Peter Malinauskas ramps up popularity in city of fun and games

While Adelaide is packed with footy fans for Gather Round, in March, ambulance ramping hit a SA high. Peter Malinauskas has a vast and unmet political challenge lurking ominously.

Gold Coast Suns teammates get around Bailey Humphrey after kicking his first goal in AFL during Friday’s match against Fremantle at Norwood Oval. Picture: Paul Kane/Getty Images

On the eve of the AFL Gather Round in Adelaide, when all nine matches will be played in the City of Churches this weekend, South Australia was recording figures the state had not seen before.

Every hotel packed to capacity. Every table booked at the best restaurants in Norwood, the Adelaide Hills and the CBD. Pubs and cellar doors full. More than 55,000 people flying into Adelaide from interstate, with 156 footy-mad souls even coming from overseas for a four-day orgy of Aussie rules.

As of Thursday, eight of the nine scheduled games had sold out, with just a few thousand tickets remaining for Friday night’s Swans-Richmond clash.

The good times roll on next weekend with 42,000 tickets sold for Australia’s first LIV golf tournament at Adelaide’s Grange Golf Course, with 40 per cent of ticket sales coming from interstate and overseas.

Amazing figures all.

Then there’s this one: in March, ambulance ramping hit a South Australian high with ­patients spending a record 3968 hours languishing outside hospital waiting for a bed.

These disparate statistics combine to tell the story of a new government determined to inject new life and buzz into Adelaide, but with a vast and unmet political challenge lurking ominously in its in-tray.

In a national sense, the manner in which the Gather Round was “lured” to Adelaide shows how savvy sports administrators are playing off state governments keen for the economic sugar hit of major events and their bread-and-circuses appeal for voters.

The decision of the one-year-old Malinauskas government to hand an undisclosed and sizeable pile of public cash to the AFL in ­return for this one-off Gather Round has not been without political risk. That risk was compounded when Premier Peter Malinauskas announced at the same time the state’s $40m Major Events Fund would also be used to attract the LIV golf tournament to Adelaide under a four-year deal.

The criticisms of Malinauskas came from across the divide. He was attacked by the Greens and some left faction members of his own caucus on human rights grounds for doing a deal with a Saudi-backed entity. He was ­accused by the Liberal opposition of having warped priorities when his government, elected as it was on a much-trumpeted promise of fixing the ramping crisis, had spectacularly failed to do so, with ramping even increasing on several occasions to higher levels than any ever recorded during the four-year tenure of Steven Marshall’s Liberal government.

A busy Adelaide Airport on Friday. Picture: The Advertiser/Morgan Sette

The murkiness around the cost of hosting these events also invited criticism. The total outlay ­remains a matter of conjecture and cannot be unearthed through Freedom of Information laws. It’s been speculated the AFL pocketed upwards of $14m from the SA government to secure the Gather Round, with that also being the amount the former Perrottet government was believed to be offering to lure the event to Sydney. For his part, Malinauskas has flat out refused to say how much SA taxpayers are being billed to host ­either event, even though in opposition he and his Labor team would habitually accuse the Liberals of secrecy when they failed to disclose details of similar deals.

“It’s not about money, it’s about the jobs that it provides for,” Malinauskas said as the ink was drying on both the AFL and LIV deals. “I’m not going to go into the specifics because that subject is commercial-in-confidence in a way that won’t surprise you.

“We’re making an investment that is going to more than deliver to the taxpayers of South ­Australia. We’re confident on all the numbers that we’ve run.”

Fremantle fans Xavier, 5, and Danae Florias from Perth, with Bill, 8, and Steph March from Kadina. Xavier and Bill made friends at a Gather Round banner-making event and have been inseparable all week, including at Elder Park/Kaurna Yarta on Friday. Picture: The Advertiser/Morgan Sette

The numbers Malinauskas refers to certainly dwarf the state’s outlay from its $40m events fund, which he stresses has not been exhausted by the AFL and LIV deals. It is estimated LIV alone will inject $70m into the state’s economy. While there are no hard estimates for Gather Round due to its novelty, last year’s NRL Magic Round was worth $20m to Queensland, a figure AFL chief executive Gill McLachlan says has already been eclipsed in SA by attendances and visitor numbers this weekend. Further, the back-to-back timing of the two events means SA is enjoying a sustained tourism and hospitality boom, with thousands of visitors making a fortnight of it to enjoy the footy and then the golf.

For the AFL, for LIV, and for other codes such as the NRL, which are now auctioning off marquee events such as State of Origin and Magic Round to the highest bidder, the message is now clear: state governments are prepared to pay big bucks to host these events on account of the economic activity they bring.

Malinauskas said this week it is his hope that rather than rolling the Gather Round through various Australian cities, Adelaide will do such a great job this weekend that the AFL will come to regard it as the natural home of a permanent annual football festival.

“Absolutely, that’s the plan,” he told The Weekend Australian.

“We are determined to make this such a success that there will be no argument as to why it should be held elsewhere.”

The Liberals are trying to paint Malinauskas as “Party Pete”, more interested in blowing public money on good times than the tougher job of delivering on key services and honouring his central promise on ramping.

While such attacks on Malinauskas are being led by the conservative side of politics, the reality is the Premier might actually be turning the tables on his opponents by winning strongest acclaim from traditional male Liberal voters. When it comes to the Gather Round and LIV, the biggest enthusiasts in SA are the local business community, which lost faith with the Liberals over Steven Marshall’s hands-off management of Covid, and middle-aged blokes who simply love footy and particularly love golf.

Channel 7 Sunrise hosts Mark Beretta, Natalie Barr and Matt Schirvington presented from Elder Park/Kaurna Yarta on Friday. Picture: The Advertiser/Morgan Sette

Malinauskas won last year’s election with the tacit or candid support of almost every key industry group in the state, fed up with what they saw as Marshall’s acquiescence to the health bureaucracy and police over job-wrecking Covid measures. The arts-loving Marshall also had none of the ­everyman appeal of Malinauskas, who is closer to a Peter Beattie in his style as a knockabout footy-mad bloke, and spent almost two decades playing for his beloved and lowly ranked Adelaide Uni Blacks Team, the division seven battlers known as “The Scum”.

Acting on a canny plebeian hunch, Malinauskas clearly decided that in the aftermath of Covid, South Australians were simply up for some fun. We might all be paying for it, but there is nothing to suggest Malinauskas will pay for it in the long run.

Right now, having just emerged from a record festival season in Mad March when the Adelaide Fringe became the first event in the southern hemisphere to sell one million tickets, there’s a sense of excitement and fun in ­Adelaide not felt here for years. It’s going to escalate this weekend and continue into the next. As long as you’re not stuck in an ambulance experiencing chest pains, where else would you rather be?