Dear 3CR,
Most years I have contributed to your request for financial
support naming Beyond the Barricades -
Save Albert Park, the programme I mostly hear and with which I mostly
agree. However I have some doubts about
some aspects of it that I am compelled by subconscious contemplation to write
about some of my thoughts.
Motor Racing is a Working Class sport and opposition to the
Grand Prix is a bourgeois attack on the low-cost entertainment of ordinary, people. In the same way the Baird Conservative
Government in NSW banned Grey-hound racing, which is the working man’s
equivalent of the upper class equestrian sports. Anyone can own and train a dog, but you need ‘room
for a pony’ as Mrs Bucket said on television.
With an ironic twist of logic, SAP pesents itself as the
enemy of the Ruling Class – the Big End of Town. Certainly, the Grand Prix like all the big,
international sporting events that Melbourne hosts there is participation by the
global power elite of wealth and title.
Motor racing, like horse racing attracts the remnants of the old
Aristocracy as well as Old Money and now days New Money too. Motor racing is a popular sport with Europe’s
Royal Princes, of which there are quite a few.
However, the great bulk of participants and spectators of
motor sports are working class people.
Again, anyone can own and race a car, though private racing is banned
from public roads, and the skills that underpin the sport include the Mechanical
Trades as much as the Engineering Professions.
The comparison with other Melbourne sporting events is ignored. We present the MCG as the ‘people’s ground’,
the ‘G’, and the vast majority of the stands are taken up by ‘people’, but it
is still the private ground of the Melbourne Cricket Club, an essentially
elitist organisation, though it is perhaps no longer run from the Melbourne and
other private men’s Clubs.
SAP should take pride in the unpopularity of the Melbourne
Grand Prix, because their opposition must have done a lot, from the start, to
politicise the issue and deter people from enthusiastically enjoying the event.
The program often refers to the lack of support as a reason for expecting it
might be terminated. In a similar way,
the lack of real ‘branding’ internationally for Melbourne is as much a reflection
of how Melbourne as a city has not taken its Grand Prix to heart and made it
uniquely ours, as we have done with Horse Racing, the Tennis and Cricket, as it
is an fault in the way the international media do not notice the locations of
events unless they impinge on their consciousness, because for the sports
media, it is the sport that matters, not what people are wearing or where the
event is occurring. For Melbourne to be
more than a mere lable, we need to make ourselves seen.
There is something rather humerous about Progressives,
Socialists or any opponents of Corporatjisation when they start to use the
jargon of Business and Free Enterprise, for example calling for a cost-benefit
analysis and producing figures that show the return is ‘unprofitable’. Such people, by definition do not understand
Business, and they only use these procedures to attack their class-enemies,
while their own practices, when in Government or in control of any
organisation, is to spend but mostly spend on administration of the spending
with no concept of cost-benefit as for them it is a question of need, not
benefit.
There is another problem with the present aim to ‘save
Albert Park’, and that is for whom? In
this present day, the sorts of people that I think inhabit 3CR would be
supporting all things Aboriginal, including the regeneration of Country. Albert Park, apart from the single Corroboree
Tree has obliterated ‘nature’from the park.
Like everywhere in Melbourne it is mowed lawns apart from tended
shrubberies and beds of mono-species, some of which are Australian hybrids,
including grasses, though they are not a ‘grassladn’. SAP works hand in glove with Parks Victoria
which is a colonial organisation charged with maintaining the Englis-style
public parks and public places. Every
year in early Spring, Melbourne comes to life with the new wild-flowers, but
within weeks every Council has been out and sprayed and killed all the local
indigenous plants that somehow survive as well as endemic plants that have
become naturalised in these parts. Left
to itself, we would live in a lush, verdant paradise, not the ‘sunburnt country’
that still forms the Australian colonial self-image we retain. We are so blind to our own cultural prejudices
that no one thinks that a Car Race is equally compatible or not with ‘Country’
as it is with a neatly tended, colonial park.
There is a similar distortion of purpose in wanting
Australia to become a Socialist Republic and ditch the Crown and our Australian
Monarchy. No one seems to notice that in
the Referendum at the end of last century, it was the Labor electorates that
overwealmingly voted to retain the Crown, and the bourgeois electorates that
voted to give themselves more power.
This is not the place to expound all the reasons why the post-modern,
Democratic Monarchy is the most stable and safest form of government, but also
ensures Equality and fairness without prejudice, and would do so even better in
Australia if we embraced the system we have and made it work for us, instead of
so many activists working to undermine it even though they have nothing worked
out to replace it.
Instead of setting up and pulling down the Gran Prix
infrastructure every year at great expense, it is not inconceivable that
facilities could be built that attract large crowds all year. It is one thing to complain that a
singnificant but small number of locals are deprived of their use of the Park
during the many months the Grand Prix takes, but it could be an entertainment
facility for a very large number of people throughout the calendar; of course
this does appropriate open space and parkland, but does it for public use.
SAP, as a program, does cover a lot more issues than the car
race in Albert Park, and fills an important place in the community activism the
is a big part of 3CR. As it is
presented, SAP’s Beyond the Bracades fits well into the Progressive mindset
that is most importantly given public voice through 3CR. Anti-Establishment movements always become
subsumed into the main-stram, till a new generation finds its original
voice. Think of designer torn-jeans, or
what is happening now with Hipster culture.
In the same sort of way, community causes become commercialised, or subverted
for other purposes. This is what is
happening with the Grand Prix, where opposition to an essentially Working Class
sport is opposed by ‘Polite Society’ and done so under the guise of left-wind
activism, for the park, for open space and for Economic Rationalism.
Ghe Grand Prix is a good example of Government secrecy, but
this is apparently endorsed as a general rule, and only becomes a problem with
the cause is one of class warfare. We
are all tol ready to throw the spotlight on the costs of Royal Tours, for
example, while the lurks and perks of Bureaucrats including luxury travel and accommodation
for international fact finding, for
example, are kept well out of public gaze.
There is a good argument for Open Government, but it is not served by
only being heard in a context like the Grand Prix.
The obsession with the cost of the race is also wrong. Money spent within our own community is not
money down the drain but money circulating within the Economy. Certainly fees and charges sent overseas is
equivalent to money down a hole, but this is not understood, for example the
recent dispute of our military uniforms that are manufactured overseas on the basis
that it costs less, but they ignore the Multiplier effect of money spent at
home compared to thrown away to foreigners.
Perhaps in this case there is also an element of the preference for
foreign suppliers of any persuasion over any local supplier from the Private
Sector, that pervades our Government Sector’s
purchasing power.
