Political commentator Robert Godden dissects the existential crisis facing South Australia’s Liberal Party, exploring whether Vincent Tarzia’s leadership and the party’s rightward drift have made electoral victory impossible, not just in March but potentially forever, before Steve shares his song about Spring Gully’s four-generation story.
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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An AI generated transcript – there will be errors. Check quotes against the actual audio (if you would like to volunteer as an editor, let Steve know)
423-The Adelaide Show
Steve Davis: [00:00:00] Hello, Steve Davis here. Welcome to episode 423 of the Adelaide Show Podcast. And my special guest in this episode will be our political commentator, Robert Godden. Uh, the topic is the Liberal Party of South Australia and the Liberal Party of Australia, and more broadly, liberalism itself. Um, one thing that people outside of Australia sometimes struggle with is they’re familiar with the, the movement, the philosophy, uh, the disposition that is liberalism and that’s liberal with a small LA lowercase L, which has various definitions, which we start the interview off.
Understanding. Typically, it’s when someone is self-governing, we can trust them to work their way in life because they will hold themselves back from the excesses. They’ll want, you know, things to be good for them and for those around them. [00:01:00] And then it evolved itself, liberalism over time to focusing on where the state is holding me back.
And we need freedom from that. Or where there are things in society that are, um, jeopardizing the, the prosperity, comfort, and happiness of some people. And so, uh, one branch of liberalism is to stand up, to ask the state to step into, protect and support those people. Then you’ve got the liberal party with a, an uppercase L here in Australia where it’s not really a liberal lowercase L party.
Maybe it was at one point. And that’s what Robert and I will discuss. In fact, Robert wrote a paper which prompted this discussion. And the paper is entitled, or the essay, the liberals have no chance of winning this forthcoming South Australian election. Realistically, can they ever win another one? And [00:02:00] before you throw a brick at your phone or car system, whatever you’re listening in, uh, we are going to do a forensic deep dive into the Australian Labor Party here in South Australia, uh, before the next election.
So don’t worry, their time is coming as well. But today the focus is on the liberal party. And then of course, uh, we’ve got the federal liberal party, uh, Susan Lay coming out, and there’s a whole lot of things coming out of her mouth that I just wouldn’t have thought we’d be hearing in 2025. It’s fascinating.
And as Robert goes into, there’s a cascading domino effect at work. Um, in fact, it’s pretty bleak for liberals all to run Australia in his view. And you have to remember, he was a liberal growing up. In fact, um, we don’t have a photograph of it, but he, as a young 12-year-old schoolboy in Whyalla, uh, went to hear Malcolm Fraser speak in W’s Hotel Alexander and had a book signing [00:03:00] and actually was a bit miffed, as you’ll hear in the interview.
He actually said to the prime minister or the, uh, the opposition leader at that point. Um, um. What are your actual policies? And that got a stern look back from Malcolm. Anyway, he’ll expo. Explain that more. And the photograph that you see going with this episode is actually an artistic representation of that meeting of the small redheaded boy and the demure statesman.
And then in the musical pilgrimage, I’m gonna finish off with a song that I wrote and then brought to life with Steve Davis and the virtuosos about Spring Gully and the sadness of what seems to be, its passing now after four generations. There is a tenuous link to the liberal party. I’ll explain that more when we get there.[00:04:00]
Brett Monten: The refugees, lady,
lady, lady
Caitlin Davis: in the spirit of Reconciliation. The Adelaide Show Podcast acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout South Australia and their connections to land, sea, and community. We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.
Brett Monten: That Lady Lady.
Lady Lady
[00:05:00] Adelaide,
Steve Davis: Robert Godin is our political commentator here at the Adelaide Show, and he’s written an essay. With the title, the Liberals have no chance of winning this forthcoming South Australian election. Realistically, can they ever win another one? And it seems that Robert’s thesis about the South Australian liberals could equally apply to the Federal Party.
But I don’t, don’t wanna get ahead of myself before we get into party politics. I want to start at the beginning, not with, as Robert alludes to, in his essay with Vincent TA’s Missing Personality, or Josh Peak Measuring Curtains for 2036, but with a question about liberalism itself. Uh, Robert Godden, welcome to the Adelaide Show.
Great to be here again. Steve, let’s start [00:06:00] by, I mean, I always love that saying, I think it’s attributed to, uh, Socrates at the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. And so I wanna do that with American political philosopher Patrick Deneen. Um, he had an argument, and in fact a whole book that cuts right across the political categories that sort of overlap with liberalism.
He says, liberalism, both classical and progressive are built on a false. Promise that when you detach individual freedom from tradition and nature, you don’t actually create liberty. Instead, you create loneliness and you end up utterly dependent either on the market or the state to view the void where culture used to be.
Before I let you loose on this, I wanna play a snippet from his conversation with economists Russ Roberts on EconTalk, who has kindly given me permission to do this sort of thing, because it frames something that you’ve been thinking about within [00:07:00] the South Australian Liberal Party. So let’s have a listen to Deneen give a working definition to begin with of what liberalism is something that perhaps the liberal party is connected to.
Patrick Deneen: I guess I would start with just, um, uh, a very basic premise, which is, um, liberalism, inaugurates, a kind of a new understanding of liberty. The Liberty’s a very old word. It goes back to the Latin libertas and in a classical, and then in the Christian tradition, liberty meant the condition of ruling oneself according to what.
Is understood to be good and always had a kind of understanding that the life of liberty was a life lived according to virtue. So that there was a kind of form of self limitation and an orientation toward an understanding of the good that was the ground condition for what constituted liberty. And in the early modern period, in the beginnings of the liberal project, um, the word liberty was.
Continued to be [00:08:00] used, but the definition became really rather different. And one sees it originally in a proto aliber thinker like Thomas Hobbes, and then a fully kind of full blown liberal thinker like, like John Locke, that liberty becomes, uh, understood as the absence of obstacle to the fulfillment of our desires or will or appetite so that it becomes redefined as the absence of external constraint And as a political matter, then you can see how this would really transform, um, our understanding of what the ends and purpose of government is and what they should be.
But my argument is really that what we think of as the great and Titanic political battle of our time, kind of classical liberal versus progressive liberal is actually two sides of the same coin. And what we see failing is not, um, is not one version of this liberalism or another version of this liberalism, but the entire, um, in a way that the presupposition.
That liberty understood and, and the, this liberal understanding is [00:09:00] itself at fault and at, at really at the core of what, what I think is the, the kind of the crisis of of, of the modern liberal regime. Really what we have is a kind of debate over the means to the end of the liberation of the individual.
And in the classical liberal tradition, that means, was understood largely as the limitation of the state understood in a certain way. Uh, and of, and of course, the, uh, expansion of, um, of the economic realm. The, you know, what we think of today is the free market system as the, as the best venue for the pursuit of this kind of idea of individual liberty.
And then in the kind of, let’s say the second wave of liberalism, the progressive, uh, liberalism, uh, the understanding is that it’s actually, um, inequalities and injustices arising from the economic system that prevents a large number of people from realizing that personal, individual liberty. And so what’s needed is the intervention of the state and the, um, the role of the state to put people in the position then, uh, to have the kind of equal opportunity to, to [00:10:00] pursue liberty.
So Robert,
Steve Davis: um, let us get into this first, because as we just heard, Deneen argues liberalism. Originally about self-governance and has since sort of grown and split into two sides related by economics, classical liberals saying the government gets in the way of people having freedom. And the left saying Too many people are held back by the economy and other things.
What’s your wise take? You are our political commentator. How do you look at this foundation of liberalism?
Robert Godden: I think liberalism was always built on the bigger pie theory. Uh, liberalism has always said if we have a bigger pie, um, there’s, there’s more for everyone. And the way we get to a bigger pie is to a, allow individual freedoms and allow the people the, um, the scope and the imagination to improve the world.
So I think if you go back to John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, all these sort of classic [00:11:00] liberals, I. They, they championed the free market. They said the free market is gonna sort everything out. And, um, and each individual has a, uh, a role to play and each individual has the opportunity. And, and, and that sort of proto liberalism was very, um, unevenly applied.
