Mike Rann

A few weeks after he was clouted in the face with a rolled-up wine magazine, and on the same day that Channel Seven ran salacious allegations about his relationship with former parliamentary waitress Michelle Chantelois, Mike Rann wrote an article about the sex lives of pandas for our opinion website The Punch.

The timing was somewhat awkward. Rann, an early adopter of Twitter and one of the first politicians to use blogging as a new and direct way of talking to the voters, was spruiking the arrival of breeding pandas Wang Wang and Funi at the Adelaide Zoo. He explained how male pandas were sexually lethargic, difficult to arouse, and how zoos overseas had resorted to showing them films of mating pandas in a bid to fire them up.

Our website, driven as it is by robust and comic interaction with the readers, decided it would be best to hold the column for a while. Not out of any desire to protect the Premier – whatever scandals he was involved in were his problem, not ours – but because the job of keeping the reader’s comments within the boundaries of taste and libel would be impossible.

Continue reading "On message, even when up to his neck in it" »

For SA Premier Mike Rann, “school” ends today, and from 9am tomorrow, he is on holidays. This is earlier than he wanted, but the right-wing “shoppies” union gave him no choice. No wonder he has spent much of his last days railing against factional influence in the Labor party.

Mr Rann has had a long innings since taking over the Premier’s job on March 5, 2002. Not a record, by a long way. The Liberal and Country League government of Tom Playford set the record, from 1938 to 1965, a longevity which will probably never be beaten. Of course, he did have a heavily biased election system in his favour.

That long Liberal reign was followed by a Labor domination. Of the 46 years from 1965 until now, Labor has been in office for 35. And that period has been dominated by three Labor Premiers: Don Dunstan (1967 – 79), John Bannon (1982 – 92), and Mike Rann (2002 – 11). In those data is one reason for the Rann angst at being pushed out of the job early – he could have achieved the record of being the longest serving Labor Premier.

Continue reading "In politics it’s all just a little bit of history repeating" »

If we ever needed proof that politicians should respectfully butt out of moral issues like gay marriage, we got it this week in South Australia.

On Monday – the same day we learnt that the number of Australian households with mum, dad and kids is set to plummet to just 22 per cent within 15 years – outgoing Premier Mike Rann said the time for same-sex marriage had arrived.

So, after effectively putting the issue in the too-hard basket for almost a decade as premier and also during a stint as Labor’s national president, Mr Rann has a rainbow epiphany on the eve of his departure.

Continue reading "No kidding, gay couples make great parents" »

Political tragics live for the moments when leaders let the mask slip; when the acting stops and the houselights come on and a bit of humanity shines through. We love when they slip up, or speak out, or decide to go out in a blaze of glory. We love it when there’s a surprise in the script.

After almost ten years in power, with almost ten days to go, SA Premier Mike Rann has raised the curtain on his final act before he hands power to incoming Premier Jay Weatherill, and the show is promising to be sensational, inspirational, celebrational. Or like a kind of torture.

Mr Rann has kicked off with a dazzling endorsement of gay marriage, and there are sure to be more big performances before it’s time to take off the makeup and dim the lights.

Continue reading "Are all our politicians either puppets or Muppets?" »

In his personal review of his legacy to South Australia, Premier Rann had two main regrets. The first was his inability to abolish the Legislative Council.

This has been a key aim of the Labor party for over a hundred years.

The passion flows from the fact that Labor has never won a majority of the seats in the Council.

Continue reading "Keep the Upper House until they fix the Lower House" »

South Australia has not so much two premiers now but none.

The outgoing Mike Rann has played his assassins off a break revealing them to be weak, disorganised, and without the class necessary to lead.

Worse, the sheer hollowness of the personnel change at the top has been exposed for what it is - merely a marketing ploy to repackage a tired government. Nothing in the way of substantial vision or a different approach has been put forward.

Continue reading "South Australia in limbo, governed by an also-Rann" »

A quarter of a century after Neville Wran showed how it could be done with elegance, the Labor Party still hasn’t settled on a leadership succession process that doesn’t involve embarrassing conflict.

The strange events following the move-on order given to South Australian Premier Mike Rann by his Caucus last Friday shows the ALP is, in fact, capable of coming up with fresh ways to humiliate itself in the eyes of voters.

