Sydney is falling behind Melbourne in the race to win big events and build great infrastructure
In Melbourne right now they are laughing their heads off at us. While they move ahead with redevelopment plans for the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Marvel Stadium in Docklands, Labor leader Michael Daley has taken Sydney back to the 1980s.
In Melbourne right now they are laughing their heads off at us. While they move ahead with redevelopment plans for the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Marvel Stadium in Docklands, Labor leader Michael Daley has taken Sydney back to the 1980s.
This week Daley vowed to stop the demolition of Allianz Stadium and sack the highly influential Sydney Cricket Ground Trust board members.
“I am making it crystal clear to the Premier and her mates on the SCG Trust — don’t knock down the stadium,” he said.
Cue the guffaws in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth as those muppets in Sydney shoot themselves in the foot and open the door for millions of dollars generated by major sporting and musical events to go elsewhere.
On Friday the NSW Land and Environment Court dismissed a community group’s desperate last-ditch appeal to stop the bulldozers from rolling in — at least for the weekend.
NSW Minister for Sport Stuart Ayres said: “Demolition can start now that the court’s removed the injunction. I expect you’ll see work taking place around the edges of the stadium and the roofline will start coming down next week.”
But opposition group Local Democracy Matters will go back to court to try to get work stopped again on Monday.
And in the meantime Daley has gone back to the 1980s with a botched attempt to win votes by trying to save the out-of-date stadium. His comments are being closely monitored by rivals interstate.
BACK TO FUTURE
“The stadium was a ripper when it was built but its time has come and gone.
The world has changed significantly,” Melbourne’s Mr Stadiums, Collingwood boss Eddie McGuire, says.
“I have no dog in the fight in Sydney,” he says. “But I know if you don’t keep up you will be left for dead.”
To get sports fans off the couch and into a stadium they need a modern, 5G-connected experience that takes them to the heart of the action.
Not a hard plastic seat, a lukewarm pie and, in the frightening new era of terror attacks, dangerously slow crowd movement and jammed entry and exit points.
Melbourne is already way ahead. McGuire says: “People don’t realise the only thing remaining at the MCG from the 1956 Olympics is the picket fence. The stadium has been rebuilt twice. Even the soil has been replaced. The lights they fought so hard over installing in the 1980s are now heritage-listed.”
He has played a pivotal role in securing the deal to revamp Marvel Stadium and the whole Docklands precinct.
Unlike the isolated proposal for Allianz Stadium at Moore Park, the Marvel Stadium proposal looked at benefits for the whole area.
“The arguments (in Sydney) are 25 years old. The whole thinking about sports stadiums is not to turn up on a Saturday afternoon to watch rugby league, it’s about building something that is the epicentre for a community,” McGuire says.
ADELAIDE EXAMPLE
His point is reinforced by the evidence from the new Adelaide Oval, which has had a dramatic impact on the city when AFL matches were moved there from Football Park. Attendance at AFL games jumped by 44 per cent, accommodation revenue went up 36 per cent and room nights by 25 per cent.
That in turn saw tourism revenue for the year increase by $900 million to $6.3 billion.
It is not rocket science. Infrastructure NSW found: “Stadiums can generate significant economic benefits for a community, creating economic activity through sporting events, providing employment opportunities for local people and attracting visitors to NSW.”
But Daley on Friday repeated his earlier claim that: “A Daley Labor government will keep its word and divert all of the remaining $1.5 billion earmarked for stadiums into schools and hospitals.”
McGuire says: “I am not against building hospitals, but I am for having some enjoyment before I have to go to that hospital. If you get this right you can have both.”
In fact, the money generated by the new stadiums would help pay for more hospitals.
His point was backed yesterday by Liberal powerbroker Michael Photios, who crunched the numbers to show that just 1.4 per cent of the NSW government’s $136 billion infrastructure spend is going towards the new Allianz, ANZ and Parramatta stadiums.
He said Daley’s demand for schools and hospitals ahead of stadiums made the “assumption you cannot chew gum and walk at the same time”.
MISSING THE POINT
But Daley was not finished. In an error-laden rant on Trust member Alan Jones’ 2GB radio show, Daley also vowed to sack all the SCG Trust board members — except the vote-pulling popular sports stars, former Test cricketers David Gilbert and Stuart MacGill and Wallabies great Phil Waugh.
On the surface it looked to be a classic return to the old Labor class-war values, ripping into the eastern suburbs silvertails. But it completely missed the point that almost half the people visiting Allianz Stadium come from the west and southwest of Sydney.
It also fails to recognise that those SCG Trust board members have enormous positive influence over the people of NSW who will be voting in a couple of weeks.
People like the first female NRL board member, Harvey Norman boss Katie Page, who employs thousands through stores and franchises and has been a major sponsor of women in sport.
Chairman Tony Shepherd laughs at Daley’s portrayal of the SCG Trust board members as eastern suburbs silvertails out for a free ticket. “Why would someone like Katie Page bother doing it? She can go to any sporting event in the world. Why attend board meetings and have vilification and stress? Why would any of us do this other than for the best possible reasons?” he says.
The SCG Trust board has scope and depth right across industry and enterprise in NSW. Members include former News Corp boss John Hartigan, Australian Turf Club chair Michael Crismale, former SBS chair Nihal Gupta, former ABC chair Maurice Newman, former Hoyts boss Peter Ivany, former premier Barry O’Farrell, and Rod McGeoch, the mastermind behind Sydney’s Olympics.
Shepherd says: “I would love to go to the football or the cricket and have a few beers with my mates and not have to stress. But when I realised Allianz Stadium was just so far behind the rest of the country and the world, I knew we had to do something about it.
“We made it our focus to get it fixed, and the most sensible course was to rebuild.”
GOING FOR GOLD
NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet says: “Remember the 2000 Olympics — people were so proud of Sydney and NSW. This is about more than just building new sporting infrastructure. It’s about taking our state from good to great. It’s about creating a better future.”
That better future would make Allianz Stadium more user-friendly to women. The current one has no female change rooms and only 48 female toilets in the main seating area.
Meanwhile, back in the 1980s last week, Daley vowed to make good on his pledge to the SCG Trust that, if the stadium was demolished, “you are going to have to pay for a new one, not the citizens of NSW”.
The reality of that means a 40 per cent increase in food and drink prices to service loan repayments of $19.5 million a year. It means your $6 pie will cost $9.10 and the old plastic seat will still be uncomfortable as you watch the game from a distance.
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