So, so it, it sort of assumes the old saying, if all things are equal, and we know they’re not, um, and, you know, but they were all about government, just, uh, just lending a helping hand to, to the free market really and letting it take care of everyone. Um, and, and even if you look at things like the, the philanthropic, um, tradition that we really don’t have these days, um.
Uh, Smith et al made assumptions that, you know, things weren’t gonna change. I mean, I always work on the basis that the, for, for most of the sort of, uh, you know, modern history of the last 500 years, there’s been, there’s been three factions. There’s been the conservative [00:12:00] faction, which is things are great, we don’t need to change.
There’s been the, uh, liberal faction which says, you know, with a bit of imagination and, and a bit of freedom, we can make things better. And there’s the labor, uh, faction, which says, things are great but not for us. And if we make a loud enough noise, we can be part of it.
Steve Davis: Just before we go too far down that path, I wanna come back to Deen’s assertion.
That what you are talking about, there almost seems like liberalism. 2.0 because he argues that liberalism 1.0. It wasn’t about how much I can get for myself, it was how I will govern myself. I am a liberal, I can think, and I am part of the church, I am part of this society. There are lots of eyeballs keeping me in check.
And then a flip comes when it’s about, hang on a minute. No, I want to be able to own more [00:13:00] houses and I want to have this sort of power. Do you subscribe to that? Do you understand that? Do you think we are missing a trick in not having the trust of the self-governed human
Robert Godden: look? I think, um, I, I, I could see where he is coming from.
Um, uh, and he. I think where his ideas fall down is that every person is different and, and you can apply what he says to a range of society, but there’s always gonna be that proportion. I mean, take psychopaths, like psychopaths are a very small part of the population. I know some of them mate used to.
Yeah, I didn’t say that. I, I thought I would say that. But you got there first. Um, and I think that, um, I think that they’re so ungovernable that, um, that they, uh, you know, no matter what you say [00:14:00] about society, it doesn’t apply to them. And then you go to, to the other side where people are, are. So, um. La lacking in, um, uh, in, in ability to, to do things perhaps because they have a, a disability that, that prevents them from say, communication or whatever, that, that, that it’s never gonna apply to them.
So, so the question is you then go, okay, what’s the actual range on this? Does it, is this a great definition, but for 80% of the population? And, and is that enough? And, and I think that’s the problem of, of any philosophy. It, it, uh, I, uh, there’s a great, uh, quote, Steve Jobs, uh, was in a meeting and he was championing, um, laser printers.
Mm-hmm. And one of the, uh, marketing, uh, executives there said, the biggest problem is we don’t think there’s a market for it. And Steve Jobs said, well, I’d buy one. [00:15:00] And the guy said, yes, but 20 odd year old millionaires aren’t a huge market. And jobs, uh, fired him. Yes. Um, which is the problem you have when you speak truth to power.
The guy was a hundred percent correct and everybody, a a a lot of these, a lot of the most famous people in this space, they, they, they, they come with a range of assumptions based upon their status and their, um, you know, role in society. It, it, it, I mean, when, when the classical guys I mentioned earlier, locksmith mill were, were riding their marvelous treatises.
I mean, how many people were within, you know, 10 miles of them living in the gutter trying to beg that, that weren’t overly concerned with, you know, how much the government was interfering their life actually could have used a bit. Um, so I, I think any definition is always hamstrung by what percentage of the population does that definition represent.
So I think, and, and look, let’s face [00:16:00] it for, for the liberal party to be. Successful. They, they probably need to get, you know, drag well on a federal level, about 40 odd percent of the population with ’em, and on the state level, closer to 50. So, so in reality, any definition that tries to encompass the whole of society is, is aiming the point that it can’t apply to everyone.
And B, but you’re not trying to apply to everyone.
Steve Davis: Before we get to the party politics, I, I just want to finish this little entree about liberalism itself. I’ll take your point that maybe Deneen, um, has, and the people he’s quoting have a rarefied view. What’s a working definition? How, how do we differentiate in, in your thoughts, liberalism, let’s say what we might call classical liberalism from neoliberalism, which seemed to emerge in the what, late two thousands and champ at the bit.[00:17:00]
What, what’s your working definition of that? Because then I wanna bring us to the liberal party and see if there’s any overlap.
Robert Godden: Yeah. Well, I think you can think of, um, classical liberalism as a, uh, as an apple. Okay. Right. And this apple, uh, is made up of individual liberties. It’s made up of free markets, made of a minimal gov government intervention.
Um, and then what’s happened over the last 150 years is bites have been taken outta this apple. So there’s a, there’s a bite that says globalism. Do, do we like it? Do we not like it? It’s good for us, but it’s not good for us. So that, that’s, that’s sort of disrupted the smooth, uh, surface of our apple. Um, you know, identity politics are, are we willing to just.
Represent ourselves purely as a liberal idea or are people wanting to represent themselves as you know, I am Joe Blogs and I represent the liberal idea and this is how I represent [00:18:00] it. Um, so it’s, it’s no longer the same apple for everybody. And then, then the biggest problem you got, of course is, um, trying to grow apples when the environment’s falling apart.
Steve Davis & The Virtualosos: Yeah.
Robert Godden: So, um, so I think it used to be simple. It used to be this is what, this is what this one is, this is what this one is, this is, is what this one is. And, and they’ve all nibbled and take part, I mean, large chunks of classic liberalism have grow gone into the, um, sovereign citizen movement. They’ve taken a lot of the early writings, willfully misunderstood them, applied stupidity on top, wrapped it up with a bit more stupidity given Mr.
Dunning and Mr. Krueger a call. And, um, there you have it, sovereign citizens.
Steve Davis: I,
Robert Godden: I, I was
Steve Davis: actually only thinking about sovereign citizens earlier this week. I, I don’t know why they were on my mind and I thought. We need to pay our frontline workers like the police a lot more. ’cause they’ve gotta deal with these fruitcakes.
They really do. Yeah. Oh. Um, now, okay, but neoliberalism, neoliberalism, how does that sit next to this [00:19:00] apple? Because that’s, yeah, that’s like a combine harvester going through the apple orchard. Yeah.
Robert Godden: Yeah. It’s kind of, um, it, it, it’s where, where liberalism, the classical liberalism said we are. Um, I mean the last classical liberalist was John Howard.
Right. And he, and the sentence he made said the, the famous sentence he made, which he said, the liberal party is a broad church. And, and that sentence to me is where the liberal party went wrong. They were, they were willing, they were always willing to, if your heart was in the right place, and if you were looking for the good of society, then you could say what you thought, believe what you.
Believe and then work together as a group, uh, for the betterment of society. That, that’s how I see. Now, you could argue that menses wasn’t really formed along those lines, but I always thought that li that line that John Howards is, is one of the most important political lines, I think, in my life. And I think that it was always that case.
And I think the, the fracturing [00:20:00] along issues, um, is, um, is, is really interesting. And the, uh, so that is really what happened. People have split up the apple and said, you know, I, I like the left side of the apple, but I don’t like the right side of the apple. And, and that is what’s happened. So you’ve got, instead of one.
One body with multiple ideas, you’ve now got multiple bodies with one idea each.
Steve Davis: Okay. That poses questions. Can a body with multiple ideas live practically? But before we get there, I’m, I’m not satisfied. We finished the neoliberalism, um, definition well enough. I think we move past that. What is, what does a lib neoliberal mean to you?
How do they, how do they see the world? Um, and are they really liberals or are they using, are they wolves in sheep’s clothing or vice versa?
Robert Godden: Yeah. Look, look, I think it depends on how [00:21:00] you, how you see, how you see yourself. So, so neoliberalism, I guess, is based around, um, uh, a free market capitalist. Uh, model, um, with financial austerity, that’s a big pardon, neo individual responsibility.
Um, and also it, it’s a global movement. You know, it definitely a lot of international free trade is wrapped up in it. Um, and I think that the people who promulgate that see that as a good thing. And they, they see it as the, as the path to greatness and the people who are against it see it as a bad thing.
