Behind the PR on Premier’s mission with Don
Premier Peter Malinauskas’s ‘handshake’ tour of Japan and Korea has brought together a group of blokes who all owe their careers to the elder statesman in the travelling pack. Matthew Abraham looks beyond the photo opportunities.
Hold the smashed guitars and ditch the brown M&Ms, the Shoppies Reunion tour of Korea and Japan is selling out to packed houses.
Small packed houses, admittedly. OK then, small rooms packed with men in suits.
The gig in question is Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas on his “first overseas trip as premier”. This description is in inverted commas to give it the gravitas the government thinks it deserves.
I’m not suggesting for a minute that the Premier’s band would emulate US hard rockers Van Halen and insist on no brown M&Ms on the back stage nibbles menu. But, just like real life rock stars, they’re travelling in style and we’re paying to watch them.
Having been on a few overseas “trade missions”, I have a different view of their importance. But more of that shortly.
Mr Malinauskas is travelling with his fellow Shoppies band members – Transport Minister Tom Koutsantonis, Trade Minister Nick Champion and federal trade and tourism minister in the Albanese Government, Senator Don Farrell.
All four band members owe their political careers and allegiances to the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, or The Shoppies for short, the largest private sector union in Australia.
To be strictly accurate, the other three band members all owe their political jobs to Senator Farrell, former secretary of the union’s SA branch. He’s a political powerbroker in every sense of the word, but also a man of his word, and that counts in a game where words are dispensable.
Don Farrell, while still Shoppies Union chief, guaranteed to give Mike Rann two shots at returning Labor’s “Tarago Opposition” – it had just 10 seats – to government after the party’s historic December 1993 election drubbing.
Few political leaders of any hue get a guarantee like that – two elections, or eight years.
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Can you imagine what it would mean to new Liberal leader David Speirs to have that security in his back pocket?
Rann needed time to rebuild Labor’s stocks and tear down the Liberals, who generously helped by tearing themselves down, including leaking directly to the Labor leader. Any Liberal who says this is fantasy is either lying or was doing Year 11 at the time.
Rann used up every day of his eight years as Opposition Leader, but delivered with his 2002 victory as a minority government – the start of 16 years of Labor in office.
Given all this, it’d be rude not to invite The Don along on the tour.
"Did they buy the lamb at the Japanese equivalent of Foodland before the shops shut at 5pm on Sunday?"
Most overseas “trade missions” achieve very little. They achieve nothing that isn’t choreographed by diplomats and senior public servants, both on the ground in exotic overseas locations and back home in Adelaide. They’re the ones who make things happen.
And, in the age of Zoom and Facetime, they achieve nothing that couldn’t be worked out with a teleconference.
These trips are largely an exercise in political self-promotion paid for by, you guessed it, Terence Taxpayer*.
Thanks to the omnipresent Twitter, we’ve been treated to a steady stream of photo opps, or photo opportunities, of the Labor team performing overseas.
Two stand out as favourites at the time of going to press. The first features the Premier and Senator Farrell, both wearing masks and aprons, wielding the tongs at an official BBQ on Tuesday.
“Cooking some beautiful South Australian lamb with Federal Tourism Minister Don Farrell in Tokyo at the launch of Tourism Australia’s ‘Come and Say G’Day’ campaign, which will run across the world in key markets,” the Premier tweeted. It raised more questions than it answered.
Did they buy the lamb at the Japanese equivalent of Foodland before the shops shut at 5pm on Sunday? Don’t the Shoppies have a Tokyo branch?
Why were they both wearing masks when the Premier has scrapped them for COVID protection back home? Shouldn’t he be demonstrating to his Japanese guests that masks are pointless?
Lamb cutlets retail for $43 a kilo back home, out of the reach of most Australian families. Let them eat mince.
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"Cooking some beautiful South Australian lamb with Federal Tourism Minister Don Farrell in Tokyo at the launch of Tourism Australia’s “Come and Say G’Day” campaign, which will run across the world in key markets. pic.twitter.com/X0i7k63skt"
"— Peter Malinauskas (@PMalinauskasMP) October 11, 2022"
The other picture, tweeted by Minister Champion, showed the Premier in Deadly Serious mode explaining his hydrogen vision for our state to a small group standing around him, seemingly entranced by his presence.
Champs, however, appears to be struggling to suppress a laugh. He needs to work on that.
And whether overseas or at home, most of the photos of our new Premier seem to be taken from near ground level, looking up, accentuating his height and dominance in the shot. Is this by accident or design? It is a trend worth watching, because it happens a lot.
On Wednesday, InDaily reported that the Premier had rejected accusations his meetings in Japan have only been symbolic. In other words, a glorified photo album.
Instead, the government is selling the trip as an attempt to support exporters continuing to reel from tough new trading conditions in China. But his main game is SA’s “clean energy transition”, with the promised $593 million hydrogen power plant in Whyalla.
The Premier told ABC radio that his “handshake agreements” will help SA develop turbines for the Whyalla project.
“As many South Australians who have done business in Japan well understand, relationships and long-term relationships are everything here,” Malinauskas told the ABC.
“You’ve got to start from the ground up and build a relationship over time, because the Japanese take very seriously the power of shaking hands and looking someone in the eye, having a meal with each other, to develop those relationships before you get commercial outcomes.”
Last year, the former Morrison Government merrily tore up Australia’s $93 billion submarine contract with the French in favour of the AUKUS agreement to build a fleet of US or British nuclear submarines.
That wasn’t a handshake agreement, it was sealed in ink.
We apparently had a special relationship with the French people. Remember the promise of French-language primary schools in Adelaide to deepen our long-term bonds with our friends and allies? Whatever happened to them?
We can only ponder what French President Emmanuel Macron might think should he read about the power of shaking hands and looking someone in the eye.
He’d choke on his croissant.
Mike Rann, at least, had a handshake agreement that went the distance.
*Bless the Australian Financial Review’s political editor, Phil Coorey, Peterborough’s proudest export, for recently coining the phrase Terence Taxpayer. He’s a cousin, so won’t mind me stealing it.
