The Outsider: Probing Adelaide’s obsessions
Today The Outsider explores SA’s new external affairs arm, ministerial advisers’ dough, more hypocrisy on sports advertising and – above all – the meaning behind Spandau Ballet’s hit song True.
SA’s foreign affair
Little ole South Australia now has an official ‘External Relations’ arm of Government.
In a “seamless transition”, the former head of the Thinkers in Resident program Gabrielle Kelly has been moved into a new spot in Premier Jay Weatherill’s department as head of the new section.
For those who managed to stay awake during the long, grinding hours of the Estimates Committee process, the Premier explained the new office was part of a “more coordinated and sophisticated approach to building the key relationships at local, state, national and international levels”.
“In any one week, there is an extraordinary range of international and interstate visitors moving through South Australia. They are obviously here for their own business or even for pleasure, but the opportunity for us to proactively invite people, make sure they are well looked after when they are here and, importantly, draw to their attention the opportunities that exist, we think is one that needs a more strategic focus, rather than being a more reactive focus.”
Hard heads in Government may well roll their gimlet eyes as everyone of this ilk always saw the Thinkers in Residence as ripe for the chop after its champion, Mike Rann, departed.
Weatherill eventually obliged, but now Kelly will now be part of a fancy new unit with seven full-time equivalent positions.
The Budget will be “within existing resources”, according to Weatherill.
Doing it for the kids
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The State Government is all about looking after the kids.
This week Premier Jay Weatherill announced that his ban on live odds advertising would come into force in SA on August 1.
As he’s said before, it’s all about the kids.
“It is of great concern to me that we will end up with a generation of children who believe gambling is a normal part of watching or even playing sport,” he said.
Which makes it even more breathtaking that the State Government has chosen to totally undermine a Federal attempt to remove alcohol advertising from sports promotion – notably the spruiking of booze via the Adelaide United football club.
In short, last year Adelaide United was part of a funding deal between the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) and the Federal Government to stop alcohol promotion. United lost beer maker Coopers as a front-of-shirt sponsor after the FFA signed up to the National Binge Drinking Strategy deal, a national program in which the Commonwealth provided $25 million in sponsorship to promote safe drinking messages in exchange for the banning of alcohol promotion.
The deal meant the FFA and its member clubs were prevented from having alcohol company sponsorships. The FFA pocketed millions – yet this week Sports Minister Leon Bignell announced a deal to give brewer Coopers naming rights of Hindmarsh Stadium.
This means the booze ads at Hindmarsh will be bigger than ever.
State sports minister Leon Bignell doesn’t appear to give a toss about any concerns. It’s a business decision, he says.
The Opposition cares not.
The local media gives not a fig (apart from this upright online organ).
But the alcohol abuse experts have a different view.
Health researcher Lance Barry pointed out the bleeding obvious this week – that there’s no difference to the viewer between a shirt sponsorship and a stadium sponsorship.
Any form of alcohol advertising – from shirt-front sponsorships to stadium naming rights – would promote alcohol consumption.
Which is the point, right?
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Robbie, Danny and Foody
Liberal frontbencher Robbie Lucas loves this time of year.
It’s when the SA Government Gazette publishes the salaries of ministerial staffers – easy pickings for Robbie who pores over such details with a forensic enthusiasm that borders on obsessive.
The bottom line for Robbie is this – they get paid heaps of dough and… and… and… they work for Labor politicians!
It’s water off a duck’s back for most of the staffers, but Robbie has taken to referring to John Rau’s chief of staff – known to everyone as Daniel or Dan – as “Danny Romeo”.
That’s gotta hurt.
The gazette does make for interesting reading for the financially and politically prurient.
Apart from the obvious – that, yes, advisers get paid crap-loads of money – did you know that food minister Gail Gago has a ministerial adviser with the last name “Foody”.
Well played Minister, and well played Dale Foody.
Over here!
Businessman Ian Smith was in fine grumpy form on ABC radio this week during a panel discussion on the state of South Australia’s media.
Like Goldilocks, he just isn’t happy with the media in Adelaide. The ABC (by which he later clarified to mean just Matt Abraham and David Bevan) was “too cynical” and The Advertiser “too populist”.
What alternative could there be, we wonder?
Limbs by the ocean
The Outsider can barely wait for Adelaide’s newest festival, Word Adelaide, particularly the visit of Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp.
Kemp will be part of the Words Without Music event at Her Majesty’s Theatre on August 18, in which he and fellow Brit songwriter Guy Pratt will “share the inspiration and stories behind their famous lyrics”.
It will be worth the ticket price just to hear Kemp explain these lines from Spandau Ballet’s hit True:
Always slipping from my hands
Sand’s a time of its own
Take your seaside arms and write the next line
Oh, I want the truth to be known
If you thought this was just obscure 1980s pop frippery you would be wrong. This is art, man.
According to Kemp, the song is full of coded messages to Clare Grogan, the winsome star of the whimsical 1981 Scottish indie film Gregory’s Girl (who doesn’t love a girl in a beret?).
“I’m still berated for the line ‘Take your seaside arms’ but it’s straight out of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which she had given me as a present – although in the book, it’s ‘seaside limbs’,” Kemp once revealed in an interview.
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