Better uses for our dollars than another MCG upgrade

WHAT would you think of a family down the road who threw out their still-working colour television and spent three grand on a two-metre plasma while their kids suffered from rotten teeth?

"We need to take the kids to the dentist," they tell you, "but we just can't afford it."

Our state government is like this. It is spending $30 million of our money on an "upgrade" of the MCG's Great Southern Stand. This stand is all of 20 years old, you see, and apparently it needs work not that football supporters are staying away from it in droves or complaining about how old and substandard it is.

The upgrade will cost a total of $55 million, with the Melbourne Cricket Club chipping in $20 million of their members' money. They will be improving:

Food and beverage areas, concourses and toilets.

Entry points to the stadium, ensuring a more streamlined ticketing process.

Function rooms and sports bars to provide improved viewing areas, similar to those offered in the Northern Stand.

Audio-visual equipment, including installation of plasma screens.

Plasma screens, of course! How exactly do you spend so much money on so little? And while AFL boss Andrew Demetriou insists that it will be a "boost" for fans, wouldn't the fans appreciate something simpler, such as cheaper tickets? Or the right to go along to a game and sing and shout and create their own atmosphere without the corporate tyranny of blaring advertisements and inane announcements?

Much of this money, our money, will be spent on "function rooms" that is, corporate boxes. Why should my hard-earned be spent there? Corporate boxes are a complete drain on the atmosphere of a football match. Face it, if we all watched the footy behind a glass window there would be no atmosphere at all.

This football fan would be happier if a fraction of the money was spent ripping out the corporate boxes and replacing them with seats for people to sit in. If you want to watch the football without going outside, then stay at home.

The MCG has been completely rebuilt in the past

20 years at a cost of close to a billion dollars. We now have a modern stadium that holds fewer people than it did 20 years ago, and has less atmosphere. The curving roof of the old southern stand kept in the noise. The new stand is much higher and steeper and less-generously roofed and it doesn't hold the sound in the same way.

We have also lost the Olympic Stand, built for the 1956 Games, and the 1920s Members Stand. Like the demolition of the southern stand, the rebuilding of the Members was in response to zero public demand. Indeed, membership of the MCC is famously tight. There is a 30-year waiting list, I gather. People were desperate to belong and perhaps the old stand with its memories and its history was a part of that. They didn't need a billion-dollar stadium as a carrot, but it's what they got.

What is wrong with us that we must sacrifice so much money on the altar of sport? We spend hundred of millions on rebuilding a ground that is incredibly popular just as it is and as soon as we've finished rebuilding it, we find a way to spend some more money on it.

How about spending the money on something we need, such as homes for disabled people? For $30 million, the government could provide houses for several hundred disabled adults who are now living with their ageing parents. There is a great shortage of such supported accommodation, so that older carers feel pressured to keep their grown-up children at home. In desperation, they sometimes get their adult children into respite care and leave them. Consequently, respite beds are in short supply, too.

Don't people like this deserve our money just a teeny bit more than a grandstand that was built only 20 years ago?

Or are we just like that family with the big new plasma who can't afford to take their kids to the dentist?

Brendan O'Reilly is a freelance writer.