It wasn’t a ‘gotcha’ moment – wasn’t meant to be. But it was surprising to hear Golf Australia chief executive James Sutherland admit that he hadn’t spoken to NSW Premier Chris Minns since Minns announced that Moore Park Golf Club, the busiest course in Australia, was going to be cut in half.
I'd thought, naively, that it was part of the big chief's remit to lobby the Great Deciders in person. Cajole them. Influence them.
Fight them.
Originally, at a press event at Moore Park to spruick bulging participation numbers, I’d asked Sutherland the tactics he and his team used when lobbying government to ‘save’ courses like Moore Park and Oakleigh in Victoria, and all the rest under threat from councils keen to turn golf courses into ‘green space’ because they don’t apparently think golf courses are green spaces.
Sutherland replied that the message to government is this: “Golf is a huge sport. It's incredibly popular, and it's only getting more popular.
“To see this kind of passion [at Moore Park], the busiest golf course in the southern hemisphere, halving it in size doesn't make sense to us.”
It doesn’t make sense to millions. There are 91,000 rounds a year played at Moore Park. There are 500,000 visitors who hit balls on the course or the range. Do all these people just sit back and suck this up? Do these people not vote?
Sutherland says Golf Australia is “absolutely open to conversations [with government] about what the solution may be. From our perspective, it's only going to create more problems by reducing the amount of golf that's played here.”
“But when,” I asked, “was the last time you spoke to Chris Minns to flesh it out?”
“I haven’t specifically spoken to the Premier,” Sutherland replied. “But we’re in constant dialogue with the Government.”
Sutherland added that their plan is to work with Golf NSW. He spoke of putting their best foot forward and explaining to town planning types where golf is “specifically around this site, but also more broadly around the popularity of the game, and the growing interest in our sport.”
I’d genuinely asked the question naively. I’d assumed that Sutherland would have actually spoken to Minns. Instead, going into bat for public golf in Australia meant using a third-party – the media – as a conduit to cajole the suits.
But why wouldn’t Sutherland, and ‘golf’, given the billion-dollar industry it creates, and all its captains of industry go over the parapets together and fight for public golf? Worked for the miners. Worked for the poker machine industry. Worked for bloody greyhounds. Why not front Minns and Clover and whoever else?
“Because the NSW Government funds the Australian Open,” reckons a cynic in the press box.
It’s true: the NSW Government is a ‘partner’ of the Australian Open. Michael Block is in Sydney because the taxpayer's covered his flights, accommodation and, let’s call it, ‘spending money’ that Block might use to buy a fishing boat when home in California. Photos of the man with a kangaroo on Instagram will be a boon for Destination NSW.
Yet would it be so simple as Sutherland and the suits not wanting to spank the hand that feeds them? Do they fear aggravating Minns and his minions who, in a fit of pique, might cut funding as they’ve cut Moore Park? Would a government truly use such a cudgel?
Golf Australia, it appears, doesn’t want to find out, instead eschewing the full frontal approach with the silky paw, the cat’s meow, the velvet glove of soft diplomacy: a bank of cameras against a backdrop of a super-busy golf course full of voters that the government is going to chop in half.
It's actually a strong message. Not to say a chainsaw couldn't be taken to Moore Park. But to turn this green space into green space that less people use, doesn't make sense. Moore Park is used by tens of thousands of people – voters, taxpayers, petition-filler-outerers. Surely there's power there.
In the same precinct there is existing, and far less frequented, green space including Centennial Park on the other side of Anzac Parade, and a giant swadge of grass between Cleveland Street and South Dowling Street where joggers jog, kids roll down a slope, and medieval re-enactment types get excited in their home-made chain mail.
But there aren’t 10,000 of them there every day as there are at Moore Park GC.
And you think: wouldn’t it be important for Minns and Moore and the New Dan Andrews to be made to hear that in a meeting, and to explain their decision to kill public golf to a delegation from the governing body of golf in Australia committed to saving it?
Related Articles
Cleary: Moore Park fires salvo in War on Golf
Cleary: February beckons for standalone Australian Opens
