$mack ’em, Steve, where it hurts

South Australia’s new premier, Liberal Steven Marshall, will have his hands full settling in and, if he is smart, identifying the Labor and Greens stay-behind operatives in the public service who will need to be shown the door. No doubt, too, he recognises no mere re-routing of the Torrens can clean the Augean stable so thickly crusted with the barnyard fruits of Labor’s 16 years of folly and mismanagement. Still, amidst those challenges, he would be well advised to look both back and to the east, where Victoria provides a sobering example of what happens to Liberals who, yearning to be loved,  make nice with their sworn enemies.

Like Marshall, Ted Baillieu scraped into office, then set out to prove he was one of those “nice” conservatives hostesses on the Left can invite to dinner without fear of hearing something appalling — for example,  that the state’s arts grants sustain and nourish to the exclusion of all others the Left’s court artists, writers, polemicists and, to be…