And, and the path to despair. And the issue is, of course, that none of these things are good or bad in themselves. It’s the way they’re, um, they’re approached. So, you know, you know, [00:22:00] free market, good fiscal or AAU austerity. Good. Um. Globalization Good. And we all must individually be responsible, which is kind of like saying, you know, we have no control over the three of the biggest things in our lives, but hey, other than that, we’re good.
Um, and you know, people, people obviously critique it and say, these people are setting up inequalities and they’re, um, eroding public service and public trust. And they, they, the, the markets aren’t always the, the honest brokers that these people say they are. So, look, it’s definitely a, it’s definitely a corner.
It’s definitely, um, you know, these people see this as the core of our apple. I think neoliberal think they’ve got down to the core, they’ve jettison some of the, um, some of the outer nonsense, and they’ve got down to what do we actually need? We need a free working global market. We need to, uh, be very tight with the public purse and, and we need people to take individual responsibility and use all the [00:23:00] skills they learned in their expensive public schools for the betterment of partly society, but partly themselves.
Steve Davis: And, and the, the criticism I bring is many of them benefited from the large s of a caring government that had broader, uh, remits. And then these labels, they, they come across to me as a marriage of convenience or even just one night stands of convenience because when they’re on the up and money is no issue, then.
Yes, we’re all for this. Uh, but oh no, we’re not gonna pay tax. We’re not gonna do our share. Um, but we are neoliberals. There are so many, I I wanna say charlatans who will just dance with those costumes on while it’s convenient for them. But the moment they can get a handout or get some benefit, it, it crumbles.
So I’m very cynical about, you know, the people who run your Amazons and your [00:24:00] Netflixes and all those sorts of companies, your Facebooks or Metas, you know, they’ll say one thing ’cause they know it’s never gonna hurt them.
Robert Godden: Mm-hmm. Look, look, I think you’re right. And, and I think also, um, you know, much as we have the, the metaphor of a a, you know, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Yes. Um, it’s pretty hard to be convinced that a, a wolf with a sheep’s can rug on it is, is not a wolf. And I think neoliberals in, in many cases, uh. Uh, are more like a sort of a, um, you know, a a a a wild jackal in a WW wolf’s clothing. They’re, they’re almost the same thing. They’re trying to, they’re trying to present themselves as slightly more palatable.
Um, but you know what, I, I can’t see a lot, lot of the leading federal liberal, uh, leader, they call themselves neoliberals. And that’s a nonsense. You know, that’s, that’s an absolute nonsense. They want to be the
Steve Davis: Bond villain, but they’re
Robert Godden: not quite Well, I think, I think they, they, they [00:25:00] want to be the bo they want the sort of popularity of the bond villain.
I think. Um, I think they want to be the sort of, um, you know, the, the, they wanna be the hero, their own story. And, um, they, I mean, you like take globalization, right? This is a simple fact that the globe is getting hotter and hotter and international trade is being severely impacted and curtailed by the environ.
So if you were truly a neoliberal and you truly put, you would have a look at the figures and go, well, coal doesn’t make sense anymore. The the figures are, are unambiguous. You know, it, it, it’s, and so, so you know, where, whereas as I said, classically, we had conservatives, liberals, and labor, what we’ve actually labor in the broad sense, what we’ve now got is, is a whole bunch of these neoliberals that are, that are just e es espousing the liberal views, but with a very conservative heart.
Steve Davis: [00:26:00] That brings me to where I want to start. Which is now that we’ve sort of got a messy sort of Salvador Dali esque, uh, portrait of, of liberalism, were, were you expecting anything else, Steve? I was with you, Robert. I was expecting a very hands, hyen pastel, uh, detailed. Uh, but yeah, I’ll go with the Salvador Dali.
Um, when we look at that liberalism itself, and we look at the liberal party in Australia, and you can tell me whether you think liberal party federally and liberal party South Australia are in the same family, or whether it just is happenstance they’ve got those names. How much overlap has there ever been between the liberal party with a capital L and liberalism itself with a lowercase l?
The, the philosophy.
Robert Godden: That’s a great [00:27:00] question, isn’t it? ’cause you could also, um, ask the same question of, of the Labor Party, you know, you know, how, how much does it actually overlap with, with the idea of, of, of organized labor? And
Steve Davis: I think we should come back and do that on another night. Yeah. But tonight it’s, but it is.
Robert Godden: Yeah. But it is, it is a, um, it is a, you know, uh, the, the word liberal in is, is shorthand in Australia far different to what it is in other places. So, yes, because we have the liberal party now, there’s a, there’s a liberal party in, in the uk, they’re minor. Um, so here we have that idea of, um, of, of a liberal party.
And, and we know that they talk about, you know, freedom and they talk about responsibility and they talk about fiscal responsibility and they talk about all these things, but they never define them. All right. They’re very, they’re very vacuous. I think the difference is that liberalism is about thoughts and ideas [00:28:00] leading to results, and the liberal party is about espousing these thoughts, but not necessarily having a plan that’s going to, um, to get you there.
I mean, the Venn diagram of liberalism and the liberal party is not a perfect circle. Um, it’s, it’s more like a, um, uh, you know, maybe a, a third overlap. Okay. Um, you know, they, they still, and, and you know, it, it is, it is it, John Howard’s Broad Church had this idea that everyone had a different idea, I think, and I always thought that, and, and I think these days the liberal party is, is like liberalism is confined to.
Three or four versions of the, of the idea like liberalism. Fairly simple concept, uh, even though we obviously had some problems defining it, um, and uh, because it has changed so much, but [00:29:00] we, you know, the liberal party used to be that you, every liberal MP had a different opinion on everything. And, and now, now they’re basically, um, you know, cookie cutter.
Uh, what is the difference between, um, Angus Taylor and five other liberal members that you could literally interchange and in fact several nationals that you could just interchange and, and there, there’s, there’s really no difference. They say the same lines. They, they spout the same, uh, nonsense at times.
And, um, and they get the same result. Now this, this
Steve Davis: actually, this fascinates me because someone, some whip. Is keeping them in line and feeding them those lines and is either scaring the living daylights out of them to keep them in that world. And if you talk to them privately, it might be different, or they might actually have drunk the Kool-Aid versus the Howard years.
You’re talking about when he says, look, we’re, we’re a broad church and we’ve got lots of different [00:30:00] people, but I didn’t get the same sense that the party was about to fall apart at the seams. At any moment, one of these models requires a Saddam Hussein to hold everything together. I would almost argue, I can’t believe I’m saying this, in the Howard era, we almost have that very original liberal ideal of self-governance that yes, I’ve got different views, but I.
At some point, no, I’m gonna have to make some compromises and then we’ll win some, we’ll lose some, but together we are a broad church versus what I see as a very digital world now where it’s, you’re binary, it’s a one or it’s a zero. You’re in or you’re out and do not tempt fate. Uh, does
Robert Godden: that make sense?
Yeah. Look, I think if you look at the origins of Howard, um, so, so when I was 12, 13, maybe I wagged school to go and, and talk [00:31:00] myself into a, a, a lunch that Malcolm FRAs was putting on in Walla. Now Walla is not the place to be if you’re a liberal leader, by the way. Um, or a liberal loving young school boy.
Yeah. I, I must admit, the only extreme sport I’ve ever, uh, indulged in is handing out liberal how to vote cards as a child in whale. Um, so, but Malcolm Fraser was really interesting because I was a big fan. Uh, you know, I, I, I could see the, the chaos that that came out of, out of Whittler who had all the ideas, but no filter and no, uh, no discipline at all, um, within that government.
And I think that Fraser seemed to be a very steady hand on the shift. So I went along to hear him talk, and all he did was mumble about how awful it would be if the, if the, if labor won the election, mumble, mumble, mumble, bill Hayden, this mumble, [00:32:00] mumble mumble, bill Hayden. That, which turned out to be a very ineffective strategy given that labor rolled Hayden on the eve of the election.
