David Penberthy: The council is sending itself broke running the Aquatic Centre but is too silly to see that, in the Crows, it has a financial saviour in front of it
The Adelaide City Council has returned to what it does best – personality politics, rank amateurism, questionable judgment calls, and looking for all the world like it is hostile to change and new ideas, writes David Penberthy.
Opinion
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Back in 2009, when Adelaide Oval’s stakeholders decided to embark on an ambitious and visionary redevelopment, the then-SACA president Ian McLachlan made it clear from the outset there was one criterion on which the upgrade had to proceed.
Adelaide City Council could play no part in it.
In a lunchtime speech at the Oval in 2014 to celebrate the opening of the redeveloped ground, Mr McLachlan, a former minister in the Howard Government, explained how the starting point for the SACA, AFL, SANFL and state and federal governments had to be the deliberate exclusion of the inhabitants of Town Hall from the process.
“It was the first decision of the meeting in Melbourne by all sides that we were not going to bother with this new arrangement if the Adelaide City Council were to remain the lessor of the ground,” Mr McLachlan told 400 guests in the William Magarey Room in the Riverbank Stand.
I was there that day, and Mr McLachlan’s commendably blunt remarks struck me as a shocking but deserved indictment on the council, in that the very body that is entrusted (you would hope) with making our city better and more vibrant had to be locked out to ensure the opposite did not occur.
Fast-forward to 2020 and it is hard to see what has changed.
Breaking the habit of a lifetime, I wrote a favourable column early last year about the positive work the council was getting done since the election in 2018 of Sandy Verschoor and the like-minded people on her majority ticket. That column now seems to reflect less of a permanent trend than a happy but fleeting moment in time.
As, in the past few months, the council has returned to what it does best – personality politics, rank amateurism, questionable judgment calls, and looking for all the world like it is hostile to change and new ideas.
In fairness to the majority faction, much of the chaos has stemmed from Councillor Anne Moran, who has been chastised by the Ombudsman for leaking commercially sensitive information from a confidential council meeting.
But the majority faction has made its own missteps, such as agreeing to use public money for the juvenile purpose of legal mediation between Cr Moran and her nemesis, Cr Arman Abrahimzadeh.
It has now been made significantly worse by the self-interested decision of former deputy lord mayor and majority faction member Houssam Abiad. He quit the council less than 18 months into his term, causing a publicly funded $60,000 by-election, because he has a better offer in Saudi Arabia managing the annual 30 million-strong Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.
The people of Mecca can look forward with excitement to the reforms Mr Abiad can bring from his time in the town hall – two-hour event-day parking for the pilgrims and a ban on the use of minarets after 10pm.
Factional bickering aside, the council continues to have a demonstrated capacity to annoy. Instead of working with schools on congested city streets to find solutions to parking problems, it sends inspectors out to film parents with iPhones and fine them as they pick up or drop off their kids. And last Sunday, when the state rallied behind its fire-ravaged communities to watch its two football teams play a T20 Showdown, a number of the 35,000 spectators returned to their cars to find they’d been hit with $55 fines for exceeding the event-day parking limit by the council sticker-lickers. The very existence of this stupid two-hour limit tells you all you need to know about the mindset that permeates this gimcrack outfit – protecting a few self-interested toffs in North Adelaide, and a shared fear that someone, somewhere, is trying to have a good time.
Yet for all its uselessness, and in breach of the excellent approach taken by Ian McLachlan, these amateurs still wield a whip hand over projects of state importance.
The best current example of this is the proposed redevelopment of the Adelaide Aquatic Centre by Adelaide Football Club.
I write this not as some uncritical booster of the club, of which my wife is a board member. Indeed, given the shellacking I gave them last year over the handling of the pre-season camp fiasco and internal restructure, it’s a novel feeling being in agreement on something.
The appeal of the proposed Crows redevelopment isn’t so much its modesty – the replacement of a run-down swimming centre with a brand-new one at reduced cost to council, on a smaller footprint, and with continued public access.
The appeal is that it makes perfect financial sense.
The council is sending itself flat broke running the Aquatic Centre, but too silly to see that, in the Adelaide Football Club, it has a financial saviour standing right in front of its nose. The council revealed last year that it is losing $700,000 a year operating the Parklands centre, which is losing water and has sections closed due to concrete cancer and rust.
The council’s current-needs analysis says the capital works budget merely to maintain the centre over the next decade “could be in the range of $14 to $21 million” and that even that amount of spending “would not necessarily enhance the services provided or reduce operational costs”.
Hmm. If only there was a way the council could find that sort of money?
Instead of just making a decision, the council is relying on some kum ba yah people’s survey, which is already being stacked out by the Parklands preservation mafia, an organisation which, despite meeting in a telephone box, is doing its very best to create the illusion that there is a majority revolt to the very concept of this upgrade.
My hunch is that the majority view in Adelaide is the polar opposite, in that for too long we have been held back by busy-bodies, Nimbies and political pygmys with neither the stomach nor sense to embrace big ideas.
It’s why the Adelaide Oval upgrade was nothing short of a miracle in a town where the fuddy-duddies and forces of inertia enjoy inordinate influence.
Come back, Ian McLachlan. Your state needs you.