneath, and generate income. Farmers don’t want bushfires or floods, they want to make money. Watch ABC’s Landline, Robert suggests, though the Nationals would dismiss it as left-wing propaganda.
Looking ahead, Robert sees no Liberal victory on any horizon in the next five to six years. More likely? “No Liberal Party, or let me put it another way: the Liberal Party not being the opposition.” They’re seriously under threat of other parties overtaking them. Federally, if you separate the Coalition partners, the numbers are nowhere near the historical imbalance where Nationals made up numbers for the Liberals. Now those numbers are close. A One Nation-National coalition would be numerically viable.
Victoria represents the critical test. If Jess Wilson’s woeful Liberals manage to topple a deeply unpopular Victorian government by picking the right leader, “that’ll be a critical moment for the Liberals to take that lesson.” Robert’s prediction? “The only reason we have to think they’re incapable of learning is all the evidence.”
Robert’s father once said that Don Dunstan’s departure horrified him, not because of policy agreement, but because Dunstan was a strong leader with ideas who made the state feel good about itself. That’s what’s missing from the contemporary Liberal Party: ideas that inspire rather than divide, leaders who build rather than tear down, and the humility to recognise when the world has changed and they haven’t.
The conversation closes with Winston Churchill’s 1920s quote distinguishing socialism from liberalism. Robert agrees it was “100% correct” for about 1924, when those ideologies were genuinely competing and distinct. But it’s become a caricature over the intervening century. The quote doesn’t really apply to 2025, when the ideologies have mingled, adapted, and in the case of the Australian Liberal Party, lost their way entirely.
01:14:33 Musical Pilgrimage
In the Musical Pilgrimage, we play Spring Gully Road, a song written by Steve Davis and performed by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos, chronicling the four-generation story of Spring Gully, one of South Australia’s most beloved food companies.
The story begins in 1946 when Edward McKee returned from the war and started growing small brown onions outside his back door on Spring Gully Road. His pickled onions became a South Australian staple. The company expanded under Allen and Eric, then weathered storms under Ross and Kevin’s leadership, before Russ and Tegan faced the modern challenge of cheap imports and changing market appetites.
Steve reveals a personal connection: his colleague Domenic at Funlife Fitness in Ingle Farm remembers his father growing small onions and cucumbers, taking sacks to Spring Gully weekly to be weighed and paid. It was simply part of the fabric of South Australian life.
In full disclosure, Steve is friends with Russell Webb, who along with Tegan led the company through its recent challenges before administrators were appointed. Most believe it’s written off and gone, but Steve holds hope for a way forward. They were doing innovative things to fight back against retailers bringing in cheap overseas alternatives, gutting the market for local sovereign food production capability.
The song’s folk-influenced simplicity captures something essential about generational enterprise, family legacy, and the challenge of maintaining local production in a globalised economy. The repeated refrain, “Turn the earth, turn the earth when it’s harvest time, pick the bounty and preserve it in your sweetly seasoned brine”, becomes a meditation on the cycles of growth, harvest, and preservation that sustained Spring Gully through good years and hard years.
Steve offers a tenuous but poignant link to the episode’s political discussion: the Liberal and Country League, precursor to the modern Liberal Party in South Australia, formed in 1932 and became the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party in 1945. Spring Gully started in 1946. Now in 2025, we have administrators appointed for Spring Gully, and Robert Godden suggesting you might as well call them in for the Liberal Party as well.
Both represent South Australian institutions facing existential questions about their future in a changed world. Both have served their communities for generations. Both are confronting the reality that what worked for decades may not work anymore. And both deserve more than a quiet fade into history.
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