Dear 3CR,

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.