Leadership change is never easy, but might be considered again by the ALP should Prime Minister Julia Gillard lose internal support by the end of the year.

Continue reading "It’s the way the blood spatters that matters" »

The cocked-up coup to oust SA Premier Mike Rann (read all about it here) has left a stain on the Labor Party carpet, and the various men responsible are either staring at it in disbelief or pretending it doesn’t exist.

The Premier himself has flown to India, and seems quite happy to let it fester.

A clean kill is the Holy Grail, the perpetual motion machine, the leprechaun’s gold for Labor party operatives. You would think the Gillard/Rudd experience would highlight just how difficult that is, but the factional warlords were optimistic enough to give it another go with Mr Rann.

Continue reading "Labor leadership woes: The more things change…" »

When Julia Gillard survived the near-death election last year, one proven campaigner offered the rookie PM a piece of advice.

While Mike Rann’s popularity has waned with time, the nation’s longest serving current leader knows about political survival.

As she cobbled together what looked like a very shaky majority, Mr Rann told her, ``you may have a majority of just one vote but you should govern as if you have a majority of ten’‘. Doubtless, this is easier said than done but he had been in a similar bind himself in 2002.

Continue reading "Turnbull: A ray of light or imploding star?" »

For a blubbering, lonely, unlucky-in-love, toxic politician with a ‘hit-me’ sign on his back, SA Police Minister and former Treasurer Kevin Foley sure has risen in my estimations.

I can’t believe he’s still standing. I can’t believe he hasn’t packed his bags (no, not just for his latest overseas jaunt) and signed a lucrative deal for his own guts-spilling talkback radio show.

I can’t believe he only slightly teared up at his press conference last Monday. I’d have been pulling my hair out, frothing at the mouth and howling with sheer exasperation. Not least because of the double standards that have applied to him and Premier Mike Rann in the past 18 months.

Continue reading "Labor’s woes will not end with this man" »

Like the proverbial frog dropped into cold water and boiled slowly, we have grown accustomed to paying people to twist the truth.

Every now and then we have a little skirmish and a little outrage at just how much government spin doctors are paid, but overall it has become an intrinsic part of how information flows (or doesn’t flow) to the public.

Last week we saw the SA State Government, when all eyes, hearts and minds were on Christchurch, drop the news of cancer-causing chemicals in underground water - an issue the Environment Protection Authority knew about for a year and a half.

Continue reading "An inside guide to spin doctors’ wily ways" »

Across Australia today a familiar push and shove is taking place as cyclists vie for space with the ever increasing numbers of cars on our roads. It is a pattern that is repeated throughout our towns and cities; a symptom of our car loving culture and sense of road entitlement from drivers and cyclists alike.

Drivers resent the packs of Lycra warriors when they take up entire lanes and invent their own road rules, and cyclists understandably fear cars which are often wielded like 100 tonnes of road clearing debris.

Neither party is blameless in this dangerous game of chicken, but it is up to state governments to appreciate the differing needs of commuters and adjust their infrastructure accordingly.

Continue reading "Ensuring safe passage for our Lycra warriors" »

Taxpayers deserve to know what they’re forking out to sporting stars.

In South Australia, Premier Mike Rann - despite his reputation as a master of spin - has made a poor judgment when it comes to not disclosing how much Lance Armstrong is paid to appear at the Tour Down Under.

The State Government has continually refused to say how much it has paid the seven-time Tour de France winner to appear at the TDU, even claiming the information was commercial in confidence, thus putting the details out of the reach of freedom of information requests.

Continue reading "Governments stupid to stay silent on sports stars" »

Within weeks, South Australians will have a clear idea of who will replace Premier Mike Rann before the 2014 state election.

It’s a race between Employment Minister Jack Snelling and Attorney-General John Rau - both ministerial cleanskins with with less than a year’s experience in the ministry.

Both men are jostling to take over the role of Deputy Premier which the incumbent Kevin Foley is set to step down from when he returns in three weeks from a defence industry trip to the US.

