THE ADELAIDE 500 is now an election issue.

At least, if you talk to the Liberal party.

The South Australian opposition has targeted the government-owned event in it’s latest push to unseat the incumbent Jay Weatherill-lead Labor party, suggesting that should they win power they would spend an additional $1m a year on shortening the build-time of the Adelaide Parklands circuit.

Liberal leader Steven Marshall told Adelaide daily The Advertiser last Sunday that his party would spend the cash to remove four weeks from the current build time of 25 weeks.

Meanwhile – in another instance of ‘why the hell do we pay these people to argue?’ – the government quickly added their riposte’, telling the ‘tiser that the build time was already 20 weeks and that the Liberals ‘failed to grasp the basics of policy making’, amongst other he-said, she-said rubbish.

Aside from highlighting the fact that Marshall’s only policy is to attack Labor and Weatherill is on the back foot harder than Steve Smith on a fifth-day turning wicket in Bangalore, it’s hard to decide if it’s a positive or a negative that the that the event is even election issue in the first place.

On the plus side, it’s PR hit for the race and proof of how significant it is as a tourism draw card for the state – hence the bipartisan support is has so far enjoyed across its history.

On the negative, it’s a PR hit for the race that draws it into a remarkably horrible election campaign where it seems South Australia has three options, all of which quite remarkably seem absolutely terrible.

Hence the events of last Sunday:

“Currently, the erection and dismantling of the Adelaide 500 takes way too long,” Marshall told the paper, in full knowledge that while the seat of Adelaide is Liberal-held, its grip is flimsy at best and could change quicker than Barnaby’s stories about his new missus.

“This is a great park, and at the moment it’s a construction site for too much of the year.”

Obviously, Marshall also failed to note that outside of the Adelaide 500, the Adelaide Motorsport Festival and the occasional two-wheeled event for fans of cycling, Victoria Park is a mostly empty, broadly unused and wide-open section of the park lands with fewer trees and fewer uses.

Still, when have facts gotten in the way of a good story?

Time and time again proposals have been brought forward to develop the park, including several for a permanent pit lane / grandstand structure for the ‘500. These proposals are regularly shut down thanks generally to vocal campaigning from the same bunch of <redacted> who live within a few blocks of the park but probably never go to it.

Incidentally, they started landscaping part of it a few years ago – with trees and plants and paving with nary a Grandstand to be had – but then stopped half way, probably when someone complained the trees were the ‘wrong colour’ or something.

The bigger issue here is that the fact the race was even brought up underlines its inherent fragility amongst the broader spectrum of South Australian events.

For much of its 20-year history the event was somewhat independently managed by the South Australian Motorsport Board, and in a rare sign of bipartisanship (the Liberals kicked the event off in 1998, only to lose power to Labor three years later) the State Government of the day has since tipped in a bulk of the operating income.

However, in recent years the board was shut down and the event brought under the auspices of the South Australian Tourism Commission, making it the responsibility of the Government department rather than a more independent operating body.

Our friends over at the outstandingly brilliant AdelaideGPrix.com wrote a column about such things last week that we highly recommend you read.

In a nutshell, it means the event is more open than ever to being lumped in the same political rhetoric as the debates on public transport, lowering housing costs, creating jobs or possibly, one day, a reliable supply of power.

Which can’t be a good thing, especially given the rough treatment the event has been given in the press recently.

Still, it makes for nervous times for those who are actively involved in the event and for those who love it – for those things that get drawn through the nightmarish political process rarely come out bright and shiny at the other end.

At the moment the Adelaide 500 continues to enjoy support from both parties (and the security of a long-term contract with Supercars to back it up) but that could change in a heartbeat in a Trump-like attitude swing in the way people vote here.

Which, facing the candidates we currently have, is not as ludicrous a proposition one may imagine.

Yes, you’d be mad to be the government that kills an event that does so much good for the state for the estimated cost of $10m a year and either 20 (or 25 – depending on who you talk to) weeks of irritation in a parkland few people use.

But then again, the same party that kickstarted the Adelaide 500 also funded the construction of a one-way freeway in South Australia in the mid-1990s, proof that crazy decisions are well within the remit of even the most supportive, nurturing, forward-thinking government of-the-day.

Still, you can’t help but think that, had the event still been independently-run rather than a government plaything, there would be a much smaller chance of it becoming such a political issue that News Ltd would use it as their Sunday morning lead on their main news website in Adelaide.

In the end, we’ll never know. Perhaps its an over reaction and there really is nothing else to talk about.

Which reasonably sums up the state of play in South Australian politics, come to think of it.

One day I’m sure there will be a government who decides they’d rather spend their $10m on something other than a car race in the parklands, and then we’ll have a real election issue.

But I do not think that time is now and my message to all the parties here is simple.

Keep the Adelaide 500 away from your meddling political fingers and let it be what it is; a great way to promote the state of South Australia and a brilliant, vibrant, buoyant feature on the Adelaide event schedule.

It is what the event does best and what the event can continue to do for years to come with sensible management and sensible decision making that is not just tied to whoever gets in to power.

WORDS: Richard Craill
IMAGE: Mark Walker