Stadium a stage for the final clash

A fortnight out from the NSW election, Michael Daley’s fight with Alan Jones appears to have worked beyond Labor’s ‘wild­est dreams’.

Michael Daley outside the Land and Environment Court after the injunction on hard demolition of Allianz Stadium was lifted on Wednesday. Picture: Jonathan Ng.

If NSW Labor leader Michael Daley was a no-name Opposition Leader at the start of this week, he certainly wasn’t by the end. Just a fortnight out from the state election, Daley’s spectacular fight with the state’s mighty 2GB ­broadcaster Alan Jones appears to have worked beyond Labor’s “wild­est dreams”.

Squaring up to Jones and his fellow board members on the hallowed Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust, Daley hit a raw nerve with voters during a fiery exchange on Tuesday. If elected premier, he said, he planned to sack Jones and most of the rest of the board for squandering $730 million of taxpayer funds for the “grandiose” rebuild of the SCG’s Allianz Stadium.

The Berejiklian government’s $2.2 billion stadiums “folly”, he said, would be scuppered entirely and the money ploughed back into where it was needed: hospitals and schools.

It’s an empty threat. The Allianz Stadium has already been ­reduced to a shell, the $360m Parra­matta Stadium has been built and the $1bn do-over of ANZ Stadium at Sydney’s Olympic Park is well under way.

But for Daley, it’s been a game-changer. The barely known Opposition Leader anointed just three months ago has suddenly burst into life as a self-styled people’s champion and Jones-slayer.

“It went off better than our ­wildest dreams,” one Labor insider confessed to The Weekend Aus­­tralian yesterday. “It’s been ­incredible.”

“It was a very, very quick way to tell the voters what Daley was all about, his character, his values.

“It’s driving the Libs mad ­because this is an election that should be theirs, but so far they haven’t been able to land a punch.”

The Berejiklian government went into the election campaign this week on an unprecedented spending bonanza — bankrolled by a bulging $70bn war chest. Yet the $734m stadium rebuild has suddenly left it scrambling to wrest back control of its good news narrative.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian has valiantly tried to defend the Allianz investment — listing a raft of reasons it had to happen, from fire and safety issues to a serious shortage of women’s toilets. However, at a press conference on Thursday her refusal to confirm a date for the Allianz Stadium’s demolition went pear-shaped: she infuriated the usually congenial political press corps with her repeated refusal to discuss the stadium at all.

Gladys Berejiklian campaigns in western Sydney. Picture's Darren Leigh Roberts

It was hardly a match for Labor’s campaign circus masters, who on Thursday had the would-be premier propped in front of Allianz Stadium, straining to be heard above the crashing and banging of the bobcats behind him.

Young Labor has also been ­recruited: a huge batch of T-shirts featuring the Jones and Daley fisticuffs is expected to hit the streets at the weekend, emblazoned with the message: “Thanks for Your Service”.

Daley’s timing couldn’t be more excruciating for the government. After weeks of being stalled in the courts, yesterday the NSW Land Environment Court gave the green light to the government to bring out the wrecking balls to ­finally demolish the stadium. The court may well order a halt again on Monday — ensuring the stadium crisis isn’t going to go away any time soon.

“The media optics around this have just been diabolical for the government,” one senior political observer told The Weekend Australian yesterday.

“Day after day you’ve had Daley standing in front of the stadium giving press conferences as you see the bobcats behind him pulling the joint apart.”

“No government has built or fixed or spent more money since Lachlan Macquarie, yet now they are in this incredible situation where they are seriously on the back foot.”

Until this week, Daley looked like a relatively easy target: an ­unknown who took on the job in ugly circumstances just three months ago after former Labor leader Luke Foley was forced to ­resign over allegations he had sexually harassed a female reporter at a parliamentary Christmas Party.

As a former minister in the past corruption-ridden Labor government, Daley is dogged by the stench that still lingers around NSW Labor after it was reduced to a rump at the polls in 2011.

It’s an Achilles heel for the ­Opposition Leader as many voters will not have forgotten or forgiven the scandal-prone years of Labor. Berejiklian’s endless on-repeat message about the 110 yet-to-be-finished infrastructure projects around the state shouldn’t be such a hard sell. But with polling still running at 50-50, her failure to step up to Daley’s challenge this week has government campaigners spooked.

Labor insiders say it’s no accident the decision to take on Jones over the government’s Allianz Stadium debacle has fired up voters, who until now had been noticeably uninterested in the looming state election.

Jones has been a political kingmaker for both main parties in NSW for generations. At the height of his powers in the late 90s to early 2000s, NSW Labor governments would rarely appoint a minister without his blessing.

But kowtowing to Jones has been increasingly perilous for governments in the past decade. Former NSW Labor premier Morris Iemma was the first to call Jones’s bluff, ultimately refusing to even speak with the broadcaster by the end of his premiership in 2008 — a position successive Labor and Liberal premiers have also adopted when they could no longer bear the broadcaster’s public tirades.

“No premier in this state had dared to defy Jones before Iemma, but he was a proud Italian and he just wouldn’t cop it any more,” a veteran Labor campaigner ­explains. “The reality is his audience is rusted-on Liberal-voting pensioners who were never going to vote for us anyway, so what was the point of trying to keep him happy?”

Sydneysiders, already grumpy about living in an entire city under renovation, were never sold on the idea of knocking down what ­appeared to be a perfectly ­adequate stadium. And right from the start, voters in the bush were furious.

Former Liberal premier Mike Baird had flatly refused to fund the rebuild of Allianz Stadium — unconvinced there was a business case for such an extravagant project, especially when he had ­already earmarked $1bn in 2013 for the rebuild of ANZ Stadium in Sydney’s west.

That made Baird a target for a series of bruising encounters with Jones. Baird’s sudden resignation in January 2014 ushered in the ­Berejiklian era — but that didn’t please Jones either. He promptly declared her a “nice person” but a “bad choice” for premier.

However, six months on, Jones appears to have warmed to the Premier after convincing her to fund both the Allianz and ANZ stadiums. Despite dire warnings from her colleagues it would be “political suicide”, Berejiklian was so hellbent on the plan she stared down a cabinet revolt in November 2017 to push it through.

It’s a decision that this week came back to haunt her.