‘Far too presidential’: Does SA premier Peter Malinauskas have his sights set on something else?

AdvertisementSaveYou have reached your maximum number of saved items.Remove items from your saved list to add more.ShareAAAIt is 6.

47am on a Friday morning (14 degrees, feels like nine) and the latest episode of “The Peter Bryden Malinauskas Show” sees a tall streak in a sharp blue suit running at a fair clip alongside Adelaide’s River Torrens. Peter Malinauskas, the 193-centimetre, 79-kilogram South Australian premier, accompanied by his thermos of instant coffee and his mobile phone containing 3483 contacts, is once again cutting it fine.He has three minutes to rush from an ABC News Breakfast outdoor interview to a nearby live cross on Seven’s Sunrise so he can spruik Gather Round, the AFL’s four-day football festival, where all 18 teams play the entire round of nine matches in South Australia.

After four years, it’s a huge success, this year selling 270,018 tickets and flooding local venues with revenue-generating interstate visitors.It’s the sort of major event that state governments love, so much so that back when South Australia’s negotiator-in-chief got wind that the AFL favoured handing the initial opportunity to NSW, he said to himself, “Nah, that’s bullshit” and stole it out from under them in a celebrated lobbying campaign during the 2022 grand final.Malinauskas greets fans at the AFL match between the Adelaide Crows and the Carlton Blues at Adelaide Oval in April.

Once again, people are the reason the popular Labor premier is on the crease of lateness. Malinauskas will chat to anyone and they all want to talk to him. People are amazing things, he says, the human condition endlessly diverse.

“And that is … captivating, I find.”The Malinauskas Show has been running for 45 years, the tale of an eager Catholic grandson of Lithuanian, Hungarian and Irish immigrants who in the words of one prominent South Australian politician “has risen to the top without touching the sides”.

The buzz around this political show is now global. The idea to ban social media for kids is getting rave reviews in the UK. Standout scenes include poaching major events (Gather Round from NSW, MotoGP and the Australian Open golf from Victoria), bouncing steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta out of Whyalla Steelworks, and wooing singer Katy Perry to come and tour.

AdvertisementBut there’s also a tough side. In 2011, as a youthful unionist, he is said to have told the then premier Mike Rann it was time to quit; he wore a concealed wire tap for a police investigation into an ALP colleague; and more recently ignited a cancel-culture firestorm after criticising a writer invited to Adelaide Writers’ Week.Malinauskas (the first premier of South Australia with a non-Anglo surname) celebrated his crushing election victory in March (winning 34 out of 47 seats in the state lower house while reducing the Liberal Party to five) by reciting a Henry Lawson poem.

He has views on everything from the political to the personal, the rise of One Nation, boosting the state economy, to the magnificence of healthy sexual relationships and the opposition he faces, including daily defiance from his 11-year-old daughter.The Sunrise audience of footy fans are pumped when he appears. “Let’s enjoy our premier,” a man in a Richmond cap says excitedly.

“He’s the best.”The premier’s two TV interviews this Friday are followed by three breakfast events, with food and speakers on stage for invited guests – just some of the 34 engagements planned across the week. After he finishes his Sunrise interview, a grey-haired man hands Malinauskas his 17-month-old granddaughter to hold, so that the time little Elsie met Mali – as the premier is universally called – can be preserved in photographic posterity.

AFL CEO Andrew Dillon and Malinauskas announce a renewed partnership to keep the AFL Gather Round in South Australia until at least 2029. For Mali, Gather Round (which was renewed for three more years in early June), is the biggest platform in the country he can use to sell South Australia as Australia’s future, with its 5 per cent State Final Demand growth for the full year in 2025 (a key economic indicator, eclipsing the national rate of 2.9 per cent), its naval shipbuilding and future AUKUS submarine program, and its 70 per cent share of the nation’s critical mineral copper reserves.

As the admiration and adoration stack up, it becomes apparent that many people within and without the state feel Australia’s future will be Peter Malinauskas. “First impressions matter in politics, and I liked him from the off,” says Alastair Campbell, former director of communications for one-time UK PM Tony Blair. The pair met when Campbell was in town in 2024 for a live The Rest Is Politics – the popular podcast – event.

Advertisement“I was struck by the sense that he really sees politics as the vehicle to make big change for the better, and I think he has done that in many ways,” Campbell tells Good Weekend. The podcast awarded Malinauskas its 2024 Foreign Politician of the Year for championing the