Peter Malinauskas gambles on LIV Golf steamroller squashing Adelaide City Council risks | David Penberthy
Driving a LIV Golf steamroller over Adelaide City Council opens the Premier up to two major attacks, writes David Penberthy. Have your say.
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It’s been labelled a land grab, a hostile takeover, an arrogant usurping of community interests by big government.
Despite being nothing but level-headed and open-minded about the State Government’s golf plans, the Adelaide City Council will instead be steamrolled, with Peter Malinauskas set to push through special legislation letting parliament override Town Hall on the North Adelaide Golf Course upgrade and the staging of the LIV tournament.
There’s a live question as to which entity should be blamed for such a heavy-handed outcome – the State Government or the Adelaide City Council itself.
Many of us would point to the latter.
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While it might be harsh on this specific council under the more thoughtful and considered leadership of Jane Lomax-Smith, the council as an entity was almost begging to be sidelined after proving itself a dithering and incompetent bulwark to change for many, many years.
You could fill the rest of this column documenting the many projects and events the ACC has objected to and fought against.
It’s in their DNA.
Carparking for the Royal Show and football fans. The construction of anything for decades at the Le Cornu site. Modest plans to replace dilapidated existing parkland buildings with new facilities of the same size for kids sport and community sport. Rock concerts. The Crows headquarters. The new RAH. The Police horse barracks. Horse racing. The V8s. The Oval upgrade.
On and on and on.
Yep, this council has been better. But history suggests that when it comes to dealing with the council, you easily and frequently end up in a quagmire of paralysis.
Peter Malinauskas says the sole reason the Government is acting this way is because of time. He says there is no way it will be able to meet its deadlines to remodel the course and meet the LIV guidelines if the process becomes bogged down in delays.
The reasons run deeper than that. The Premier is just being polite in not stating them.
This legislation is the statutory embodiment of the famous declaration made by former SACA chairman Ian McLachlan ahead of the Adelaide Oval upgrade – that the project could not succeed if there was any involvement from the Adelaide City Council.
McLachlan was right. If the ACC was involved, we would still be talking about whether the proposal to let Toyota operate HiLux Hill on match day would obscure the view of the Moreton Bay figs.
So too with this golf plan. You can easily imagine a scenario where this council, despite its positive noises so far, declared it all too hard in six months time because some remnant hardenbergia had been found growing on the edge of the fairway on the 13th.
But while most people will cry no tears for the sidelining of the council, there are significant political risks for Peter Malinauskas with this plan.
The first goes to the question of his priorities, the second goes to his political style, the two things being the Premier’s only political vulnerabilities.
Many voters are asking why the Premier has to drop everything and move hell and high water in the apparently urgent need to upgrade what is already a pretty decent golf course.
Many are rightly pointing out in suitably droll tones that while ramping might still be a disaster and the state’s prosperity plan in the bin thanks to the death of green hydrogen, the Premier is really delivering on the golf front.
The cost of the project will also be difficult to manage – $45 million, which is not small change, especially when you consider Stephen Mullighan just brought down a budget surplus of $18 million, somewhat shy of the forecast $201 million.
Then there is the criticism of LIV itself, which many see as a boozy and blokey private party, backed by a regime which has a less than unblemished record on the human rights front.
I don’t share these concerns, but then again, I really like golf, and I think LIV in conjunction with Gather Round has been a brilliant way to make people rethink our city, and attract thousands of people here to give hospitality businesses a much-needed shot in the arm.
But there is a strong view that LIV is a symbol of a bread and circuses Premier who’s more interested in hanging around with Greg Norman or Katy Perry than the harder business of meeting his promises on health and energy.
And to keep the Roman ruler theme going, the manner in which he is going about this – special legislation sidelining another tier of government – suggests a degree of imperiousness in the eyes of his critics, inviting claims from the Liberals that this is a vanity project.
Whether the Libs can make any significant political capital out of this is yet to be seen.
I was struggling to understand whether their criticisms of the process the Premier is using in special legislation means they are actually going to vote against the legislation.
If they do, they risk facing criticism themselves, especially from their own pro-business, pro-development constituency which would happily see the ACC sidelined not just from golf, but from everything.
But by using this legislation, Peter Malinauskas is backing himself massively.
His read on this issue is that South Australians are overwhelmingly happy with the new spring our state has got in its step.
So he is pushing through accordingly, confident in his popularity on that score, even though this issue has the chance to rev new life into his detractors who want bread and butter issues over what they regard as bread and circuses.
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Originally published as Peter Malinauskas gambles on LIV Golf steamroller squashing Adelaide City Council risks | David Penberthy
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