David Penberthy: A grand idea to bring AFL final to Adelaide
There are plenty of good reasons to bring the Grand Final here, not least of all that we have the best oval in the country. The only downside is the prospect of Port supporters being even more unbearable if they win.
Opinion
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Bring the grand final to Adelaide, according to:
- The State Government
- 70% of these survey respondents
- Christopher Pyne
Should South Australia mount a taxpayer-funded bid to host the 2020 AFL Grand Final? The answer locally may depend on where your footballing allegiances lie.
With Port still sitting atop the table and very much in the mix to make the granny, most Port fans would love the idea of a home grand final, especially if it denied West Coast or Brisbane the advantage of the match being played at Optus or the Gabba.
As for us Crows fans, the response might be more along the lines of: whatever, who cares, life has no real meaning but has become a monotonous and soul-destroying source of misery.
Despite the fact that there is more chance of Wuhan becoming this summer’s go-to holiday destination than the Crows winning the flag, I would put myself down as an enthusiastic yes for bidding, and for using public money to do so.
2020 has proved that deficits are meaningless and that money is an abstract concept. Money has never been cheaper and deficits have rarely been bigger; and the good news is that Australia might be stuffed, but it’s less stuffed than many other countries.
As such, with governments spending like drunken sailors to keep the economy chugging along, I fail to see how an extra few million bucks is really going to add much to the bottom line.
The counterargument to that is (as always) that the money could be spent on something else, with dialysis machines or our children’s education often proffered as morally loaded examples to skewer the frivolity and wrongness of publicly underwriting entertainment or sport.
But governments can walk and chew gum at the same time, and people need to let off steam. It is a logical fallacy to assert that a mass public event, by definition, comes at the expense of a public service.
And the reality is that in an economic sense, by spending public money on these events, you are doing a public service anyway, to those workers who rely on a robust entertainment sector to keep their jobs turning down beds in hotels, pulling beers and serving meals, working on match days in their blue coats at our beloved ground.
There are plenty of aesthetic and cultural arguments as to why Adelaide should become the first city outside of Melbourne ever to host the game. It’s the best oval in Australia. Sure, the MCG has an unmatchable colosseum quality, but it’s not in the race.
So it’s either the Gabba, which has nothing to recommend it at all, or a brand-new but soulless stadium in Perth that’s the same as so many other stadia the world over.
It also comes with the added negative of being named after a telecommunications company which isn’t the same telecommunications company that’s the principal sponsor of the AFL. No such branding issues here.
The chief reason I would back Adelaide in is that, surely, we are at a point when we should be willing the return of anything that resembles life in 2019 than life in 2020.
The past six months have sucked massively and comprehensively. But, by world standards, our state has been an absolute international standout in its management of the pandemic.
There is a myopic view among some that we should somehow remain cut off from the rest of the country and the rest of the world forever more.
Many people have expressed a knee-jerk reaction that the grand final, as a mass public event, should just be dismissed out of hand.
If we let this become the dominant view, life as we know it will keep grinding to a halt.
It would clearly be reckless in the extreme to advocate the holus-bolus resumption of every pre-pandemic activity. But, provided the health protocols can be observed and social distancing can be met, bring it on.
This same queasiness has been on full display this week with the public backlash over the joint decision by the Marshall and Morrison governments to hold the one-off trialled return of 300 overseas students from Singapore.
I totally understand the criticisms of this plan in the context of continuing and increased hard border closures.
I don’t for the life of me see how we can be smart enough to devise a system whereby 300 people can arrive from Singapore, be safely quarantined, and begin their studies on North Terrace, yet we can’t think of a way to ensure that five-year-old Reception kids in the town of Kaniva can keep attending Bordertown Primary School, and must be placed in a “cluster” on the other side of the border to keep us all safe.
The contrast is a ridiculous one, and it suggests a tin ear on the government’s part that they couldn’t see this criticism coming. But, without that unfortunate and avoidable contrast, the announcement of the overseas students should be seen as a positive sign that our state is in a safe enough position to start resuming normal life.
We have shown we can manage quarantine well. Hundreds of people have been repatriated to SA without any COVID outbreaks. And the idea that this scheme is all about a sole benefit for the overseas students themselves is not true.
The money these students bring underpins our research; it also underpins the ability of many other South Australians to hold down jobs.
The chief reason the staff at the University of Adelaide voted this week to have their own pay cut was to save some 200 jobs that are directly threatened by the collapse in university revenue, due almost exclusively to the cancellation of international travel.
So, bring on the students, and bring on the footy, too.
The only downside is the prospect of Port supporters being even more unbearable in the distressing event that they win the damned thing.