COP that, ADL500 | Uni’s green hydrogen dreams | Freeman sprints into Adelaide
This week, InSider checks for clashes in the events calendar, rewinds to better days for hydrogen and outs a minister who doesn’t care where the money comes from.
Speed into COP31
An event of a scale just second to the Olympic Games could take over Adelaide next November, should Australia get its way.
ICYMI: Australia is bidding to host international climate change conference COP in Adelaide next year.
It’ll see tens of thousands of delegates from across the globe descend on the city to chat policy, problems and solutions in November 2026.
The state government is frothing to secure this event.
It’ll be the jewel in Premier Peter Malinauskas’ events policy crown should he lock it in, alongside the likes of LIV Golf, Gather Round, the Adelaide Fringe and ADL500.
Wait a minute… November… Isn’t there a certain very loud car race happening in the CBD then?
That’s right. COP would clash directly with one of Mali’s favourite events: the ADL500 – now called the bp Adelaide Grand Final.
“We have turned our minds to the relative incompatibility of the ADL500 and COP,” the Premier told a crowd at the Adelaide Economic Development Agency 2025 Business Summit this week.
“Different crowds…
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“We’ve factored that in and Supercars have been very supportive of that.”
Whether the Supercars event moves months (yet again) is yet to be seen, but InSider agrees: the two events are “relatively incompatible”, just as the ADL500 is “relatively incompatible” with the CBD generally, but that’s a gripe for another day.
Adelaide University didn’t get the memo
InSider feels a little bit bad for making fun of Adelaide University about this but when have we ever let the feelings of marketers get in the way of a good laugh (we’re looking at you Trev the Bee, and whoever cooked you up in a lab).
Again at the AEDA Summit, InSider was treated to an address from the Adelaide University chief marketing officer Dr Benjamin Grindlay, who has the exciting task of selling the merged institution to the world.
InSider has no issue with what Dr Grindlay said, rather the contents of a video played directly before his presentation.
You can watch the same video below for context, which tells the tale about the rationale of the momentous merger and looks back at some major achievements of South Australia, which was the first to recognise women’s voting rights, the first to ban single-use plastics and introduced the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975.
A young student – we assume – then pops up and asks some questions: “What if the next space race took off from our state? What if Whyalla powered the world with clean, green hydrogen? What if two of the state’s leading universities came together to create a global university for the future?”
Wait, rewind… Did InSider hear that correctly? “What if Whyalla powered the world with clean, green hydrogen?”
What if someone told Adelaide University that the dream of Whyalla producing green hydrogen was dead, buried, never to return?
What if Adelaide University hired someone to edit the video again?
What if we invented a time machine to go back to 2017 to never let Sanjeev Gupta buy the Whyalla Steelworks?
Look, editing a video to remove that Whyalla mention is probably a bit difficult, but with just seven months until the end the year and the formal commencement of Adelaide University, it might be worth it?
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In any case, it had InSider chuckling at the AEDA summit, even if no one else was…
We all love ‘Cathy’
There are moments that define a nation and Cathy Freeman winning the 400 metres at the Sydney 2000 Olympics is one of those. As Bruce McAveney said on that day “What a legend, what a champion!”
But for Catherine – yes we dubbed her ‘Cathy’ in perfect Aussie tradition of shortening names – another memorable and more terrifying moment was lighting the cauldron at the opening ceremony.
She told the SA Sports Awards yesterday that on that infamous day, when the mechanism famously failed, that for more than two terrifying minutes only she, a camera man, the orchestra conductor and the event manager knew that things had gone terribly wrong.
“I was trained to race. You don’t train for these moments,” Catherine told the crowd.
“A voice in my ear told me ‘we have a slight technical problem, nothing that can’t be fixed’ and then the next thing I hear is this guy swearing, he’s swearing!”
As the conductor kept the music playing, they told Catherine to turn around and acknowledge the crowd, and then do it again, and again.
“Oh my god, I wouldn’t put anyone in that situation. The drama had started and I hadn’t even started racing,” she said.
Quote of the week
InSider would’ve ignored this but Planning Minister Nick Champion said he “hoped the media don’t report on that” and InSider was the only media at this event and everyone turned around and stared at InSider as a result which was embarrassing and that was a bit mean of him, so we’re doing it now.
Planning Minister Nick Champion doesn’t care where the money comes from to fund his sprawling housing ambitions, he told a crowd at CEDA’s Addressing the Housing Crisis forum yesterday.
A fiery Champion – on a panel with Workskil Australia CEO Nicole Dwyer, City of Playford CEO Sam Green and UniSA Professor Chris Leishman – backed in his government’s focus on bringing on supply to the housing market.
“I get a bit frustrated sometimes, because people want to have a tax debate instead of a housing debate,” he said.
“If you look at other jurisdictions like Canada which don’t have the same taxation arrangements as us that have exactly the same appreciation of prices as us…
“You can have the tax debate and I’m the only person in the room who actually stood for election, two elections, to get rid of negative gearing and to halve the capital gains tax discounts. Pretty hard elections. We lost both of them. So we can have that debate again – wasn’t that much fun.
“We’re here to talk about housing. If we want to talk about housing and designing cities, that’s what we should do. Where the money comes from, I don’t care. That’s Treasury’s job. I hope the media don’t report on that.”
Too bad, Champ! Unfortunately for you, the Streisand effect is real.