Anyway, but I was really disappointed and I lined up afterwards and got him to sign my menu, of course. And, and, and I said to him, I, I literally said to the Prime Minister at about 13, um, where, where can I find out what you are going to do if you win the election? It’s, um, and what did he say? He, he said, oh, we have, we have policies.
And, uh, they, they gave me a little book that, it was, a book was more or less, what are we gonna do if we win the election, to be fair. Um, but the fact was, I’m
Steve Davis: sorry, I’m, I’m going to interject. Do not lose your track, but I had a similar example of that experience of being brought down to Earth. ’cause I think Robert, you and I both have an idealism within us that we actually believe we should hold aspirational ideas and strive for [00:33:00] them.
Uh, I was once a member of a Labor Party sub-branch and there was a vote, uh, in the state parliament on lowering the voting age. I was ready for a fantastic discussion in Bragg. I was looking forward to a deep philosophical discussion. Karen and Pickles was our leader. The whole conversation was. Would a 16-year-old vote labor or liberal?
And I was disgusted. I, I left the party. I’ve never been a party person ever since. And so here we are having a conversation at a lofty level about ideas and philosophy. Are we fooling, this is just a little footnote. How much are we fooling ourselves that at the end of the day, all they care is getting the more, you know, the 50.1% of the vote.
Robert Godden: Mm. Look, look, I think that is interesting and, and, and the, the philosophical current, um, you know, equivalent in labor, in liberal terms is, you know, what does Gina think of it? But, um, [00:34:00] but I think that Fraser was interesting. Yeah. Fraser was an interesting, uh, character because he, he was, I don’t think he, he was self propelled.
I think he was propelled along what is right. He, he, he wasn’t someone who was there to be, uh, you know, I’m the leader and I’m gonna say he was, this is the right course and we will take the course and all of my mps will be disciplined and we will take this course. And I think that was a big relief to people.
I mean, people, you know, there’s this sort of rewriting of history that, that phrase was his cartoon villain that, um, you know, got rid of Whitlam. But if you look at the following election, FRAs, it was a landslide and people liked what Fraser had to say. And, uh, or, or to a extent what he, he didn’t say, but what he did, um, you know, he was very, so I think John Howard as a junior minister at that time, and then treasurer, um.[00:35:00]
You know, learn that discipline and, and learnt that, you know, Fraser would get everyone together in the party room. They’d talk through the issues. They wouldn’t say, who are they gonna vote for? They’d say, what does everybody think about this idea or the merit of its own idea? And then Fraser would maybe take a vote or maybe just say, the right thing to do is this.
And on they would go. And, and I think if you look at the discipline, um, within, like for a party that’s never disciplined, people per se, you know, you don’t get ejected for crossing the floor, unlike in the Labor Party. Um, they had a, a marvelous discipline in the phrase he is, they had a marvelous discipline in the, um, uh, Howard years, I mean.
Hawke was a very disciplined, uh, regime. Keating was an authoritarian regime, which is a slightly different thing. Yes. Um, Whitlam was a cult. Um, uh, Rudd was an authoritarianism. Um, [00:36:00] Gillard was to a certain extent, disciplined. Uh, and really at around that time, that’s where the wheels fell off of politics anyway.
Um, so I, I think some significant things happened. Uh, firstly there was the Rudd, Gillard Rudd, yeah. Wars where they showed, um, that, you know, revenge can be had. Um, and, uh, and it’s not about what you believe. Uh, you know, I mean, I look at Penny Wong and Julia Gillard through all that time being against same-sex marriage because that was the official party line.
Um, then we had a, what I think was a really significant event in South Australian politics, which was where, um. Abuse was discovered in South Australian schools, and the minister was not held responsible on the basis that nobody had told him. And that was a complete rewriting of the Westminster, um, system.
And, and I make no secret the fact that I think Jay Weatherall should have resigned and should never have been premier and [00:37:00] was a, a weak minister and a weak premier. And, but he really, it really was the, then you could do whatever you liked. I mean, I’m, I’m quite surprised Mr. Spears lost his job, you know, given he could have said, well, nobody told me it was cocaine or nobody told me it was illegal.
Um, you know, we really did move to this. Nobody told me, I don’t know. I can make mistakes. I’m sorry. I’ve let down my team, I’ve let down my wife, I will do better. Um, you know, in, in 20 years, we’ve completely lost that you are responsible. So in a circumstance where it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re gonna get away with it or you’re gonna be sorry about it, um, you.
You can change ideas. You, you can, you can move around to you, you, you, your words don’t come back to haunt you the way they used to used to be. If you said something that was what you said. Um, I mean, look at what, sorry. You go
Steve Davis: for it. Do you think there’s a Trump factor here in that, because at the moment, at the time of recording, he’s saying, I’ll release the Epstein [00:38:00] files, and pundits can play back quote after quote of him saying they should have been and then they shouldn’t have been.
And he’s created this thing where it doesn’t matter. And unfortunately, it’s come at a time when I don’t think journalists have enough headspace in their day to actually follow something through. And their readers are glued, addicted to these smartphones. Doom scrolling on the latest piece of bullshit that’s keeping them occupied habitually.
I wonder if this is also, um, this is what I love about Danin. I don’t think there is self-governance anywhere on the planet. Well, in very, in rare places on the planet, those could be me pandering to that middle group that you talked about, but we are lost now. I’m, I’m just trying that as a, a cat among the pictures into what you’re saying.
Robert Godden: Yeah. Look, I think, I think [00:39:00] we used to have very clear, uh, well, I mean, two incidents. Uh, Barry o’ Farrell, the Prime Minister of New South Wales, he failed to declare $300 bottle of wine mm-hmm. That he’d received and he resigned. Yep. You know that you don’t see that anymore. Um, and going back to Howard again, um,
Steve Davis: he said, sorry, John Laws failed to declare that he was getting cash for comments and they’re giving him a state funeral, but go on.
Robert Godden: That’s true. Um, John Howard said There’ll never, ever be a GST and then. He was, he was brave enough to go back to the people and say, you know what? I was wrong. And, and I have become convinced there is a need for it. So I’m gonna go to the election, I’m gonna explain my reasons why we need A GST, and I’m going to stand on that principle, and if I win, we’ll get a GST.
And, um, that’s a pretty So principled. [00:40:00] That’s principled. Yeah. And, and it’s also someone deciding in advance they’re wrong. Whereas most of the time when politicians do something wrong, it’s only after it the wrongness has come to bear. Uh, that, that we live with it, you know, but we’re in the, you know, the, um, the, um, the age of the sound grab.
I think that’s a problem for politicians in, in, in regard to this. They, they’re painted again, frass painted as a cartoon villain and people, he, he quoted George Bernard Shaw. Um. And, and the people only remember the first three or four words of the quote. Life wasn’t meant to be easy. What he said was, life wasn’t meant to be easy, but take heart.
It can be delightful, which is a, a Bernard chore quote about, you know, things might, um, individual bits of things might be tough, but the overall, and, and, you know, that’s a, that’s a actually quite a lovely quote. And, and yet, uh, you know, the, the next thing we were seeing was, was labor party ads that said these are his words.
Steve Davis: Yeah.
Robert Godden: And they [00:41:00] were, but they’re stripped of context. And context is a big thing at the moment. You know, context is suddenly people suddenly notice context for, for some reason haven’t been when it’s convenient. Just like the Neoliberals, everything’s about costumes of convenience. Mm-hmm. Look, look, I think so too.
And, um, and, and I think so, so, you know, my, my my view of my politics is that I, I. I was always on the moderate liberal side. And then I stayed where I was and the liberals drifted off to the right and the Labor party drifted towards me. Um, I actually met with a Labor party figure in 2007 and I said, you know, I handed out how to vote cards in, you know, the 19 early 1980s, uh, uh, in Moala.
And he said, well, if you were a liberal in 1980, you, you’d be with us now. Wow. Because we’d come to you, you know, and, um, and, and he wasn’t at the time. I didn’t admit it, but I, I must admit, he’s, he’s, he’s probably, there’s probably a lot in that.
