https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/august/1596204000/lech-blaine/art-class-war#mtr
PR complaining about Vlandy not having success with Governments and power brokers...?
How about this...
How decades after Murdoch and Packer destroyed the popular appeal of a game created for the masses, Peter V’landys is putting rugby league back on top
Peter V’landys is a man with a plan to make Australia sane again. His straightforward vaccine for the financial stress and social isolation of COVID-19? The Greatest Game of All: rugby league, which, with his unapologetically bogan persona, he pronounces
rugba league, a sure-fire source of amusement for smug southerners.
“An Australia without rugba league is not Australia,” declared V’landys at a press conference on March 14.
V’landys is the freshly crowned chairman of the sport’s governing body, the Australian Rugby League Commission, as well as the long-serving chief executive of Racing New South Wales. He has a twang more associated with tradies, the legacy of a working-class upbringing in Wollongong with migrant parents from the Greek island of Kythera, where his grandfather rode a donkey for a living. In Australia, his parents worked 12-hour shifts and personally skipped meals to put food on the table for three kids.
As a tribute to his blue-collar roots, V’landys dresses like a suburban justice of the peace who’s stumbled into the Supreme Court, with scuffed shoes, boot-cut trousers and untucked shirts – a subtle
f**k you to the Establishment he keeps running rings around.
“The concern I have,” says the league chairman, “is more people are being affected by mental illness than by the coronavirus.”
This isn’t V’landys’s first rodeo, or, indeed, his first public-relations campaign triggered by a plague. In the dying months of John Howard’s political supremacy, the little-known racing executive sought to rescue the industry from equine influenza by seeking a $110 million bailout – he got $235 million. His style of megaphone negotiation also clinched another $42 million sweetener for Racing NSW when the Catholic Church, led by then Archbishop of Sydney George Pell, wanted to use Randwick Racecourse for Pope Benedict’s visit on World Youth Day in 2008.
“Mr Pell is a bully,” V’landys said at the time. “He’s refused any meeting with us because he realises he’s not in a position of strength, because he’s forcing his strength on someone who doesn’t want to comply.”
The wins kept coming. With Racing NSW he took gambling companies to the High Court and received an estimated billion-dollar dividend over a decade, then used the influx of money to launch an all-out war on Victoria, the superpower of Australian racing. Long story short, V’landys masterminded the richest turf horserace in the world – The Everest – to occur on the same day as Melbourne’s Caulfield Cup.
Victoria was home to “the most dreary city on Earth with the worst weather”, he complained to
The Daily Telegraph, “yet NSW bows and scrapes to it all the time.”
Not anymore. The inaugural $10 million Everest race in 2017 was a smash hit, attracting 33,000 fans and more than $50 million in gambling revenue. To coronate his success, V’landys attempted to use the Sydney Opera House as a billboard to launch the second year. A public outcry was led by Nine newspaper columnist and popular historian Peter FitzSimons, prompting a petition signed by 300,000.
FitzSimons grew up on an orange orchard before boarding at Sydney’s prestigious Knox Grammar. Sitting on the lounge in his North Sydney home, with panoramic views of the dusk-lit harbour, he’s apoplectic.
“To put f**king
betting ads on it?” he says, of V’landys’s plan to project promotions onto the Opera House. “That is a desecration of a work of art!”
According to V’landys, the saturation negativity from Sydney’s loud “elites” provided $25 million of free PR for The Everest, leading to a record crowd in 2018 of 40,578, with betting revenue exceeding $100 million. He declared that the Melbourne Cup – held on the first Tuesday of November for 150 years – should be rescheduled to accommodate Racing NSW.