Glimpse of life after Turnbull comes from South Australia

Canberra

SOUTH Australia has always been a bit different: it's the driest state on the Earth's driest inhabited continent, the world's first place to let women stand for election and the nation's only settlement to exclude convicts.

Nowadays it's a testing ground for the opposition Labor party to show how it could govern if it wins the next national election. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill has initiated a range of offbeat policies to stimulate an economy devastated by the demise of traditional manufacturing industries, from opening a nuclear waste dump to raising taxes on big banks to tasking Elon Musk with installing the world's largest renewable-energy battery.

Depending where one sits politically, Mr Weatherill is either trailblazing a path to the new economy or desperately throwing mud at a wall to see what sticks. His leftist Labor government oversees one of the nation's slowest-growing states saddled with Australia's highest unemployment. At the same time, it's now the top-ranked state fo…