Matthew Abraham: I could think of at least a dozen better ways to spend $700m

There’s a dozen better ways for South Australia to spend $700 million, writes Matthew Abraham.

The Big Rocking Horse, the Big Lobster and the Big Galah look tiny stacked up against the Big Election Promise, but they all have one thing in common.

While they look impressive from a distance, get up close and tap them and, like a giant Easter egg, they’re hollow.

Gumeracha’s Big Rocking Horse is certainly big, but it doesn’t rock. Larry the giant lobster in Kingston SE always seems to need a lick of red paint. And Kimba’s 8m-tall tall galah looks as stoned as a crow.

Just over a week ago, Premier Steven Marshall unveiled his big thing – an indoor arena for concerts, conventions, basketball, Morris dancing and whatever else they can think of except soccer, squeezed into the increasingly crowded space along the River Torrens.

This is obviously Adelaide’s Big Things precinct. If they keep stacking enormous buildings in this location, that whole end of North Terrace is in grave danger of tilting and sliding into the Torrens.

The arena’s cost is unknown, but The Advertiser has previously been told taxpayers won’t get much change out of $700m.

How the new arena will look from the River Torrens, alongside the Convention Centre.

Does Adelaide need a $700m arena? Let me answer that. No it doesn’t. It’s so far down the list of things this city and state really need it’s laughable.

Off the top of my head, I could think of at least a dozen better ways to spend $700m, such as extending the O-Bahn to Golden Grove, ruled out because of the cost, or extending the Southern Expressway to Aldinga as promised, or building a new Women’s and Children’s Hospital next to the new RAH.

The government has yet to turn a single sod on its big 2018 election promise of a $200m Aboriginal arts and cultural centre on the old RAH site up the other end of North Terrace.

It walked away from another biggie, the Globelink heavy freight hub mooted for the outskirts of Murray Bridge, again because the dollars didn’t add up.

It even dumped its big boast during the election campaign that trams would turn right on North Terrace, again because of the cost.

Mr Marshall bagged the no-right-turn trams as one of Labor’s “cynical, stupid and ultimately costly transport decisions”. He must have been quite proud of that because the words are in his March 8, 2018, media release, still frozen in time on the Liberal Party’s website, under “policy”.

Sorry to keep banging on about the tram but it enabled Steven Marshall, as Opposition leader, to deliver a killer campaign zinger – voting him into government was the “right turn for South Australia”.

The new rules when making election promises is to go big, go hard and worry about the fine print later.

If you win, you have the full resources of government to either deliver, modify or abandon a promise and if you don’t win, nobody will remember anyway.

Even so, it was mildly surprising to see Labor leader Peter Malinauskas pulling a big election promise out of his kitbag on Tuesday with his $593m “Hydrogen Jobs Plan”, with a hydrogen-fired power station to be built, owned and operated by a future Labor government.

Leader of the Opposition Peter Malinauskas. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Kelly Barnes

The Labor leader’s Symphony in Flat Battery predicts creating up to 300 jobs building a 200MW hydrogen power station with a $342m price tag, although he’s done no detailed costings. Don’t you worry about that, because he says the whole hydrogen shebang will create about 10,000 jobs and deliver an 8 per cent drop in wholesale power prices.

But how will it work? It’s “surprisingly simple”, apparently.

Here’s his explanation on ABC Radio on Tuesday morning: “So how you produce hydrogen is actually surprisingly simple in terms of being able to explain it – you put electricity through water in a process called electrolysis so you have electrolysers that do that and those electrolysers separate water into both oxygen and hydrogen, you then capture that hydrogen, store it and you can use that hydrogen for a whole number of purposes.”

Kids, don’t try this at home.

If elected, will a Malinauskas government build a hydrogen power station? Maybe, maybe not. Will the same party that in government presided over SA households paying the world’s highest electricity prices for the best part of a decade actually deliver an 8 per cent drop in power bills? I don’t think so.

This is an election year and politicians have to go hard or go home. But if you believe every word of every Big Election Promise, you’re a big galah.