Steve Davis: [00:42:00] Alright, so let’s come to the party question with, with a, with a distinct focus.
Um, and I’ll give you the option ’cause you are my guest and you are our guest political commentator. There seems to be a lot happening on the national front or the federal front with the liberal party and your paper. The whole reason we are gathering is your pronouncement of death on the liberal party in South Australia.
Which one would you like to go for first? Okay.
Robert Godden: Well, so start from the basis that while my, my paper was on the Liberal Party in South Australia, I think it’s pretty fair to say that in, in the mainland states, uh, and federally, uh, liberal’s been going down pretty well, the same, same path. Queensland’s weird because Queensland’s weird.
Mm-hmm. Um, and you know, they’ve got that coalition with the nationals. So, you know, it’s, um, I’m trying to not to say anything about laying down with dogs. Um, if you spend some time with people with unusual ideas, sometimes you develop unusual ideas [00:43:00] of your own. Um, and, um, the, and so. I think South Australia was to an extent the forerunner.
I, I think we liberal were actually bad here before they were bad anywhere else. Okay. It was nice to be first they did a, yeah, they did a spectacular slide. Um, but what’s compounding it now is, is South Australia’s got the best government in Australia. I mean, the Malus government is incredible. It is, it is a totalitarian dictatorship that makes you feel good.
Like everything’s done Mr. Malana’s way. Hang on.
Steve Davis: Unless you’re in an ambulance or you wanna go to the beach. Yeah.
Robert Godden: Yeah. But you, nevermind. PE Peter’s got you covered. Um, but you know, it, it is a, it is a spectacularly successful government, um, uh, because it tells you that look, the difference between the Putin model and the Malinowski model and the Trump model is very little.
The only difference is Malinowski is very careful not [00:44:00] to say anything that isn’t actually true. He might predict things that turn out not be true, but he won’t actually, he won’t actually barefaced lie. Um, and he won’t, um, he, he won’t, uh. Say things that sound off, he won’t, he won’t say things so that people would go, well, that’s, that’s not something I can subscribe to.
So if what he, if his thought, if his, his idea isn’t populous, he just doesn’t say it. Um, and if he’s, uh, if, if he’s not, if something isn’t true, he doesn’t say it. So it, it, it, I mean, it’s a much better idea obviously, than the ravings of Trump or, or Putin.
Steve Davis: Well, that’s true. I mean, almost like you’re saying they’re pre-pub tested, uh, in a way that I remember growing up at the point.
In history where you bought a pair of jeans, you washed them, and they shrunk and it was a waste of money. And then the, the gene maker said, these are now preshrunk jeans. So Peter malas us [00:45:00] is the Preshrunk jeans of political messaging.
Robert Godden: Yeah. Look and look, we are early in his, you know, two decade reign. Um, uh, really how many more races can we
Steve Davis: have?
Robert Godden: I mean, there, there’s always a possibility he’ll jump up to one of the next two jobs that’s available to him, you know, prime Minister or Pope. Um, and, uh, you know, whether he sees either them as, as worthy of him. Um, but I think that, um, look, it’s a very disciplined government, uh, but there are some bad decisions being made by this government.
Um, I think the merging of the universities is a really dodgy one. Nobody wanted it except the premier. So it happened. Um, I think the co-location of the women’s and Children’s Hospital on the one site, when all of the. Uh, thinking at the moment is that those two hospitals do not need to be together. And other than Boston where the decision was made, simply because the, the hospital facility there is so huge [00:46:00] that, that it’s each one is like multiple hospitals anyway.
Um, you know, neither is, and to be fair to Malus, that decision was kind of made during the last government, but he’s enacted it last labor government. Um, but I think that he, he’s a incredibly strong politically. Um, so my, my dad is obviously one of the key influences on me and my dad, very much a liberal party voter, his whole life.
And a member I probably of the bright, I, I wouldn’t swear to that. I think he was. Mm-hmm. Um, and that he’s only ever met two impressive figures that have impressed him in his life. So one was Goff Whitlam. Oh, the Goff Whitlam turned up to Wala to what he thought was gonna be a rousing um, event. And unfortunately they got the date wrong.
And there were four people in the room. One of ’em being my dad and Whitlam said, well, this is a waste of time. Let’s go to dinner. And took ’em all to dinner. So, uh, and dad said that the guy’s charisma [00:47:00] was absolutely off the chart. He never met anyone, you know, more charismatic. Um, and, um, everything he said, they would think, it doesn’t sound right, but hey, Goff’s saying it.
So there must be something to it. Wow. And um, and the other figure that he’s my dad is, is, you know, he is 80 odd years old. He’s heavily involved in the men’s shed in Whyalla and, um, pet Malus, he’s a fixture at the men’s shed. He pops in and tells ’em what’s going on with Whyalla. And, um, and this has impressed him greatly.
So I think the, the, it, it’s probably always been true that great. Labor leaders have been better communicators and better sellers of a vision than, than the liberals because, you know, it’s a harder vision. You know, the la labor, liberal vision of, you know, if we govern ourselves, all will be great as opposed to the labor vision of your being ripped off by the system.
And we are gonna sort it for you and you don’t have to worry about a thing. I mean, [00:48:00] you know, look, I, I, I can’t see a more, I can’t see an alternative in South Australia, Western Australia, or federally to a labor government. Like, there’s simply no competence whatsoever of the, um, of the, uh. Opposition that’s standing against them and, and, and they’re all in the same boat.
The o opposition just being hopeless. Victoria’s a different killer of fish where the opposition of being vindictive and nasty and um, and tearing themselves apart, you know, which is also not helpful if you want to govern. Um, but look, Victoria’s really, really interesting and, and Victoria, I was really excited today by the news out of Victoria.
Uh, ’cause on the day we’re recording this, there is a new opposition leader in Victoria, so an opposition that has proven so [00:49:00] incapable of toppling Dan Andrews Yes. Who was Public Enemy number one. Yes. And then Jacinta Allen, who was Public Enemy number two. Like, like literally, um, literally that you must, you must have had to hold your nose in Victoria to vote no matter who you voted for.
But, you know, it, it’s, it’s been absolutely appalling. And, and, and the, and liberals have not come close. I have not come close and all of a sudden. They have, uh, elected a new, um, leader, Jess Wilson. Um, now Jess Wilson is, uh, in her thirties, I think about 35. Um, she was a lawyer, so you know, that’s pretty par for the course.
Mm-hmm. Um, she was a business advisor to the Business Council of Australia and to Josh Frydenberg. Um, uh, she’s, she talks a lot about health, home ownership, uh, which, you know, things that, crime. Yeah. Crime. Oh yeah. Crime is, crime is the big thing. Melbourne hasn’t got a crime, uh, problem [00:50:00] unless you ask, you know, any of its citizens or the police.
But according to the government, everything’s fine. Right. Don’t you worry about that. And, um, the, the idea that Jess Wilson should be in the liberal party is an idea that is what, eight years out of date, she should be a teal. Like literally the teals are liberal party people who haven’t decided to go down the right wing.
View and, and we, she’s the best thing that could possibly have happened to the, um, liberal party. And, and I know that by the amount of people who are against it on Facebook.
Steve Davis: Well, that, that’s true. So you are, you are quite bullish on the liberal’s chances in Victoria, but not so much
Robert Godden: elsewhere. Hideously, hideously, unimpressive government.
Um, absolute teachering on the last thing, and, and probably the only thing they had going for it is they could sell the opposition as a group of bitter men that were infighting and now they’ve, they’ve got a, a, a smart, intelligent, intelligent [00:51:00] woman leading it.
Steve Davis: Let’s just bring it back to South Australia because, oh, okay.
In your essay, you, you did have some brother snide comments, Robert Godden snide about Vincent. The leader and his personality when it can be found. Right. So, so is this in contrast to what you’re talking about with your Goffs and your Peter Mal Yeah. Who seem to be oozing it out of their paws?
Robert Godden: Yeah, I, I mean, if I was the, um, if I was, uh, Vincent TA’s advisor, my first advice would be whatever you do, keep your shirt on.
