Perrottet’s ‘Adelaide card’ in the NSW election

For the people of South Australia, one point of interest in the upcoming NSW election concerns Dominic Perrottet’s repeated comparisons between Sydney and Adelaide. In Perrottet’s view, Sydney’s greatness is best measured against Adelaide because the South Australian capital leads the country in one respect only – dysfunctionality. His comments to this effect, which include two so far in the current election campaign, raise the question posed by Melbourne journalist MacKenzie Pennycook in her article, ‘Dom Perrottet has another weird swipe at Adelaide for literally no reason’. Mr. Perrottet, ‘what has South Australia done to you?’

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An alternative South Australian perspective

An edited version of this article was published on Flat White – here.

The Flat White article, ‘A South Australian perspective’, written by Ross Eastcoast, will win him plenty of admirers in Sydney and Melbourne. Of all of the articles written by journalists who seek popularity by slipping a boot into Adelaide or South Australia, I have never seen one that squeezes so many insults into a single two-minute read. Written in serious tones from start to finish, the article is a study in word economy in the Sydney-Melbourne practice of bagging South Australia.

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Bagging Adelaide

(My 3AW interview with Tom Elliott about this article can be heard here. The article was published by The Big Smoke under the title, ‘Interstate ribaldry: Why is Adelaide the national punching bag?‘)

It’s been a bumper season for bagging Adelaide. The running ‘joke’ in Sydney and Melbourne that South Australia is the pits has made its way into the national discourse, with a growing number of journalists and other identities making derisory comments about Adelaide whilst on national platforms, having forgotten that they are being heard or read in South Australia as well. It is a peculiar thing, and seemingly uniquely Australian, that otherwise respected national voices should dump on one particular state. No doubt they would argue the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ defence. I myself prefer the diagnosis offered by Adelaide writer Andrew P. Street, who says there is a ‘national blind spot’ blanketing everything south-west from about Broken Hill.

Continued on The Big Smoke.