Today, readers comment on heritage issues for the park lands Women’s and Children’s Hospital, another rate rise, affordable housing and football power plays.
Commenting on the story: Heritage hurdle for city hospital
Why don’t they build over the tracks, they could use it as park land. It could join together the two hospitals better with green space in between.
It would add land to the park lands, offset the ugly tracks that cut through the middle and make the area more attractive by creating more walkable space. At the moment it is just the footpath on the bridge. – Shane Williams
Seriously! Utopia, Series 1 Episode 2 – Protected Species. We have officially moved into living a farce. Just waiting to hear about a ‘rare and protected grass’ to be found at the site now. – James Rock
Commenting on the story: Christmas rate rise locked in for mortgage holders
This rate rise defied logic. Petrol prices are up 30%, which is passed on in the price of everything needing transport – or in other words, all goods, essential and otherwise.
The RBA Governor says that “inflation is weighing on people’s real incomes” – what about $1100 in rate rises? Household consumption growth is “weak”, so the inflationary pressure must be coming from somewhere else, and lifting interest rates won’t affect that somewhere else. – Tony Dawkins
Commenting on the opinion piece: SA must find the key to unlock affordable housing
What is this obsession that government and agencies have with affordable housing? What don’t they understand? People need affordable long term rentals, built by government and administered by government.
This is what the SA Housing Trust used to do, as opposed to their current role of selling off public housing stock to private enterprise. It’s not hard to work out, if the people that are supposed to work this out take their collective heads out of the sand bucket. – Edward Jaeger
The State needs to maximise the use of federal funding for affordable homes. At the lower end of the affordability spectrum, there is clearly an urgent need to provide for those with low incomes and also the homeless in South Australia.
Here is an example of what can be done at minimal cost to construct affordable housing. In Ilford, Essex, on the eastern outskirts of London, the Malachi project was developed to provide accommodation for the disadvantaged. The local council, in conjunction with the Salvation Army, developed a housing concept utilising shipping containers.
The result is quite remarkable. The 3-storey block of modular one bedroom units is impressively constructed and finished. The land was made available on a short term lease by the council. The units are designed to be deconstructed and reassembled at anther location when required. – Kevin Hill
Commenting on the story: SANFL eyes return to Football Park with $27m facilities investment
The gall of SANFL’s new Football Park bid is breathtaking. The statement from its CEO Darren Chandler has similarities with the rhetoric of Crows chairman John Olsen over the Crows concurrent bid to take over the community-owned Thebarton Oval precinct. It’s all about “community benefits” they parrot.
In 1973, the SANFL acquired the 23ha Football Park site at West Lakes, primarily for the use of the SANFL competition and its affiliated clubs. In the following years, AFL clubs the Crows (from 1991) and Port Power (from 1997) played all of their home games at Football Park. SANFL controlled both AFL licences until 2014.
SANFL was firmly attached to the taxpayer teat for millions of taxpayer dollars in the ensuing years as it developed the precinct, culminating in its sale in November 2014 for a windfall $71 million tax-free benefit to the SANFL.
For over 40 years SANFL extracted tens of millions of dollars in tax-free revenue from its Football Park stadium operations.
The Football Park precinct was re-zoned by the Weatherill Government to facilitate the sale. A condition of the sale excluded the main Football Park playing oval, which the SANFL President and SANFL Commission Chairman John Olsen revealed had been leased to the Adelaide Football Club (the Crows) until 2048. At the expiration of the lease, the land is to vest in the care, control and management of the Charles Sturt Council for “community open-space” land use.
As a condition of the Crows lease, the SANFL has been paying for the maintenance and upkeep of the Oval to AFL standards since 2014. In 2015 Olsen disclosed it cost the SANFL $1.3 million the previous year, whereas the Crows estimated its value to the club as $2 million annually!
SANFL transferred control of the Crows and Port Power AFL licences in 2014 for a reported payback deal to the SANFL of up to $19 million over a 15 year period. It still received a sub-licence for the purposes of playing football at the Adelaide Oval, despite staging only a few SANFL finals matches at the oval annually since 2014.
Yet SANFL has received millions of tax-free dollars from the joint venture revenue-sharing arrangement with SACA. The Adelaide Oval operations are managed by the private Adelaide Oval SMA Limited (AOSMA) company. SANFL did not contribute a single dollar to the more than $650 million tax-payer funded redevelopment of the publicly–owned Adelaide Oval.
Currently the Crows are continuing with their plans to take over the community-owned Thebarton Oval precinct for their new headquarters, the negotiations for which it had been secretly involved in for several years. This contradicts the November 2020 SANFL plans announced by its chief executive Darren Chandler of state, federal and local government funding contributions of up to $21 million to create “South Australia’s second home of football “ for SANFL at Thebarton Oval.
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The interests and links between SANFL and the Crows remain intertwined and behind closed doors. An inquiry into the “arrangements” between SANFL, the Crows, the City of Charles Sturt and the City of West Torrens councils, and any state government involvement is clearly and urgently called for. But who could be entrusted to conduct such an inquiry? – Philip Groves
Commenting on Your views and Showdown: Adelaide’s traffic grind revealed in new data
I take exception regarding the Adelaide traffic gridlock response. Cathy Chua obviously does not understand the point I was making, nor does she seem to grasp that a lot of folk work hours where public transport isn’t practical solution to their travel needs.
Synchronizing traffic so it flows as one, permits pedestrians to cross busy roads. Traffic flow is everything in beating gridlock. – James Baker
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