Berejiklian’s push for new stadiums makes sense, even if it is seen by some as mere bread and circuses
GREAT cities and great stadiums go hand-in-hand. From Rome’s Colosseum to London’s Wembley Arena to our own SCG, sporting arenas have always been bound up in the lives of a city’s people — and their government.
NSW
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GREAT cities and great stadiums go hand-in-hand. From Rome’s Colosseum to London’s Wembley Arena to our own SCG, sporting arenas have always been bound up in the lives of a city’s people — and their government.
Today, the Berejiklian government has reason to worry it might go the way of Rome, even as she and her ministers plan to execute a multi-billion dollar vision razing and rebuilding two venues in a move critics see as nothing more than bread and circuses.
The future of Sydney’s two great stadiums, ANZ at Homebush and Allianz at Moore Park, has become the most politically divisive policy clash in the state.
At one end of the field, the naysayers. Those who say pouring money into the stadiums is a waste and doesn’t benefit the people.
And at the other, Premier Gladys Berejiklian, sports minister Stuart Ayres, and those who believe that investing in the mammoth sporting infrastructure is the right thing to do for the state’s future as a major economic and tourism driver.
The cost, to demolish and rebuild those two stadiums, is placed at over $2 billion.
Several ministers believe that if the government can’t win the public argument over stadiums, it cannot win the election.
They see this as a political contest straight out of Gladiator, with political death the only option for the loser.
Berejiklian faces a diabolical problem: Having committed to the plan, every single failure to pay for anything, anywhere over the next 12 months will be squarely blamed on stadiums, even if unfairly.
In a humiliating spray, upper house MP Matthew Mason-Cox fired the starter’s gun on exactly that yesterday, lambasting his own side for prioritising “a couple of sporting stadiums” over child welfare.
A passionate Mason-Cox was blaming the perennial woes of the child protection system on the stadiums investment, and in that instance gave every critic a playbook from which to attack the government in the race to the election.
This is a searing danger going forward. Too much traffic on the roads? Stadiums’ fault.
High electricity bills? Damn those stadiums.
People moving out of Sydney? Definitely the stadiums spend at it again.
The problem for the government is that Mason-Cox was speaking words that some other nervous ministers and backbenchers have whispered privately.
Ministers and backbenchers have told me that they have never before seen the electoral backlash the scale of which they observed on stadiums.
Punters would come up to them in the streets, through their inboxes and on the phone.
The government has the figures and the financial analysis from KPMG to back up its convictions to demolish and rebuild both the stories.
I have reported on leaked KMPG financial modelling for both ANZ and Allianz. In both cases, the KPMG work shows that demolishing and starting from scratch is a far more cost effective option than remodelling. The secret figures I saw last year from KPMG on ANZ, which are still being refined, showed that it was over $100 million cheaper to demolish and rebuild the Homebush venue than it was to renovate it.
The January 2018 KMPG analysis for Allianz, which I revealed yesterday, is even more damning of the renovation option at Moore Park.
It is in such a rundown state that even spending an initial $141 million to patch up safety issues would only extend the life of the stadium by about five years.
Imagine that. We’d be having the same conversation in 2021.
It’s not difficult politics to say to them that the government should be spending that money on something else. But the case for stadiums is more complex than an instant sugar hit in an electoral cycle.
So what’s the next option — a more thorough refurb? According to KPMG, not if you want a little thing called economic benefit. The KMPG analysis that I have seen gives weight to the government’s course of action.
But what will that matter if the government cannot win the war of ideas? And what will it matter if the government is eating itself alive with gruesome internal division over the spend?
Opposition leader Luke Foley has deftly made political capital out of his repeated claims that the government should not spend the money.
His motto — and it’s rattling around the state — is schools and hospitals before stadiums.
It’s an easy message to sell to a state full of people who might attend a stadium once a year. Many in the regions would be lucky to roll into the bright flood lights of ANZ once in a lifetime.
It’s not difficult politics to say to them that the government should be spending that money on something else. But the case for stadiums is more complex than an instant sugar hit in an electoral cycle.
It’s a big picture case for tourism, for future benefit and for driving the economy.
Berejiklian rightly sees it as having a vision for the state.
Just when cries against stadiums were reaching fever pitch in December, I interviewed Berejiklian while she was travelling in China.
She said, then, that she knew she would be pilloried over the spend.
Crucially, she told me she was willing to cop the criticism because being a leader meant making the right decisions for the state, saying she wasn’t willing to do nothing.
This was a city that builds things, she said, not a city that lets infrastructure rot.
This, if Berejiklian stays the course, is true conviction politics.
The government is in a strong financial position and believes it can spend on stadiums, and schools, and hospitals. If this is true, the government needs to do more to sell that message. And on a grassroots level, anyone who wants to be on Berejiklian’s team needs to get better at selling the stadiums story in their own electorates.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House were both marred in opposition and controversy through their construction.
Neither would have been built if the anti-growth voices had their way —- and it’s unlikely they would have stood up to stringent cost benefit scrutiny. No, they were built from the cauldron of conviction.