David Penberthy: I suspect their non-invite was designed to … create the illusion that proponents of the upgrade are too scared to face this supposed mass movement
If you want to make a show of me snubbing your invite, have the decency to actually send one, writes David Penberthy. Here’s what I’d have told your parklands protest if you did.
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The Adelaide Parklands Preservation Association held a community meeting on Wednesday night over the proposed Aquatic Centre upgrade where my genial colleague [Advertiser chief reporter] Paul Starick and I were ridiculed in our absence over our failure to attend.
I’m not upset that they chose to present me as a cardboard cut-out from an old newspaper headshot where I am sporting an embarrassingly bad bowl haircut that makes me look like John Cazale in The Godfather.
What I am upset about is that they didn’t actually invite me to attend. No phone call, no email, no direct message on Twitter. No request at all.
While I would have been there with bells on, as I enjoy a good stink, I suspect their non-invite was designed to achieve two things – to create the illusion that proponents of the upgrade are too scared to face this supposed mass movement against the idea, and to ensure that the several dozen people in the room remained in perfect agreement with each other that this whole idea is the purest form of corporate evil.
If I had the chance to go this is what I would have said:
The Adelaide Parklands are a sacred place. Like New York’s Central Park they are the lungs of our city. They help give our city its character. They add a lightness to our lives as you pass through them on route to the CBD. They’re a place to relax, eat lunch, play sport, get married.
Our very own @paulstarick and @penbo are ‘panel members’ at APPA’s debate about @Adelaide_FC ‘s proposal to build its HQ at the Aquatic Centre @theTiser pic.twitter.com/q2SvACg9Du
— Celeste Villani (@CelesteVillani) February 12, 2020
The Adelaide Parklands should be off limits to any new development – other than where development has already occurred. And any new development should be framed around one key question – does the project add to the greater good for our state, without impinging on the parklands themselves?
I will give you one example. I am a mad gardener and I love spending time at the Botanic Gardens. One of the good features of the Gardens is the Diggers Shop, named after the gardening club of which I am a member.
That shop specialises in dry weather plants and stocks rare fruits and vegetables and heirloom seeds from the Diggers Club range. It is a commercial operation that is wholly in synch with the purpose of the Botanic Gardens themselves. It adds to the experience of visiting.
I have heard a lot of you criticise this proposed upgrade principally because it has emanated from the Adelaide Crows. Even though I’m a Crows fan and the husband of a board member, I do not support the idea simply because it has emanated from my club.
I would be just as happy for Port Adelaide to do it, or Adelaide United, or a consortia of privately owned swimming centres. I say this for a couple of reasons. The first is economic, but it’s the least important.
The current aquatic centre is losing money hand over fist. These aren’t my figures, they’re the council’s.
An ACC report says the centre is losing $700,000 a year and that its full upgrade would cost between $14 million and $21 million, and even that wouldn’t fix it for the long term. This is a huge impost on the city, and money that could be better spent elsewhere making our city even greater.
The AFC is offering to carry the can for much of the cost of an upgrade, taking a rundown facility off council books.
The second and more important point is a social one, in that the plan involves using the same footprint or an even smaller footprint than the existing structure, without restaurants or bars, and no loss of green space to make way for new carparking.
It is a modest idea where 21st century architects will replace a clapped-out facility with a bespoke modern one that better fits the parklands. And it will remain open to the public – the public including the 70,000-odd fans of the AFC, making it the state’s biggest grassroots organisation.
This Aquatic Centre debate should really be used as a chance to have a mature, long-term discussion about how we preserve but also use the parklands into the future.
With the exception of light sports-related infrastructure, such as the new cricket ground opposite the RAH or the tree climb facility on Greenhill Rd, there should be a permanent ban on any new development.
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But by new development, I would excise those areas where development has already occurred. The strangest debate we have had involved the old RAH site, where the foundation stone for the hospital was laid in 1840 when our colony was four years old, and which in its modern format had ballooned to a 7ha site with 25 buildings ranging from 3000 sqm to 30,000sq m with a total floor space of almost 300,000sq m. This might have been green space once, but it was no more. The horse had well and truly bolted, yet it was billed by parklands purists as some kind of sacred site that should have been returned in its totality to its former Amazonian glory.
What a missed chance. The first thing you could have done with that site was given half of it over to the Botanic Gardens but use the rest for a mixed purpose facility that involved arts, education, and – dare I say it – even included housing, as the one thing our city needs to underpin vibrancy and hospitality is more people.
I thank you for your time tonight and for your generous invitation. I have tried to remain civil.
In closing though, can I just say that the next time you see your grandchildren when they’re back from Sydney or Melbourne for Christmas, give yourselves a pat on the back.
With your professional whingeing about everything from loud concerts to oval upgrades to event day parking to modest refits of a dilapidated pool, and your paranoid determination to keep our city in the 19th century, you are doing a sterling job making this town less fun for the majority of us, and driving our young people away.
(Runs towards door and down Prospect Rd chased by a bearded man in an old Volvo with a bumper sticker reading “Hands off Our ABC”).