A couple of related ironies arise out of the Bruce Stadium fiasco.
The first is that the very people now baying for Kate Carnell’s blood are the very people who generally support large government involvement in the provision of infrastructure. They want the Government to spend taxpayers’ money creating and subsidising things for working people to enjoy and use. The “”what about the workers?” group should be applauding the provision of $45 million of taxpayers’ money on a stadium for the ordinary punters to watch the workingman’s football.
Secondly, we have the irony of a Government that has lauded the private sector, user pays, corporate sponsorship, paying your way, balancing the books and the general quantification of all activity in terms of the almighty dollar. And yet it has produced a huge stadium almost totally propped up by public money. The economic rationalists of the ACT Liberal Government have produced a piece of public infrastructure on a grand Keynesian scale.
You can rationalise those inconsistencies by divorcing the question of what was done from the question of how was it done.
You can bay for blood not because a big government project was done but because the Government should have told us upfront that large amounts of public money would be spent so Canberra (and its Chief Minister) can bask in the glory of the Olympics.
The trouble is that governments of both persuasions have created a new environment of public finance. Gone are the days when a government could proudly announce it was going to build something — to create something in the public interest, with cost as a secondary consideration. Ben Chifley got on with the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Malcolm Fraser – who led a conservative government – built the AIS and hired the people to run it. He also started New Parliament House.
Nowadays everything has got to pay for itself. The private sector has to finance and sponsor things. How much will it cost, is the incessant cry. As a result governments concoct fanciful projections to meet these expectations. They tell the voters that it will not cost them much.
But the reality underlying this new public finance environment stays the same. Big infrastructure projects require a lot of Government money in one form or another or they will not get done. That is why we have government – so that we can collectively create things that would otherwise not be created because they do not turn a buck, particularly when culture and sport are involved – Opera Houses, sporting stadiums and so on.
Governments should stop pretending.
This is the real sin of the Carnell Government on Bruce, the V8 race and the Futsal slab – the pretence that you can get something for nothing because the “”private sector” will finance it, or increased economic activity will finance it. They won’t. If the private sector thought for a moment that it could really finance a project it would not want the government anywhere near it.
But politicians are still addicted to basking in the glory of public works. Look at any major building or bridge anywhere in Australia and on it you will find a plaque with one or more politicians cited as having done the official opening. These days, though, they want the glory of the public works without the opprobrium of spending large sums of public money creating them. It is impossible because it is an information age, society is more economically literate, the media has more economic commentators and legislation requires more checks and balances.
So why not be open in the first place and realistically state what the cost is? Because people would then ask questions immediately (rather than after an election or two) about whether they wanted lots of hospital beds, schools, bicycle paths or would they prefer a giant stadium.
Perhaps this is why governments don’t last a long time these days. Their pretences catch up with them more quickly.
Smarter long-term politics would be to be more open. Re-election and good administration can be compatible. Commercial-in-confidence is fine during a tender process, but after that let the public know. If the public is brought into the picture sooner they will have a greater appreciation of the difficulties facing politicians as they order priorities and decide what will be done publicly and what will be done by the private sector.
But pretending through some magic costless private-sector smoke and whistles that you can have Olympic soccer AND have the schools and hospital beds is bound to come to grief. The cake is finite politicians may as well be up front about it.