Um, you know, Melanie Nelson doesn’t gonna get away with that. You are not. Um, so when I was, uh, kicking around in the business community in the 1980s, I went and saw a guy called Alan Peas, a famous body language thing, and he. He did this exercise. We got five people up on the stage and he got one guy that was, uh, dressed in a, a nice suit [00:52:00] and with clean shaving with a, a nice haircut.
And he got one guy that had a bald head and a mustache. And he got one guy that, uh, was a sort of tall, distinguished looking guy wearing glasses.
Steve Davis & The Virtualosos: Mm-hmm.
Robert Godden: Was that you? And he got, no, it wasn’t me, sadly. Um, and he got one guy up that looked sort of, um, was sort of dressed in like a, uh, well, like a denim jacket and jeans and looked like he worked out a bit.
And then he got another guy up that was sort of, um, quite short and he pulled that guy’s shirt out at the, um, at the pants or one half of it. So half his shirt was hanging down. They threw his tire over his shoulder and he messed his hair up. And then he said, right, we’re casting a film and we need the hero, the bad guy, the sheriff, the doctor, and the town drunk.
So I’m gonna announce each p each one in, I’m gonna walk along and you want to cheer for the person who you think should be that. And, and [00:53:00] without a doubt, he knew exactly who was gonna be picked for each role. And we all do because there’s that, that visual, right? There’s a visual and we, we can’t help it.
We, we, we like to think we are evolved past, you know, the evidence of our eyes, although we’ve got so many cliches about, you know, what’s in front of you. But the prob one of the problems Vincent Tarzi has particularly compared to Mr. Beki, is he has a, he has a slight vampire ishness about him. He, he is one of the 5% of the population that never blinks.
That does not help him. I know people that, that literally walk away from a TV if he’s on it because of his unblinking stare, and it’s not something he can help, but he, he just looks like, um, a, a Muppet version of Dracula. Um, and it’s no reflection on his competence. But he, he has a look about him that you just look at him and think, I just, what, what is going on?
He, he, he, he [00:54:00] avanto cast my bulb. Yeah. He, he just, and then he opens his mouth and. And he doesn’t, um, doesn’t have any joy in his voice. So, so it, it’s one thing to look like the joyless undead, but talking like it doesn’t help at all. Um, and, and look, there is absolutely no, he, he’s probably one of the most composit performers, right?
But I mentioned Goff Whitlam earlier, um, who had very little competence, lots of ideas, but above all, he had charisma. Um, and Malus has got a charisma and it’s a personal charisma. And people who’ve met him think he, he’s terrifically charismatic. And, and the liberals have put up against, um, him someone who, who charisma is, is not the strong point of his personality radar.
Um, so there’s two things
Steve Davis: here. [00:55:00] First of all, who else in their ranks could actually bring that to the fore? And the other thing I’d like, while we have this, and we’re talking about the liberals itself, we might do another one on the Labor Party at some point. Uh, so in fact, I think we should, um, I’ve always had this notion that there is an in aim or, um, a sense that we are meant to govern.
Uh, that’s, that’s, it’s always a shock when liberal politicians are not voted in. It’s, yeah, there’s an assumption, but hang on. But this is, this is our right. Uh, there’s, so there’s two bits there. A, who’s in their ranks who can do, and B, do you think that’s still a thing? Uh, and, and probably the third thing that I wanted to do to, to round this off in talking about South Australia is my outsider’s perspective is that.
There is a rampant group of far right, crazy evangelical religious [00:56:00] people who want to hog tie that party for their own agenda and tap into that vote. There is the, the, the wets who actually care about humans perhaps. And then you’ve got the drys who are trying to, um, you know, show that we care with austerity and, and economics.
So there you go. I’ve given you a smorgasbord to wander your way through
Robert Godden: all you can eat. So, so to answer the first part, um, you know, do they honestly think they’re the party of government? Um, they proved that spectacularly in the lead up to the last but one election, the one that Stephen Marshall actually won, um, by means of their political ad, which they had gone to a leafy restaurant in the eastern suburbs.
They had the whole cabinet there, and they’re sitting around relaxed in, you know. Ralph Lauren Polos. Um, and they’re just chatting away saying, you know, talking about the cost of private schools and things like that. And, and then they, uh, you know, and then the ad is, you know, liberal party we’re just like you.
And, um, so that was the gist of it. So, so [00:57:00] yes, they do exist in Echo Chamber. Um, yes, you could have been
Steve Davis: John Schumann then. That was a great intro to what Beaumont rag or something.
Robert Godden: I, um, I think that, um, that you’re right, that there’s a, there’s a bunch of people who think some of the ideas in, in the Bible are really worthwhile, like, you know, love thy neighbor and help people.
And then there’s the Christian element. Um, you don’t have any truck with any of that nonsense in the Bible at all. The only use they’d have a Bible was to hit poor people with it in the street. Um, but yeah, I mean, we have national embarrassments, like a Alex Antic her, um, you know, and all these people were terribly crucified and, and prosecute, persecuted, you know, they, they, you know, 2000 years ago ago I was nailed up and, and we’ve been persecuted ever since.
And you look there and go, how, how are you persecuted with, you’ve got a house in Burnside and you know, look, you’ve got religious schools, you’ve got there, there’s no persecution at all. But they do feel that they’re, you know, that they, they have a, a, an inalienable right to lead that. They have [00:58:00] the, um, uh, they have the, uh, God on their side and, and yeah, they’re, they’re a mess.
And they, they, they probably were at their strongest in the liberal party a little while ago. Um, but yeah, there’s still a problem. And then that really does leave you with not many people that are, because the liberal party are never gonna win anywhere. With a right wing member in, in charge, like it has to be a moderate, and the moderates are not on the ascendancy except it appears in Victoria.
Steve Davis & The Virtualosos: Yeah.
Robert Godden: So I, I I think that, um, you know, and, and the more right, they go, you know, you, you, you, you don’t wanna be a Look, look, let’s look federally, you don’t wanna be after one nation’s percentage of the vote. You wanna be after the Labor party’s percentage of the vote. So the idea of, you know, oh, we’ve lost 3% to, to one Nation.
Well, well, if you become one Nation, then you might get that [00:59:00] 3%, but you’ll lose the percentage that didn’t vote for One Nation, which is, you know, everybody, you know, everybody. Malcolm Roberts was elected with 28 votes. Wow. You know, 28 vote. They had 28. I mean, talking national embarrassments. Um, but we were seeing some, um, uh, Americanization.
There’s a, um, pol, there’s a senator in Victoria on the far right, Ralph gotta say Bobbit, but that could be wrong. Um, and he’s, uh, he espouses a lot of Amer American nonsense that just doesn’t, doesn’t make sense here, but he still thinks he’s gonna say it. You know, he mentions terms like DEI, which, you know, isn’t what we would say here, but he’s parroting stuff.
Yeah. Um, he probably got that
Steve Davis: GBT to write that sort of stuff for him.
Robert Godden: And, and the great thing is that, um, labor don’t have to worry about this because all of their equivalents of bugger off and become greens. So, so the Labor [01:00:00] Party to an extent split. They never mentioned it publicly, but to an extent, people who would’ve grown up in the labor movement are growing up in the green movement, whereas on the, on the.
Right side of politics. It’s, um, you know, maybe needed to split.
Steve Davis: We’re gonna finish on a green note in just a moment, but you did mention Josh Peak in your essay measuring curtains for 2036.
Robert Godden: Yeah, so, so we are aware that the SDA is a incredibly powerful union. Um, we are aware that many, many, many current and former labor politicians and premiers, uh, were involved in the SDA.
Um, and, uh, every time there’s anything to do with, uh, with retail, uh, whether it’s shop trading hours, whether it’s retail, uh, members getting, um, you know, assaulted at work or any issue at all. Then there’s, uh, there’s, well, what was young? Mr. Peak? He’s getting a, he’s, he’s getting, he’s getting a little older [01:01:00] now.
