Steve Davis surprised himself this week by liking not one but two posts from South Australian Liberal politicians, so he called in long-time political commentator Robert Godden and geopolitics expert David Olney to ask a pointed question: is Peter Malinauskas becoming the Liberal Party’s secret weapon, not by helping them, but by driving his own supporters into their arms? The verdict: Jack Batty and Ashton Hurn are operating like grown-ups in a party otherwise described as riddled with “decrepit fossils and weird cultists,” and the conversation turns to whether Malinauskas’s drift from consensus premier to contentious premier is manufacturing the very opening they need, while the Liberals themselves remain too fractured to properly capitalise on it.

From there the trio put South Australia’s Health Minister through the wringer, running his saccharine response to a horror day of ambulance ramping through The Adelaide Show’s free Spin Detector tool, which diagnoses the reply as “flooding the zone with warmth” while the union’s four specific claims quietly leave the room. This episode did not include an SA Drink of the Week segment.

The conversation closes on the value, or otherwise, of protest, with Robert and David comparing Sunday’s planned Stop the Chop march to the Vietnam moratorium marches and the Arab Spring, before Steve rounds out the episode with the Musical Pilgrimage: his own new ska track, For Pete’s Sake, a “streetwise, maybe slightly embittered” take on politicians who set sail from the people who elected them.

No SA Drink Of The Week this week.

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Running Sheet: Is Peter Malinauskas A Liberal Party Asset?

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:00:00 SA Drink Of The Week

There is no SA Drink Of The Week this week.

00:04:53 Robert Godden and David Olney

Is Peter Malinauskas, without meaning to, building the Liberal Party’s next asset? That’s the question Steve Davis put to Robert Godden and David Olney after finding himself, against every instinct, liking videos from Bragg MP Jack Batty and Opposition Leader Ashton Hurn. Godden’s answer arrived with a caveat wrapped in a compliment: “it would have to be said that Ashton Hirne and Jack Batty have only a vague resemblance to the entire rest of the Liberal Party.” He rates them as two capable, switched-on operators surrounded by what he bluntly called “decrepit fossils and weird cultists” — but he’s blunt about where any Liberal opportunity is actually coming from. Asked whether there’s now something for the Liberals to seize, Godden pushed back hard on the framing: “I don’t agree with that… They’re riven with division,” pointing to a 40,000-signature petition against the premier as evidence that discontent is building on Labor’s own side of the ledger, not because of anything the Liberals have done.

David Olney sharpened that point into a broader theory about how governing parties eventually lose the benefit of the doubt. “At a certain point, the ideology smells like five-day-old fish,” he said, and once a party in power starts breaking things badly enough, voters go looking for competent alternatives regardless of their politics. In this reading, Batty and Hurn aren’t succeeding because the Liberals have fixed themselves — they’re succeeding because Malinauskas’s own missteps are softening up his supporters and making them receptive to a Liberal alternative for the first time in years. Godden underlined how fragile even that is, noting a federal example where a promising, competent candidate “lasted six months before the rabble that has no chance of winning decided that they’d rather destroy it for themselves than destroy her.”

The pair also dismantled the comfortable idea that Labor’s 41 per cent polling represents genuine popularity. As Godden put it, “if a 39, 40% is a big win these days, you know, two-thirds of people don’t actually want you there,” while Olney pushed further into theory, arguing that Australia’s compulsory voting system means elections are increasingly decided by negativity bias rather than enthusiasm: “more people reach decisions in politics not based on who I like, but on based on who I don’t like.” The implication, left hanging over the rest of the segment, is that if Malinauskas keeps generating reasons for his own base to switch off, Batty and Hurn may not need to do very much at all to become the beneficiaries.

The discussion pivoted from parliamentary sparring to street-level action, with Steve Davis probing whether Sunday’s Stop the Chop march — protesting parkland clearing for a motorsport event — carries any real weight in 2026. Godden was characteristically unsentimental: “the only benefit you’ll get out of this march is, is publicity, and continuing to maybe foment more anger in the community, because 40,000 quite angry people won’t get it there.” Olney offered the historical counterpoint that protest’s real value in the 1960s wasn’t its immediate political impact but the fact that it taught a generation “relearning collective action, relearning organisation, relearning holding their political leaders to account” — skills he argues have atrophied in a population that has “shrunk into our little black screens.”

That theme of decline without a single dramatic collapse ran through the episode’s most striking tangent, when Olney cited historians’ work dating the fall of Rome not to the sacking of the city but to the point where the empire “stopped solving more than half of its problems every year” — a shift he places somewhere between 112 and 142 CE, and which he half-jokingly maps onto Australia’s own trajectory from around 1980. Godden couldn’t resist the follow-up: does that make Malinauskas South Australia’s Trajan? “Yeah, basically,” Olney replied, before noting the state is still waiting on its Marcus Aurelius.

00:45:30 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to Pete’s Sake by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos.

For this episode’s musical pilgrimage, Steve Davis premieres his own composition rather than paying tribute to another artist: “For Pete’s Sake,” a comedic ska track from Steve Davis and The Virtuosos, built to fuse the genre’s “upbeat, zany” energy with pointed commentary on the state government’s parklands and MotoGP saga. The song was directly inspired by the premier’s choice of language toward protesters, whom he has variously labelled “ragtag extremists” and “cultural elites,” a framing Davis skewers by noting the real elite will likely be sipping champagne in the “exclusive money can’t buy VIP areas” at the racetrack itself. As Davis puts it, sometimes many a true word is spoken in jest — and occasionally it gets sung in ska.