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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-09-03 Daily Xml
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Malinauskas Labor Government

The Hon. B.R. HOOD (15:37): Today, I rise to speak on a matter of interest regarding inconsistency: inconsistency within the government and inconsistency within the Labor Party. I am pretty happy that I get to use a Star Wars reference in this. There is going to be one fellow who does pop up from time to time in this matter of interest, and that is the Hon. Tom Koutsantonis—or, as some people in the Labor Party internally refer to him, Lord Vader, the emperor's bodyguard taking care of emperor Malinauskas.

I want to reflect on a few inconsistencies that we have seen pop up over the last little while. First of all, I want to go to the issue of the Mount Gambier by-election. There was bit on the radio today, with the Speaker, the Hon. Leon Bignell, talking about why we did not want to have a by-election in Mount Gambier. He referred to the cost and the fact that, whoever was the new member for Mount Gambier, if you did have a by-election, they would only be in the parliament for about six days. Funnily enough, they were exactly the same talking points that the Premier was using last week.

We know that the Speaker should be Independent—that was actually something the opposition did back during the Marshall Liberal government: put the Speaker in as an Independent—but now we learn that the Independent Speaker, Leon Bignell, is rejoining the Labor Party. There is the first inconsistency. Then I saw that, when the Hon. Leon Bignell was speaking on the radio today, he was referring to the fact that in 2018 and in 2022 the people elected Troy Bell to be the member both those times, knowing that he had these issues hanging over his head. It was almost like he was saying to the people of Mount Gambier, 'You made your bed and you should lie in it. Bad luck; you don't get representation for six months.'

I just do not think that really is good enough from this government because there is another inconsistency and that is, if this was a metro seat calling for a by-election within six months, you could almost guarantee that we would not be having this conversation—we most definitely would not be. We would be rushing to a by-election, but, regionally, 'Hey, look, those guys can go without it for six months. Don't worry about it.'

Then we get back to the fellow I was talking about before, the Hon. Tom Koutsantonis, and his X post about me only a week or so ago. I think it referred to me as 'the brave Ben Hood, ready to jump back in to the Mount Gambier preselection if there would be a by-election', no matter how many times I have said, blue in the face, that I would not be standing for Mount Gambier. It is quite amazing how the Hon. Tom Koutsantonis can make up a story, pitch it to the media and then tweet about that story like it was actually a story.

The inconsistency in that is that Labor have actually done that to their own members. Mr Ryan Harrison from Unley, who was the candidate for Unley, got shafted and told to step aside for someone else. There is another inconsistency. It is not happening from the Liberal Party side, but certainly from the Labor Party side, and if we were to continue on with the Monty Python reference that the Hon. Tom Koutsantonis did, I would say that he is 'not the Messiah, he is a very naughty boy'.

His fascination with the Liberal right, again, is a little bit of an inconsistency. The Liberal Party is a party of membership. They get to come into their SCCs and FECs and our AGMs and our state council meetings and debate policy that matters to them, and they get listened to, not like the Labor right faction. In 2023, the Labor right faction, known as Unity and backed by the shoppies, was formally incorporated as Labor Unity SA Incorporated. Its constitution actually names three people—the Hon. Reggie Martin, Josh Peak and Jordan Mumford—as the foundation members and gives them 51 per cent of the voting power, with all ordinary members combined limited to 49. That means that three people hold permanent control over the Labor right. Now, if that is not a takeover, I do not know what is.

For the Liberal Party, our members get to have a say. It is not the backroom of a Chinese restaurant determining who is going to be preselected or not. It is the inconsistency of this government. It is the inconsistency of Labor that I have an issue with today. But, going back to the Hon. Tom Koutsantonis, who I think is just looking for a little bit of relevance, we are approaching March 2026 and he will be put back in his box at some point as we get closer to the election because they do not want him upsetting the applecart.

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