Um, you know, doing up there, standing up for the working man. And it, it is just the absolute, um. Blueprint to for what has gone before him and, um, yeah, so, so 2036, if, uh, if Peter Malus decides that he wants to, you know, go and do something else and, you know, run the United Nations or something, um, and then, um, maybe, you know, 20, 20 40 if, uh, if, if Big Pete decides to, uh, to hang around, uh, bestow his, uh, beneficence on us, uh, plebs for, for a while longer, and then, uh, and then gracefully, you know, retire.
I, I don’t know which way it’s gonna go. Um, uh, I, I, I, you know, uh, I don’t think is, uh, in any danger of going the way the last opposition leader went. Um, that was pretty unique. Hmm. Um, so I think, yeah, I, I think we’re in, look, and, and I don’t mind stable government. Like at the end of the day, you want a stable, competent government and it doesn’t [01:02:00] matter.
Um. Going back to my parents again, were, were big, um, big influence on me. They were horrified when Dunston left, not because they agreed with his politics at all, but they felt he was a strong leader with a lot of ideas. Yeah. And, and the state felt good about itself when we had Don Dunton.
Steve Davis: Yes. He actually had ideas.
That’s,
Robert Godden: yes. That’s a nice idea. Isn’t that a beautiful
Steve Davis: thing? Yeah. Alright. I mentioned Green before. Let’s come home with this. Uh, at the federal level, uh, Susan Lay has, uh, thinks she’s discovered the current leader at the time of recording. I better add that, uh, that she’s discovered the secret to winning the world.
And that is to say the world can burn as much fossil fuel as it likes. And, uh, goodbye net zero and watch the votes come rolling in. According to some polls that I’ve seen, I shared one with you today. Uh, co Samara, uh, shared. It was a financial review. Uh, Paul, [01:03:00] the. The votes have tanked. You’ve got Labor within among diverse Australians.
Labor Primary 46% Coalition 17 Gen Z, uh, labor 51 Coalition, 10 Conservative. Gen X liberals are up 22. One Nation 20. That’s probably a little, uh, pocket they’ve got there. Um, have they made, have they shot themselves in the feet or have they stumbled upon something that’s gonna bring them home in a chariot fueled and probably parted by Gina Reinhard.
Robert Godden: Firstly, they’ve run outta feet and they’re still shooting. Okay. Yeah. Um, someone I knew was in a car accident and the, uh, they, they wanted to test, you know, cognitively how she was when they’re pulling her outta the car. And they said to her, can you name the federal leader of the opposition? She said, is that really a reasonable test?
Uh, [01:04:00] because it could have changed at any moment. And, um, I think that we do have, um, uh, a party in absolute disarray, but look at those numbers and, and you know, the, it is, what, what are you gonna be able to chip off? Are you gonna be able to chip, let’s suppose you want 10% more vote. Are you, are you gonna be able to chip 10% out of a, a group that’s got 10%?
Or are you gonna be able to trip chip 10% out of a group that’s got 41%? You know, they, they, they’re aiming at the wrong target. They, they think they’re aiming. Government, they think they’re saying, take this government. We are gonna make sure that the aging coal, uh, plans last, last a bit longer. We are gonna build impossible nuclear power plants that can’t possibly work.
Um, we’re gonna do all these wonderful things. Take that voters are gonna love it. Um, and what they should be [01:05:00] saying is. We are gonna back you 83.2%. They should be saying, they should be saying, you know what? Your ideas are great. It’s a pity you’re not smarter. Or you’d have better ideas and you’d be able to do ’em better.
So we are gonna do, we are gonna basically get to where you want to get to, but we’re gonna do it smarter. And we are gonna, we’re gonna use these incentives and we’re gonna going to do this. But, um, unfortunately they get most of their facts from Facebook. Mm-hmm. Um, which, you know, is, uh, well, it’s what idiots do, um, quite frankly.
Uh, and, and they, you know, I, I see posts by people like Matt Canavan, obviously important coalition and pe and, and they’re just, you know, you could, you could pick holes with them, um, in a, um, a kindergarten child could pick holes in them. I, I had a guy attack me online the other day and he [01:06:00] said, uh. Um, and, and it was just Dr and, and you know, my response was give my regards to Mr.
Dunning and Mr. Krueger. Um, and he, um, so I said, C, can you explain to me why you think that? Because it’s nonsense. And he said, well, it’s too complicated for you to understand. Oh. And, and I thought, well, okay. That’s, that’s, uh, that’s really interesting. Um, and yeah, the, this seems to be the echo chamber these guys are talking in.
They’re certainly not out there talking to their constituents though. The National Party, you’re not talking to farmers. Farmers are leading the way with some of the most amazing environmental stuff. Like this is a simple idea. Bang, a few solar panels in a field, you actually get grass growing because the solar panels collect the water and dump it in usable amounts and you provide shade.
So then you have your sheep underneath the solar panels and you’re generating an income [01:07:00] from the field where your sheep are. Um, and farmers are going, yeah, have me some of that. And then the nationals are standing up and the liberals are standing up and going, well, that’s not what the farmers want. And, um, you know, I mean, watch a, b, c, landline, I mean, obviously the nationals would say that’s all left wing propaganda, but, um, but the farmers are doing amazing things for the environment.
’cause farmers don’t want bush fires and they don’t want floods. You know, they’re, they’re fairly, um, selfish like that. They, they wish to be making money all the time and not have to be underwater or under fire, um, for large amounts of time. So, I mean, the, the liberal party are lost, um, the, the, there are eight to 10 members of parliament in the federal parliament right now that they could have had.
And that is the teals. All of those TEALS candidates could have been liberal party candidates and would’ve been liberal. Party candidates 15, 20 years ago if they had not willfully taken this blindness [01:08:00] about the, the climate. Um, well, they
Steve Davis: swapped Turnbull for an onion muncher, uh, in a vinyl jacket. And so look, let’s, let’s bring this to a close now.
So, uh, you are not really seeing a liberal victory at an election on any horizon in the next five to six years.
Robert Godden: I think a more likely outcome is no liberal party, or, let me put it another way. The liberal party not being the opposition. So there is a, there are seriously under threat, um, for the other parties will actually overtake them in the polls.
I mean, federally, if you take out the fact they, if you take the fact there are two parties in the coalition, the numbers are nowhere near the. Imbalance. They used to be, it used to be the nationals were the liberals way of making up the numbers to get into government. It’s very much not that now. So if the Nationals decided to, for example, the [01:09:00] new coalition party was gonna be One nation, um, you know, those numbers would be pretty close.
Um, so I think that there’s a, there’s a chance that the liberal party, uh, won’t pull itself together and Will, will, will become the, you know, democratic Labor Party or the, um, the Democrats or one of those parties who just faded from view.
Steve Davis: Are you painting a picture of saying a group of self-entitled people in a lifeboat from the Titanic who are arguing over who should be considered captain of this lifeboat?
What it drifts in the
Robert Godden: Arctic? Uh, yeah. And I think we can add to that analogy by saying that Victoria floats by, and if Victoria is successful, they will look at that and go, well, that’s irrelevant. And as at that point they are doomed. If the liberals get up in, if, if the woeful liberals who happen to have picked the right leader, managed to topple a deeply unpopular government in Victoria, [01:10:00] that’ll be a critical moment for the liberals to take that lesson.
Um, are they incapable of learning? The only reason we have to think so is all the evidence. So when they make that, that is what I think will happen. I think Victorian will get up and I think that will be the new dawn. That will be the blueprint for how liberal get back in power and they will ignore it.
Wow.
Steve Davis: Is there, so there is no real light on the hill that you can see.
Robert Godden: Uh, wake me up in late March. You know, uh, this, this, this election is a foregone conclusion unless, of course we have some wildly unexpected, um, you know, development. Like, uh, Peter Malki gets hit by a bus and they vote Nick champion in to run the party.
Or, um, uh, you know, [01:11:00] Western Australia invades, you know, unless we, unless we have some cataclysmic event, um, the liberal party will have, you know, their, their chances of fielding a cricket team in a, in a parliamentary match will, will lessen. Okay.
