Michael McGuire: No, we shouldn’t change South Australia’s name

ADVERTISING guru Bill Muirhead managed to get it absolutely the wrong way around when he suggested renaming South Australia as Adelaide. If you extend the conclusion to its logical end we’d rename Australia as Sydney, writes Michael McGuire.

• Should we rename SA to Adelaide? This marketing whiz says yes
• Business says SA has branding problem but shouldn’t be renamed

ADVERTISING guru Bill Muirhead managed to get it absolutely the wrong way around when he suggested renaming South Australia as Adelaide. He has the idea in his head that Adelaide, Adelaide could be a little bit like New York, New York, just without the glitz and the glamour and excitement. It’s hard to imagine anyone flocking to Adelaide to watch the “Rundle Lantern: car park lights” in the same way they rush to Times Square, but each to their own.

The point being that if you travel overseas and tell just about anyone you are from Adelaide they will look at you blankly. You can see their brain cells twirl. “Adelaide, that’s ahh... ehh… Where’s that?’’ But add that you are from South Australia and the light will slowly dawn. They can locate you, not because they know where South Australia is, but because unless they are particularly dim, they know where Australia is.

Once you have that established, you can tell them we are just a bit to the left of Sydney. Which is mostly the only Australian city they have heard of.

It would make more sense to call us South Australia, South Australia. Anyway, if you extend Muirhead’s illogical conclusion to its logical end we would just rename Australia as Sydney. Sydney, Sydney.

Still, to be fair to Muirhead he is only an advertising chap. It’s not an industry renowned for its good ideas. You just have to watch television every night to understand that. One of his other ideas is to abolish the internet.

It can be hard to change names. To most South Australians, Adelaide’s tallest building will forever be the State Bank building, no matter it has had about five name changes since then. Football Park was called AAMI Stadium for a decade. Every fan still called it Footy Park.

Perhaps Muirhead is just the latest in a long line of South Australians who believe what we need is one big silver bullet to solve all our problems. We are a state that suffers from something of a cargo cult mentality, waiting for the kindness of strangers to deliver us from our own seeming ineptitude.

For a long time, it was BHP and Roxby Downs that were going to save us.

So convinced were some that deliverance was at hand, that Jack Snelling, a man who was briefly Treasurer, started his 2012 Budget speech with “South Australia will be a very different place in a few years’’. And as his first piece of evidence he mentioned the expansion of Olympic Dam at Roxby Downs.

In more recent times, we have had the Elon Musk cavalcade come to town. Now we are getting giddy over Google.

Musk’s battery may not be a bad idea, but the notion that were rescued by it and should fawn over it, followed by this week’s hip trend to rename our State is all a bit embarrassing.