By the time John Bannon became Premier of South Australia in 1982, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) had changed direction dramatically from its origins, a process accelerated under the federal leadership of Gough Whitlam from 1967. Previously representative largely of the working class and intelligentsia, during the 1960s the ALP embraced the middle classes as well, due in part to the unionisation of whitecollar professions and in part to the party's strategy of broadening its base. This new constituency dominated the party leadership from the 1960s.

The election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 had reflected the effectiveness of the ALP's broadening strategy, as well as the political weariness of the Coalition parties that had held government for the previous 23 years. While impressive in its social and environmental reforms, including the Australian Heritage Commission Act (1974), the Whitlam government showed its lack of economic experience through a series of financial blunders and lost its parliamentary majority by 1975. Whitlam's successor as Federal Labor Leader, Bill Hayden, announced a change of tactic for the party in his ‘one great message: that Labor must achieve economic management superiority over the Liberals’ to regain office. Hayden's message became the guiding principle for the next generation of Labor leaders, from Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating to Premiers Wran, Bannon, Burke and to a lesser extent Cain, who abandoned many of the social reformist principles of their predecessors in a tough economic climate.