Steve Davis: I’ll give you a chance to finish this with a reaction to this quote by Winston s Churchill.
I think it sums up the meandering nature of this conversation today. He’s quoted saying, socialism needs to pull down wealth. Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty. Socialism would destroy private interests. Liberalism would preserve them by reconciling them with public right. Socialism would kill enterprise.
Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trams of privilege and preference. Socialism, assails, the preeminence of the individual liberalism seeks to build up minimum [01:12:00] standard for the mass. Socialism, exalts the rule liberalism, exalts the man socialism attacks, capitalism, liberalism attacks, monopoly.
Robert Godden: Okay, I’ll give you two numbers on that. One is, it is a hundred percent correct. And the second thing is the year that that is a hundred percent correct is somewhere around 1924. Because I think it was at the depression that we started mingling our ideologies. Liberalism had a bit of this and a bit of that.
Socially, they had a bit of this and a bit of that. Um, we had, uh, we had an example of what a Soviet socialist state looked like, and people didn’t like it for obvious reasons. Um, we had, uh, you know, conservative governments that did pretty, uh, pretty poor job, uh, or liberal governments did a pretty poor job of, of meeting that arm.
So, so I think, [01:13:00] and, and I would be interested to know what year Churchill said that, because I didn’t know the quote. Um, but yeah, I, I think it was, I think it was, it was true from a viewpoint of about 1924. Um, you know, the war was over, those ideologies were competing. Um, Marxism was, was becoming, uh, mainstream.
Um, and I think at that point, making that statement, I would, I would endorse his words. Um, I think. Uh, they faded as they’ve reached us over that a hundred years. Now they’re a bit prescriptive and a bit, um, a bit, uh, caricature. Like yeah, caricature. It’s become a caricature. Um, but, but I think, I think if he was speaking from the heart in the 1920s or if she was remembering the 1920s from the 1930s and 1940s, then, then I would not in any way decry what he has said.
Um, it doesn’t really apply to 2025. [01:14:00]
Steve Davis: Robert Godden, thank you for being our political commentator, and I think we should sometime between now and the March election regroup on the Labor Party only to be fair, uh, and be as blistering in our discussion about that as we have been about the liberals.
Robert Godden: A absolutely what a great opportunity.
In the same way that the liberals have got two competent, uh, uh, mps, I think they have probably got that many incompetent mps. I mean, it’s a hell of a government to take on, but let’s, yeah, I, I’m willing to have a, have a crack at it. Thanks for joining me here on the Adelaide Show. Thank you.
Brett Monten: And now it’s time for the musical pilgrimage.
Steve Davis: In the musical pilgrimage. The song we’ve got is called Spring Gully Road, and it’s by, uh, written by me and brought to life by my be hand, my virtual session band, Steve Davis and the [01:15:00] Virtuosos. And it charts the story over four generations of Spring Gully. Uh, the Webb family in particular though it started in 1946, Edward McKee came back from the war and there on Spring Gully Road was growing his little brown onions, which he pickled and wow, we could not get enough of them.
There’s a lot of story that touches a lot of South Australians about Spring Gully and its development over the years. Uh, someone I know and work with, uh, Dominic, who runs Fun Life Fitness in Ingle Farm. He remembers his dad used to grow lots of these little onions and little cucumbers, in fact, uh, for the pickles.
And they would go, I think it was once a week, possibly even more, with sacks of, uh, of these small cucumbers to Spring Gully where they’d be weighed, they’d be paid for them. It was just part of the fabric of it. And, uh, I, I guess in full [01:16:00] disclosure, uh, I’m a friend of Russell Webb, who along with Tegan, were the ones in the leadership seats, uh, in this last round where, um.
They have had to, uh, bring in the officials to look at what they’re going to do in the future. Is it closing? Is it not? I, I know most people think it’s written off and it’s gone. I wanna hold onto some hope that there’s going to be a way forward because they were doing some really interesting things to fight back against the way things are changing in the market.
Uh, retailers just bringing in cheap, um, stuff. I’ll be kind of what I say from overseas and just gutting the market here for our local sovereign capability of growing and pickling our own food. Anyway, this song was my reflection on that. I just wanted a, a simple little one with a, a tinge of folk, if you like, to capture the, the story of the four different [01:17:00] generations who have, uh, been the, the stewards of this.
Beloved company, beloved by most of us here in South Australia. So just have a listen Now, this is called Spring Gully Road. Oh, actually I almost forgot I was going to, uh, make a tenuous link between Spring Gully and the Liberal Party. There are no official links, but here’s what I found, given that we’ve been talking liberals the whole time.
The Liberal and Country League, which was a precursor to the modern liberal party here in South Australia that was formed in 1932. Uh, there were, you know, mergers happening of earlier political entities at that point. And so the LCL then became the South Australian Division of the Liberal Party in 1945.
Spring Gully started in 1946. And what I find interesting is that it’s now 2025 and we have administrators appointed for Spring Gully and Robert [01:18:00] Godden saying you might as well call them in for the liberal party in South Australia and possibly Australia as well there. That’s my tenuous link. Hmm. Let’s have a listen to the song Spring Gly wrote,
Steve Davis & The Virtualosos: when returned from the war, he grew small brown onions outside his back door.
Soon his pickled onions flowed all along. Spring Gly Road. Turn the earth. Turn the earth when its its time. Pick the bounty and preserve it in your sweetly season. Bright. There were good years, there were hard years, but when the sun was [01:19:00] kind, we pick the bounty and preserve it in our sweet.
When Allen and Eric stepped up to the plate, the man had expanded and became great. Some grand plans were so deep within their spring golly road. Turn the earth, turn the earth and when it’s harvest time big the bounty and preserving in your sweet season bright. There were good years, there were hard years, but when the sun was kind, we the bounty and preserve it in our sweet [01:20:00] Brian.
When Ross and Kevin took over the. The storm clouds were heavy. The firm to got stronger with
Spring Road. Turn the Earth, turn the Earth and when it’s harvest time big the bounty and preserving your sweetly season, right? There were good years. There were hard years for when the sun was kind. We big the bounty and preserving our sweet season. Bright taste can be a fickle thing. People [01:21:00] only want what’s in.
And this appetite for fast overlooks things to.
You cannot onions in a Marin.
When Russ and Tegan had their time to lead cheap import stack, the cards made it harder to succeed. Deals were struck and almost closed when shadows fell on Spring Road.
Brett Monten: Turn the earth.
Steve Davis & The Virtualosos: Turn the earth, and when it is [01:22:00] harm it’s time. Pick the bounty and preserve in your sweet LA season, right? There were good years, there were hard years, but when the sun was kind, we pick the bounty and it in.
There were good years, there were hard years, but when the sun was kind, we’d pick the bounty and preserve it in our sweetly.
Steve Davis: That’s Steve Davis and the Virtuosos and Spring Gully Road. I hope if you are still here that you, well, I imagine if you are still here, you’ve enjoyed, uh, that conversation that Robert and I had reflecting out loud about the liberal party and politics here in South Australia and Australia. We’ll do another one at some point over summer, uh, looking at the [01:23:00] Australian Labor Party, and then you’ve got the labor movement itself.
Are they connected as much as perhaps they caught upon? Are they not? Um, we’ll, we’ll dive into that, um, at some point soon. Until then, it’s goodnight from me, Steve Davis. Goodnight Dawn.
AJ Davis: The Adelaide Show Podcast is produced by my dad, Steve Davis. If you want to start a podcast or get some help producing creative content.
Talk to him. Visit steve davis.com au. Thanks, aj. I’m Caitlyn Davis and I agree with everything my sister said. But there’s one more thing to say. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a rating or a review ’cause that will make my dad really happy. Oh, and one more thing. If you really, really liked it, please help a friend put the Adelaide Show on their phone.
Thanks for listening.[01:24:00]
Buzz. Buzz
Brett Monten: lady?
Lady Who? Lady Lady.
Steve Davis & The Virtualosos: That
Brett Monten: lady. Lady.