Continue reading "Snelling odds-on to replace Premier Mike Rann" »

Being the small-l liberal kind of place that it is, South Australia not only has a “thinker in residence” to help generate innovative ideas for public policy, but a kindly Catholic priest called Monsignor David Cappo who heads the Social Inclusion board to vet major government policies for their community impact.

Both of them must have been on a rostered day off when the State Government and the Health Department came up with one of the more foolish public policy ideas of recent times, which will have the effect of denying vital health care to sick young women, and forcing older women into an environment which experts believe will not help but harm their wellbeing.

SA has clocked up plenty of progressive firsts. It was the first Australian state to give women the vote, first state to recognise indigenous land rights, first state to introduce an anti-discrimination act – but now it’s about to clock up a first of a different kind as the first state to effectively shut down a cutting-edge health facility which for the past 30 years has been saving the lives of young women battling eating disorders.

Continue reading "When cost-cutting hits the most vulnerable" »

Elections are an expensive business. The last federal poll cost $170 million. That’s a lot of school books and hospital supplies. But if the cost of elections troubles you, despair not as relief is at hand.

Who needs elections anyway when you’ve got the Australian Workers Union?

For the second time in six months this union is kindly offering to step in on behalf of the voters – or more accurately, instead of the voters – to take over the hiring and firing a democratically elected government leader.

Continue reading "Who needs elections when you’ve got the AWU?" »

Many Australians will be welcoming yesterday’s High Court decision in the case of The State of South Australia v. Totani & Another HCA 39 (2010). This is the second legal defeat of this unjust and draconian piece of South Australian legislation.

While most Australians will see the decision as a big win for the bike clubs against the money-wasting, selfish and bloody-minded South Australian Labor Government, from the United Motorcycle Council NSW stand-point it‘s just one more step in the right direction. We have to continue to fight until these hastily enacted and unworkable laws are defeated in our state as well.

There’s no doubt though that we are off to a very promising start. Mike Rann backed himself in the South Australian Supreme Court and lost, then with significant egg on his face took his war to the High Court using taxpayer funds only to lose there as well.

Continue reading "High Court ruling just the beginning for bikies rights" »

Faced with the unexpected arrival of about 400 refugees in her town, I doubt she’d say “There goes the neighbourhood”.

She wouldn’t worry that the presence of asylum seekers would cause a dip in property prices, or complain that the kids (most of whom will be under five) will shoplift.

She wouldn’t argue that we should make male asylum seekers take the place of Australia’s own soldiers at war. And she wouldn’t say that we should demean refugees and make them suffer in order to deter more people from coming.

Continue reading "What would Mary do? Tips from a hometown hero" »

I first met Bruce Hawker when he gave John Fahey’s staff just 24 hours to pack their belongings after the 1995 election defeat and get out of Premier-elect Bob Carr’s new offices. At that time I was Director of Policy to Fahey.

Whilst bitterness is not in my nature I use events to define character – mine and theirs.

Bruce Hawker is a spin merchant. He moulds the message for electoral gain. So when I read his piece today on The Punch about the weekend elections I was not surprised. How does Labor turn a hostile 7.4% swing in South Australia and a hostile 12% swing in Tasmania into a win for Rudd? Easy: “It could have been worse.”

Continue reading "Hawker’s bluff: Spinning the state results for Labor" »

A week or so ago conservative commentators across Australia were predicting all sorts of implications for Kevin Rudd from last Saturday’s elections in Tasmania and South Australia. 

On Saturday morning as the last Newspoll results landed with a thud on front doors across Adelaide, they began to polish up their “the tide is turning against Labor everywhere” columns.

Some of them are still out there beating this drum but the more astute have gone silent.  It is possible they are embarrassed, because it’s clear from the results that neither the South Australian or Tasmanian elections hold any portents for Federal Labor. 

Continue reading "The Saturday night electoral massacre that wasn’t" »

Regardless of who won the South Australian election there was always going to be argument as to whether it provided any lessons for Canberra. Like just about every state election campaign I’ve been involved in over the last 20 years, the direct federal implications in this campaign were limited.

Australians understand the difference between state and federal issues and generally resist attempts by politicians to intertwine them. For example, I recall watching focus groups in state election campaigns during the Howard years where participants rejected the notion that state Liberals would adopt WorkChoices. This, they said, was a federal issue and therefore not relevant to their decisions about state elections.

