Richardson: After 13 years, how much do we know?
It’s a funny thing.
When you get to my age (neither very old nor very young), changing priorities and conflicting loyalties mean you can devote genuine time to but a few people in your life.
And at some point you realise there are people you have known for well over a decade who have become, or have always been, relative strangers.
You see them regularly, personally and professionally; sometimes you see them every day. And yet you still don’t really know them at all.
We’ve collectively had this Labor Government in our lives for 13 years now; and, similarly, we still don’t really know them.
Like Eliza Doolittle, we’ve grown accustomed to Jay Weatherill’s face (we’ve even grown accustomed to Labor’s infamous ‘faceless men’) but it’s still unclear just what he represents, besides consensus.
Deliberately unclear, indeed. His well-worn “consult and decide” mantra makes it hard to say: “This is what we stand for!” Rather, it’s: “This is what we stand for, if it’s alright with you.”
Weatherill is, I think, a man of vision. But like other Labor men of vision before him, what is desirable and what is achievable can be difficult to reconcile.
We know the Premier wants to “keep building South Australia”. But we also know he’s got so little cash with which to do so he’s having to bump up our Emergency Services Levy bills to free up general revenue.
Hence, and henceforth, the Big (re-)Build is largely the purview of the private sector. The problem for SA is that it has never been a location adept at courting private capital. It is the investment equivalent of a dowdy spinster sitting alone at the bar waiting in vain for someone to buy them a drink.
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Thus, more often than not, it falls to Government to match its own money to its boastful mouth. In the case of the mooted courts precinct, Labor finally realised it was indeed cheaper (but still not cheap enough) to build the damn thing itself than it was to partner with private developers. And then there’s the Festival Plaza – the pinnacle of Labor’s “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” courtship with private investors.
"The risk we run is that North Terrace becomes like Victoria Square, that other great precinct-without-a-purpose; a thoroughfare rather than a destination. Much like Adelaide itself."
We’ve all seen the plans, courtesy of the Government’s meticulous media rollout (of which more later). Although “plans” might be too generous a term to describe what is effectively a vague artistic composite, a fanciful rendition designed to give life to the hyperbole. It’s all very “buzzwordy”: we hear of public money “unlocking” or “activating” private investment, the latter word-wankery putting in mind Paleo-preaching celeb-chef Pete Evans and his infamous “activated almonds”.
Speaking of nuts, the plaza is evidently set to be adorned with an oddly-suggestive collection of stone monuments, inspired, oddly, by Eyre Peninsula’s famously-phallic Murphy’s Haystacks. I’m not entirely sure what message this is intended to send; surely the design engineers aren’t trying to tell us this whole project is already doomed to be a cock-up?
And then there’s the people. They’re everywhere! They’re not real people, of course, just made-up cartoony people, superimposed on made-up cartoony blueprints of buildings no more authentic than the people who surround them (they won’t in all likelihood be blue and gold, for instance).
The artists have gone to enough trouble to actually give these people nuance: they smile and chat, some aimlessly amble, others purposefully sprint, one sports turned-up jeans, another hipster-green slacks. Every element is designed to make us feel that this will be a precinct of life and, yes, vibrancy; a multi-cultural, multi-generational, multi-purpose space, whose inhabitants mill contentedly beneath the shade of fairy-light adorned trees and phallus-shaped monuments.
Whether we ever get that many people milling around is questionable; perhaps once a week in winter after a football match, but only passing through on their way to another part of town, or out of town altogether.
The precinct remains haphazard; an office tower plonked between Parliament House and the casino’s heritage frontage was the price of “activating” Walker’s millions. And the workers in that office tower will be able to gaze wistfully across the road and down North Terrace, where neither public nor private capital is yet capable of enticing tenants (sorry, “unlocking” tenants).
But these office-workers represent new life, we’re told, new patronage. Strangely, there have long been public service tenants a few doors down in the Riverside Centre building, and yet the existing Hajek Plaza has remained underutilised and unloved.
A few doors down again, we will have a new hospital, making the northern edge of the western end of North Terrace the best darn medical/business/hospitality/entertainment/gaming/parliament precinct … well, anywhere!
Effectively we squibbed the hospital debate, because there was never much discussion about the broader precinct. To the extent that there was, it was only ever a Clayton’s debate about whether to build a stand-alone footy stadium there instead, which was never going to happen because the sod was all but turned on the Commonwealth-funded SAHMRI building next door.
The risk we run is that North Terrace becomes like Victoria Square, that other great precinct-without-a-purpose; a thoroughfare rather than a destination. Much like Adelaide itself.
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"After 13 years we still don’t know much about the Labor Government we’ve re-elected three times."
If there was a sign the Government lacked confidence in its Plaza compromise, it was in the manner of its announcement – a retreat to the Rann-era media drop to the Murdoch press, with the confident expectation that the rest of Adelaide’s media would be mollified by a more elaborate “fly-through” video handed out the following day, and a subsequent “announcement” about the Festival Centre upgrade.
As a vested interest, I have to be careful here; after all, it’s the Government’s information to do with as its strategists deem fit. But then, I wasn’t the one telling anyone who would listen this time last year that “We’ll never lift a finger for the Advertiser after they tried to destroy us at the election”.
The concept of the “drop” is nothing new and, to be fair, the Weatherill Government is far from its most seasoned practitioner. It’s still standard practice in Canberra, with News Corp and Fairfax taking turns to trumpet a Government line, which is then recycled and augmented throughout the day by content-deprived news services working to increasingly-tight deadlines.
It’s rarely questioned, which is peculiar, since if the warring TV stations ever banded together to collectively declare they would no longer follow news items gifted to print competitors, I’ve no doubt the practice would subside, if not cease, and the servile culture it engenders would dissipate somewhat.
Is it really that bad?
Perhaps not, but if we concede that the medium is the message, the information drip-feed is an effective tool for political parties to foster an unquestioning media culture. It reminds me of that speech by Albert Brooks’ character Aaron Altman in the film Broadcast News, wherein he bemoans that his colleague and rival, smooth-talking but dim-witted anchorman Tom Grunich, is in fact the Devil.
“What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around?” he argues.
“He will be attractive! He’ll be nice and helpful. He’ll get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation. He’ll never do an evil thing … he will just bit by little bit lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit.”
That’s what the media drip-feed does to our industry; it makes us a little bit less inquisitive. A little more willing to trade off scrutiny for exclusivity.
It lowers our standards. Just that tiny little bit.
After 13 years we still don’t know much about the Labor Government we’ve re-elected three times. Mike Rann once described a budget razor gang notion to close the Repat Hospital as “dopey”, assuring voters that “The Repat is here to stay, (it) will never, ever be closed by a Labor Government”. As of this week, that dopey idea is Labor policy.
We’ve seen entrenched opposition to nuclear generation and storage, tax reform and even time zone change overturned, albeit by consultation – “this is what we stand for now, if it’s alright with you”.
The only constant in that 13 years has been a strategic predilection for spin, an innate determination to control the dissemination of information.
That much we do know.
Tom Richardson is a senior reporter at InDaily. His political column is published on Fridays.
