David Speirs: ‘They spat in my face’ — ex-Lib leader seeks redemption
At a picnic table in Glenthorne National Park, david speirs smiled as he described a life he says is moving on from a public humiliation: learning to fly, the pride of a new national park and a campaign to win back the electorate he once held for more than a decade.
David Speirs: What unfolded at Glenthorne and why it matters?
The park is both his proudest achievement and the place where his political fortunes began to unravel. As environment minister in the Marshall Liberal government, he fought to convert a former farm into a national park rather than a new suburb; in 2020 it became part of a 1, 500-hectare conservation precinct he cites as the high point of his public life. But Glenthorne is also where, in a widely watched public moment, he stood at a media conference and announced he was quitting his leadership role, saying he had “had a gutful” of speculation and planned to “sail off into the sunset. ” That exit preceded a sequence of events that would transform his public image.
What does he say about the drug scandal and his comeback?
The disgraced former leader, convicted on drug supply charges, insists the episode has little to do with illicit substances. He told the assembled journalist that he “can’t tell you the last time specifically (that I used drugs) but it was a long time ago. I would say I am fully sober. ” When a video emerged the following month showing a man at his home sniffing a substance through a rolled-up note, he initially denied it was him and described the footage as a deep fake or an elaborate hoax. Those denials were later acknowledged as false; when asked why he lied, he said simply: “Panic; they were made in panic and fear and horror. “
How do the human, social and political threads connect?
Behind the headlines is a mix of personal reckoning and political consequence. He is running as an independent at the SA election on March 21 and has made reclaiming Black — the southern coastal electorate he held for more than ten years — the focus of his campaign. Yet the conviction and the public humiliation that followed have left an indelible mark: his profile was described in blunt terms as “a Scottish-Australian former politician and convicted drug dealer. ” That reality sits uneasily beside the work he points to in the park and the day-to-day gestures of rehabilitation he describes, like learning to fly and taking a lesson the morning of one interview.
Speirs uses plain language about the fall: the leadership exit in the park was not a quiet stepping back but the beginning of what he calls a stunning political downfall. He says he has tried to confront that fall openly while asking voters to separate the conservation legacy he built from the personal mistakes that dominated the news cycle.
What remains unclear is how voters will balance those two narratives: the tangible conservation achievement that transformed a suburban farm into protected land, and the sequence of denials and a criminal conviction that reshaped public trust.
Back at the picnic table, the man who once led a major party and then watched his career collapse into a scandal that many still recall with relish, paused before answering questions about forgiveness and redemption. He told the interviewer, with a mixture of ruefulness and defiance, that he had been spat upon by the consequences of his own actions and the public reaction. He continues to campaign, offering his record on the park as a counterpoint to the scandal, while acknowledging the personal cost of what happened.
As voters approach the election, that tension — between achievement and disgrace, between pride in saved bushland and the memory of a humiliating video and conviction — will define his bid to return. Sitting in the same place where his political life both soared and crashed, david speirs faces the simplest, hardest question of politics: can a record of public accomplishment outweigh a public fall from grace?
