Matthew Abraham: Health more likely to be key arena in election than a new stadium

Building stadiums has been a great path to retaining power for governments. But SA’s next election will be fought in a very different arena, says Matthew Abraham.

It took the Romans 600 years to become bored with building amphitheatres as venues to relax and enjoy watching gladiators maim and slaughter each other.

It looks like our love affair with ritzy, taxpayer-funded sporting arenas is fading much faster than that.

The Romans did love their stadiums, constructing more than 300 dotted across the empire, from small temporary 10,000-seat wooden affairs up to the sensational Colosseum that could put 50,000 toga-clad bums on seats.

Restoration work at Rome’s Colosseum has revealed remnants of an “ingenious system of platforms, winches and ramps, manned by hundreds of stage technicians and animal handlers”, reports the latest National Geographic, with trapdoors to release animals, elaborate painted sets lifting out of the stadium floors, and elevators taking gladiators up to their fights.

“Spectators didn’t know what would open when, or where,” German archaeologist Heinz Best told the magazine.

Sadly, our sporting stadiums aren’t anywhere near as much fun. They still serve the same purpose however – keeping the unwashed masses happy and distracted, and governments in power. Build a new stadium, or a new hospital, and the votes will follow.

The design for Adelaide’s proposed Riverbank Arena.

It’s why we ended up with the new Adelaide Oval and the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, both projects that helped Labor remain in power for 16 unbroken years.

And it’s why Premier Steven Marshall has promised a $667m stadium on the banks of the River Torrens as a major plank of his 2022 re-election campaign.

He calls it the “Riverside Arena”. Labor calls it “another basketball stadium” and has instead pledged to pump the earmarked arena cash into the health system.

Now a new opinion poll shows the gloss may have worn off the “stadiums for votes” strategy. The July poll, oddly commissioned by the Canberra-based Australia Institute think tank, asked voters how they’d prefer to see the $677m of public money spent – on the Riverside Arena or the health system.

A whopping 82 per cent of voters polled wanted the money spent on health, with even 81 per cent of Liberal voters backing health over their party’s arena.

A tight contest between Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas, left, and Premier Stephen Marshall is looming, says Matthew Abraham.

To be fair, if a similar poll before the 2014 election had asked voters if they wanted former Labor premier Jay Weatherill to spend $160m on his weird O’Bahn tunnel promise or to instead invest the cash in health, the result would probably have been the same.

Labor won that election, but it had already delivered the brand new RAH.

The poll shows a tight contest heading toward the March ballot box, with the Liberals holding a slender 51 to 49 per cent two-party preferred lead over the ALP.

While the figures show a wildcard 17 per cent primary vote for anonymous independents and the zombie SA Best, these are still not good numbers for the Marshall Government.

It’s risky reading too much into one poll. But it shows voter intentions haven’t budged since the Sunday Mail’s authoritative statewide YouGov poll published in March this year. That also showed a 51-49 split.

They show that despite Premier Marshall’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic, his wheels appear to be spinning in the mud. Whether the hoopla over the new nuke subs deal gives him traction, or whether voters aren’t keen on becoming a missile target for China, remains to be seen.

The latest poll shows health is overwhelmingly the major issue in the minds of voters – unsurprising given the pandemic – and we’re evenly split on who we most trust to fix the health system. Both Liberal and Labor rank 36 per cent support on this key question.

That’s good news for Premier Marshall, but it’s good news for Labor leader Peter Malinauskas too.

It confirms the smarts of the Labor leader’s dogged refusal to be sidetracked into bagging the government’s pandemic response, instead hammering away at problems in the public health system, particularly ambulance ramping.

Ironically, the proposed Riverbank Arena would be only a short stroll from the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

The fact that Labor is so well positioned on health, despite its Transforming Health mess while in office, including the dumb closure of the Daw Park Repat Hospital, shows voters are either very forgiving, or we have the attention spans of goldfish.

Add to this mix the rogue element – Adelaide’s ambulance fleet, festooned with pithy slogans attacking the government’s funding of the health system.

The ambos have become the political equivalent of cranky Roman gladiators, riding around in their chalked-up chariots, belting big dents in the government’s health armour.

Spectators didn’t know what would open when, or where, in a Roman amphitheatre. And nobody knows when, or where, an ambulance will change a vote.