Unpalatable truths on stadiums facing both Labor and Liberals
By Roy Masters
11 December 2018 — 6:00pm
Neville Wran once said, “Sometimes you get things so wrong, you have to eat a shit sandwich. It tastes bloody awful but it’s good for you.”
The former NSW Premier made the statement during an internal Labor Party squabble over admitting MLCs to caucus meetings, but Rodney Cavalier quoted it in the context of sporting stadiums.
It was November, 2001 and Cavalier, a former minister in the Wran and Unsworth Governments, had been the chair of the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust for only a few months.
The Sydney Football Stadium had been operational for 13 years and the Olympic Stadium at Homebush in use for only two years.
Cavalier made some frank admissions to a business planning forum organised by the Trust and focussed on the future of stadiums.
Referring to the NSW Labor cabinet which agreed to build the SFS, he said, “It does not seem to have occurred to this cabinet to ponder why it was that a Trust which was headed by a serving cabinet minister (Industrial Relations, Pat Hills) and why a cabinet which had a minister for sport who had represented his country in three sports (Michael Cleary) decided that Sydney did not require a stadium with a seating capacity greater than 42,000. Or why no one asked how Sydney could ever hope to fill a stadium of any greater size on a sufficiently regular basis so as to meet the costs of opening such a large stadium.”
Cavalier was having a shot at himself as well. He was also a member of the cabinet which made the decision to cap the SFS capacity at 42,000. As Cavalier says today, “The original plan had it at 30,000. Forty two thousand seemed too big.” An Olympic stadium was not on any agenda.
Given the voting numbers on the Australian Olympic Committee back then, Melbourne had a greater chance of hosting a second Olympics than Sydney had of staging its first.
Towards the end of his 2001 address, Cavalier made reference to the Homebush stadium, built for the opening ceremony of the 2000 Olympics but whose crowds declined sharply afterwards because patrons needed telescopes to see the action and some needed Google Earth to find it.
“By the ANZAC weekend of 2000 (a badly attended NRL double-header), no one who knows their sport was pretending it (Homebush) was the place to view football,” Cavalier said.
The point about all this? It’s bloody hard to make the right decisions about stadiums.
The AFL, whom some in the media deem the gold standard of sports, built a stadium at Waverley because it was the geographical centre of metropolitan Melbourne. Echoes of Homebush? But fans hated it because it was in a rain belt and not well served by public transport.
But the AFL did extract a better deal from the MCG Trust. They then sold the land, negotiated with the Victorian Government to build a new stadium at Docklands in the CBD and now own it, courtesy of a taxpayer funded grant conditional on playing the AFL grand final at the MCG for the next 40 years.
Shortly after the SFS was built, the NSW Greiner Government considered selling it to the Australian Rugby League who would relocate there, funding the purchase by the sale of the Phillip Street headquarters of the code. Given the paltry $15.5m the code received from a developer for the sale of the Phillip Street premises in 2013, buying the SFS wouldn’t have been such a bad idea.
However, the incumbent NSW Government now want to pull the SFS down and build a new one on the same site. Opposition leader Michael Daley says that if elected, he will not spend a cent on demolition, or reconstruction.
The Liberal Government will probably lose the March election if the SFS is demolished and Labor’s “hospitals and schools” pledge will mean NSW continues to be the sick man of Australian sport, certainly in terms of modern facilities.
Cavalier is sympathetic, saying, “It’s very hard to predict the future and even harder to control it.”
But decisions should be made on commercial realities, not politics. The existing SFS is rarely sold out, while cricket and the Swans know they have no future at Homebush. The market is saying Sydney needs a smaller SFS and a rectangular stadium at Homebush.
Yet the Liberal government headed by Premier Gladys Berejiklian prefers a 45,000-seat SFS and Daley a hole in the ground at Moore Park, while both parties will leave Homebush circular, ignoring the fact 85 percent of the future sporting content in Sydney is played on a rectangular field.
Someone will soon have to take a bite of Wran’s shit sandwich.
