Colin James: John Olsen will find a toxic environment exists beneath the clock tower on King William Street
Colin James: Crows chairman John Olsen wants to take plans for a new club HQ to Adelaide City Council. He shouldn’t bother.
Opinion
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Adelaide Crows chairman John Olsen is wasting his time trying to get the support of the Adelaide City Council for new club headquarters in the city.
The former Liberal premier has written to Lord Mayor Sandy Verschoor seeking a private meeting with elected members to discuss plans for a potential parklands site, as political dysfunction within their ranks plunges to new depths.
Meetings constantly are descending into slanging matches between a group created by former lord mayor Martin Haese at the 2018 council elections, Team Adelaide, and two independents, veteran councillor Anne Moran and retired media executive Phillip Martin.
Regularly getting caught up in the melees are Greens state political candidate Robert Simms and lawyer-turned- small businessman Jessy Khera. Trying desperately to avoid the scrapping are experienced government bureaucrat and former Hindley Street bookseller Greg Mackie and psychologist Helen Donovan.
They are spending tens of hours each month watching the six members of Team Adelaide, led by Liberal staffer Alexander Hyde, go toe-to-toe with Cr Moran and Cr Martin. The exchanges within the Adelaide Town Hall chamber usually are followed up by a flood of emails from Ms Moran to Ms Verschoor, often in the early hours of the morning.
The level of sniping, squabbling and bickering has been described by seasoned local government observers as the worst ever seen on the council.
Ms Verschoor and her recently elected deputy, Team Adelaide member Mary Couros, are doing their utmost to keep meetings under control. But their efforts frequently are in vain.
Relationships between Cr Martin and Cr Moran and senior managers, particularly chief executive Mark Goldstone and deputy Clare Mockler, are strained. Staff are being diverted regularly from their duties to deal with questions and motions lodged by Cr Martin, who dominates most meetings with debate, questions and points of order.
It is within this environment that Mr Olsen wants to secure permission to start exploring the possibility of obtaining a site, expected to be the council’s nursery on War Memorial Drive near Hackney, to build a new administrative and training base for the Adelaide Crows.
The club first expressed interest in buying the nursery in 2018, before being told to investigate redeveloping the Adelaide Aquatic Centre instead. The ensuing controversy, largely triggered by internal policies requiring unsolicited bids from the private sector to be kept confidential, saw the idea abandoned. Criticism centred on a lack of consultation and excessive secrecy.
Elected members, many of whom were only months into their first term as councillors when they became engulfed in a vitriolic and heated debate inside and outside the chamber, remain bruised by the experience. They learnt the hard way that the parklands remain sacrosanct. Especially when it comes to commercial or private development.
Only this week, elected members discussed how the council lacked a clear policy on how to manage unsolicited bids for commercial operations within the parklands, such as the one which Mr Olsen wants to present. He could not have picked a worse time.
While some may support a sporting complex, most councillors already have decided there will be no offices of any kind in the parklands.
If Mr Olsen is hoping for sensible and constructive debate on the issue, he is going to be disappointed. Like others before him, he will discover he is dealing with a group of people struggling to demonstrate stable, mature leadership at a time when the heart of Adelaide needs steady hands on the wheel as the CBD navigates its way through the pandemic.
A highly experienced political operative, Mr Olsen will find a toxic environment exists beneath the clock tower on King William Street.
Getting councillors who detest each other to agree to anything may well be his greatest challenge yet.
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