Gather Round people and prepare to be annoyed
As South Australia basks in the glow of our festival of footy, Matthew Abraham asks some annoying questions.
If there was a Gather Round of the Annoying, it’d be a crowded field competing for the inaugural trophy.
Inconsiderate tradies who think the neighborhood needs to listen to their inane doof-doof music choices so loud they have to shout at each other to be heard above their own dopey racket would obviously be in the top 10 contenders. You’re at a worksite, not a rave party, groovers.
Whoever devised the automated email from the Adelaide City Council asking me to rate my customer experience on paying a $58 parking fine is a finalist. Memo Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith: I didn’t enjoy it at all. Pass it on.
Premier Peter Malinauskas and Opposition Leader David Speirs both make the annoying leaderboard. Space prohibits me from going into too much detail.
Influencers with lips so pumped up that they look like they’re trying to eat the inner tube from a tractor tyre obviously deserve a mention.
But none of these holds a candle to the Visiting AFL God.
Wise men descended on us from the fabled East, not bringing gifts in the real sense of the word but granting us a thing called “rights” in return for unknown millions in our hard-earned, taxpayer cash.
And so, we get to the AFL Gather Round and Gillon McLachlan, annual salary currently a secret but $1.74 million when last reported four years ago.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Sounds a bit light on to tell the truth, because the Gather Round has turned out to be one of those nice little earners that have become such a specialty for the AFL.
The Age reports this week that the AFL will reap a “major windfall” of close to $80 million in cash and non-capital investment from the SA Government to stage the Gather Round for the next three years. The Premier’s office refutes this but remain coy on the precise costing.
The inaugural Gather Round was allegedly McLachlan’s swan song before retiring as AFL supremo and, if so, he’s going out on a high.
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We don’t how much last weekend cost taxpayers but estimates range from a conservative $14 million to The Age’s figure of between $16 to $20 million, from the $40 million fund set up to attract big gigs to our state.
To put that into context, that’ll easily cover the collected salaries of the AFL executive group, reported at $10.57 million in 2019.
Our Premier says an “optionality” is built into the three-year deal, whatever that might mean.
It’s claimed the event generated $86 million in spending from locals and interstate visitors. Don’t ask how this is worked this out because it’s an inexact science.
Is that a good return on investment? Hard to tell if you don’t know the precise number taxpayers kicked in, but the hype surrounding Gather Round means it has passed the point of no return.
The Premier, displaying an annoying modesty deficit, has declared it a stunning success and that’s that.
As they say in the Catholic Church, Roma locuta; causa finita est – Rome has spoken, the cause is finished.
"It won’t be lost on anyone, certainly not the Liberal Opposition, that the three-year extension means the Gather Round will be in full flight for the next election in March 2026"
The four-day festival of the boot was a success and a personal triumph for Premier Malinauskas. From a standing start, the government did a brilliant job in turning a vague and untested concept into a popular and exciting reality.
If only the same public service brains who organised it could be seconded to fix ambulance ramping, we’d be getting somewhere.
We deserved to keep it here and here it will stay for the next three years. It will get bigger and better each year.
It won’t be lost on anyone, certainly not the Liberal Opposition, that the three-year extension means the Gather Round will be in full flight for the next election in March 2026.
The Premier’s blokey footy bromance with McLachlan – or “Gil” as he calls him – is best viewed on an empty stomach.
It has icky echoes of former Labor Premier Mike Rann’s buddying up to champion cyclist, Lance Armstrong, during the Tour Down Under days.
Armstrong, since unmasked as a drug cheat, liked to use “Ranny” when talking about his new best friend, an embarrassing familiarity at the time, and even more so in hindsight.
But none of this is annoying enough to propel the AFL boss to the top of the Gather Round of the Annoying rankings.
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He is doing what a top sports administrator is supposed to do – promoting his brand of footy to a wider audience in a fun and engaging way while bringing home a nice fat paycheque for the AFL.
Instead, what sent my Annoying Index off the scale was the Adelaide-raised McLachlan’s assessment that his old hometown had “grown to be a proper city”.
“I think if you walk around here today, which I have, you look at the development on the River (Torrens), you feel, I think, it’s the pride through the city,” he told The Advertiser.
“I just feel it’s grown to be a proper city that actually has an infrastructure that goes with that, a confidence that goes with that, and an aspiration that goes with that.”
This is supposed to be a compliment but it’s an unwitting, absurdly patronising thing to say about us as a city and a state.
If we’re a proper city now, because we have a few tall buildings and a footy stadium on the banks of the Torrens, what were we before? Loserville?
As for sports infrastructure, Labor in this state has a track record of trying not to build it.
Premier Rann was solidly in the “No” camp when then Liberal leader Martin Hamilton-Smith first proposed a new city stadium to house AFL games.
With Hamilton-Smith’s plan fast gaining popularity, the Rann team sought to derail it in May 2008 with a $100 million cheque to upgrade the stands at the woeful Footy Park at West Lakes.
Those stands have been bulldozed into crusher dust now, along with the 100 big ones, courtesy of the taxpayer.
In last year’s election campaign, Labor plastered Stobie poles across the town with posters bagging the Marshall Government’s promise to build a new indoor multi-purpose sports and entertainment stadium on, you guessed it, the banks of the Torrens.
The so-called “$700 million basketball stadium” became central to Labor’s campaign theme that the Liberals had the wrong priorities. Malinauskas promised to plough the $700 million earmarked for the stadium into fixing ramping and other problems in the health system.
Now, for the Gather Round, he’s agreed to McLachlan’s demands to match dollar-for-dollar upgrades to rural and suburban ovals, especially a new Barossa Valley oval.
Sports infrastructure doesn’t make a town “proper”. If anything, the Gather Round matches at the Norwood and Mount Barker ovals prove you don’t need mega-stadiums to stage a successful footy carnival.
Adelaide has always been a “proper” city because of the people who live here and who stick it out and love, laugh and fight through good times and bad, more often bad than good over the last 30 years. We’ve always been proud of our city and our state.
If the Visiting AFL Gods have only just stumbled on this, that says more about them than it does about us.
Malinauskas, Speirs and McLachlan all might argue I should be near the top of the annoying list too, and that’s a fair cop.
But a journalist who doesn’t annoy the bigwigs isn’t doing their job.
Or as Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle put it: “If you’re a political journalist who has regular contact with people in power, and your analysis is always aligned with prevailing orthodoxy, then you’re not really a journalist, you’re a courtier.”
Annoying, isn’t it?
Matthew Abraham’s political column is published on Fridays. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.
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