They also said that they would judge the federal Liberals harshly when the time came - and they did.

Continue reading "Election fallout: Economic weaknesses can be fatal" »

VOTERS are a fickle lot. The extent of their capriciousness can be told with the tale of two governments: Mike Rann’s generally competent Labor administration in South Australia, which is facing possible defeat today, and that crazy sideshow act in NSW now under the care of a new ringleader, a likable American-born woman called Kristina Keneally, who is harnessing public sympathy if not pity as the basis for an improbable political comeback.

Rann has presided over a state where job growth has surged and investment has boomed. The one-time basket case of the national economy, which younger people (like me) were keen to flee in the backdraft of the State Bank collapse 15 years ago, now finds itself in the once-unimaginable position of having the lowest level of unemployment in Australia.

Continue reading "Tale of two premiers plays to mixed reviews" »

If you missed yesterday’s excellent interview with South Australian Treasurer Kevin Foley on Adelaidenow here’s the potted version – he doesn’t want the top job, he just wants a girl.

For the uninitiated, Foley is the man who last year went public about the collapse of his marriage, his subsequent failed relationships with a raft of women, his battle with depression, his late-night ruminations about whether his political career has been worth the sacrifice. Late last year to his eternal credit he was filmed at an Adelaide karaoke venue singing the above rendition of The Gambler.

The serious takeout from the Foley interview was that he appears to have put his leadership aspirations on hold and will serve as a loyal deputy until such time as Mike Rann goes of his own volition. Not that he was being that presumptuous – he admitted to being really worried about whether Labor would get home tomorrow at all.

Continue reading "Who wants a hot date with a State Treasurer?" »

Things are reaching fever pitch in the City of Pubs Slash Churches.

The election that everyone thought was going to be a low-key shoe-in for Labor has turned out to be quite the ride.

There haven’t been any really sexy promises – there’s not enough spare cash around. There’s been a Liberal Party pledge to have a good hard look at a particularly pesky roundabout. South Australia’s one-way freeway might end up being a two-way freeway, which just draws embarrassing attention to the original decision to make it only go one way.

Continue reading "SA’s whispering campaign has Adelaide by the balls" »

There must be a handbook given out to women who have had, or claim to have had, an affair with a high-profile politician. I imagine it’s called something like The truth will set you free! Seriously, you’re fabulous and, like, totally emotionally evolved!!

It’s full of sage advice such as “stop being so utterly selfless and think of yourself for once you amazing selfless woman,” and “you could have saved him if only he knew what was good for him,” and “don’t forget your clothes flew off all by themselves.”

And I imagine at least two women interviewed this week have a well-worn copy on their bedside tables - Michelle Chantelois and Rielle Hunter.

Continue reading "The confession manual for a politician’s mistress" »

Bruce Hawker is the director of Hawker Britton and is advising the Rann Labor Government on its campaign.

We are now at the business end of the South Australian election campaign and the contest is going down to the wire.

After years of internal division the Liberal Party had - until this week - managed to develop an appearance of unity on the back of Mike Rann’s problems following the Michelle Chantelois allegations.

With four leaders in four years and little more than a veneer of unity following an acrimonious leadership spill involving former deputy leader Vickie Chapman and current leader Isobel Redmond, the Liberal campaign settled on a “small target” strategy.

Continue reading "SA election: A party that can’t run itself…" »

Jamie Briggs is the federal Liberal member for the South Australian seat of Mayo.

In his book, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera, explains how to rewrite a states history:

“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.  Destroy its books, its culture, its history.  Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history.  Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.”

Mike Rann must own a dog eared version of this book if his Punch interview is anything to go by.

Continue reading "SA election: Why Mike Rann’s time is up" »

It’s been pilloried in song by Paul Kelly as a stuffy and boring place where nothing interesting ever happens, but if someone made a film about the past five months of politics in the City of Churches it would probably attract an MA rating.

Economically and culturally South Australia is humming along. Just 10 years ago, in the backdraft of the $3.15 billion collapse of the State Bank on Labor’s watch, it was an economic basketcase which young people were queuing to leave.

