The indefatigable Joan Logan highlights the opportunity costs of the Grand Prix.

Dear Premier, Minister Carbines and Minister Richardson.

Congratulations on your new roles in government – I think.

I’ve worked as a nurse in the same public hospital for 52 years with the last 40 years in its Intensive Care Unit. It badly needs a refurbishment. Our long-term patients need fresh air. We need space for our equipment. We need fully functioning isolation rooms. We need a dedicated holistic room for patients to die with dignity surrounded by loved ones. It would be excellent too to have TVs for patients who are bed blocked. And it would be even better if our patients were not bed blocked! And, of course, it would be so much less stressful if we had enough staff.

Our ICU director told me three years ago that a new unit would cost around $100 million. That’s the cost of just one four-day Grand Prix!

I wrote to Victorian Labor and Liberal MPs in January 2023 about this issue but was ignored. Perhaps my correspondence was put in the “too hard basket”.  Or perhaps you/ they thought my email was not worthy of a reply.

Now’s your chance in your new roles to show Victorians that this new government can be honest, transparent and accountable when it comes to Melbourne’s F1 Grand Prix. It could even help return you to government!

You can show, for example, that first responders and country Victoria – and even refurbishing an old ICU – are more important than a perennial, loss-making, foreign-owned business that overwhelmingly benefits F1’s owners, Liberty Media. (For evidence, watch “How F1 Bankrupts Cities” by Plain Capital.)

You can explain that successive Victorian premiers, from Jeff Kennett to Daniel Andrews, had extended Grand Prix contracts based on highly inflated “international exposure” viewing claims made by the Australian Grand Prix Corporation – and repeated by these same leaders who, apparently, did not bother to fact check AGPC’s false claims.

The AGPC admitted to us that they had “incorrectly” used global viewing figures for an entire F1 season for the Melbourne event. However, the AGPC – and our premiers – have never publicly admitted to having misled the public, including actual and potential Grand Prix sponsors and advertisers.

People, including politicians, still believe these false viewing claims. For example, the Liberal Party Shadow Environment Minister, Nick McGowan, in an article on TWISK (26 June) claimed the GP “sells Albert Park to over 400 million viewers worldwide”. He also had no ideas for fixing his contention of “years of neglect” of Albert Park.

He could have said that the $100m saved by cancelling one Grand Prix could repair the lake wall and its water quality, protect its flora and fauna, provide more trees, more shade in summer and more wildlife with better protection, provide better lighting and safety and more drinking fountains……

It is a monty that the Auditor General will find in his next audit of the Grand Prix, as he did in 2007, that the Grand Prix is a financial and economic loser for Victoria. He will not do a sham economic “impact” study as successive governments-of-the-day have done but rather a cost benefit analysis to determine if this event is value for money.

All you need to do is drip feed the media about the negative aspects of the Grand Prix, then pull the plug – and save a further $2 billion in losses by the end of the Grand Prix’s current contract.

Over to you.

Joan Logan, vice president and FOI officer for Save Albert Park Inc, ICU nurse, farmer and former athlete.