Last Thursday, on the day I started this piece by sitting down with Premier Mike Rann, the national employment figures confirmed that SA has yet again registered the lowest jobless rate in the land.

Continue reading "Bunny boilover" »

It was the week in which the words “Macquarie Banker” finally became rhyming slang after a member of the millionaire’s factory was caught perving on jpegs of Miranda Kerr during a live cross about interest rates.

The week in which the words “cyberbully” and “tweet” were listed for inclusion in a Macquarie of a different kind.

It was also the week in which one of the most old-fashioned politicians in Australia, a man who seemed puzzled enough by the 20th century and is really struggling with the 21st, blundered into a raging cyber-storm which had the potential to blow away a government seeking re-election in just seven weeks’ time.

Continue reading "How a political luddite got smashed in cyberspace" »

In their haste to get an agreement on national management of the Murray Darling Basin Kevin Rudd and Mike Rann quite literally sold the dream.

Now, as Mike Rann realises the deal he signed has left the Southern Basin high and dry despite floods flowing into the system up north, the South Australian Premier has been left so impotent that all he can do is write a letter to the Prime Minister.

It is reminiscent of the satirical movie Team America: World Police who lampooned former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix over his incapacity to bring North Korea to heel, with his character saying:

Continue reading "The real letter Mike Rann should write to Kevin Rudd" »

I owe my sex education to Christine Keeler. Not directly of course: I was eleven years old at the time the Profumo scandal convulsed Britain in 1963.

I was on a fishing holiday with my father, in a big house in the north of Scotland shared with two other families, including several teenage boys and girls.

In between tying flies and tramping across the heather, everyone – the adults and the teenagers – seemed to have only one topic of conversation, and Christine Keeler was it.

Continue reading "If it doesn’t affect national security it’s not a sex scandal" »

Denials do not get any more categorical or absolute than this - and as of his press conference an hour ago, Mike Rann is being hailed as Adelaide’s own Bill Clinton after looking straight into the camera and declaring that he did not have sexual relations with that woman.

But unlike Clinton’s twitchy and unconvincing handling of the Monica Lewinsky allegations, Rann came out all guns blazing, specifically denying key aspects of the bombshell interview by his former friend and parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois, hammering the fact that she was paid bucketloads of cash to sell her story, and declaring that he will sue both Channel Seven and New Idea for peddling allegations which he says are categorically false.

Rann also seized on the fact that Channel Seven got a key part of its story wrong, in falsely asserting that Chantelois’s estranged husband Rick Phillips had not been charged with assault after he punched the Premier in the face with a rolled-up magazine in a chance encounter at the Adelaide Wine Centre last month.

Continue reading "Rann’s emphatic sex denial might not end this affair" »

Update 1.20pm AEDT: Rann is due to speak to the media at 2.30pm AEDT today. Passing waiting journalists heading into a cabinet meeting earlier he refused to deny outright having sex with Chantelois.

Today could decide the career of Australia’s most popular premier and Punch contributor Mike Rann. “It is disappointing and distressing that a friendship I had with Michelle Chantelois more than four years ago has become the subject of such sensationalised publicity,” the SA Premier said this morning. There’s more from his statement over the jump.

The publicity, which you may have caught, was the airing last night of a detailed account of an affair that former parliamentary barmaid Michelle Chantelois claims to have had with Rann. She claims it involved sex on the premier’s desk and clandestine trips to a golf course for romps in the dark. The trouble for Rann is that he has been insisting there was never any sex.

As one senior Labor figure said: “At the end of the day, she has either made the whole thing up or he’s lying.”

Continue reading "The Mike Rann sex scandal: is it a sacking offence?" »

It is hard to believe that not one South Australian Federal Liberal wouldn’t have tapped Malcolm Turnbull on the shoulder late last week and uttered two cautionary words – “Remember Marty”.

Where was SA’s Christopher Pyne or Nick Minchin? Where was Turnbull adviser, Adelaide’s Chris Kenny, in the lead up to the fake email affair and Malcolm’s call for the Prime Minister to resign?

Last week’s email attack in Canberra came just days after I read into Hansard an extraordinary apology from South Australian Liberal Leader, Martin Hamilton-Smith.

Continue reading "Dodgy Lib documents are deja vu all over again" »