Many, many years ago the then Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett was over the moon about poaching the Grand Prix from Adelaide.

Today, after costing Victorian $1 billion dollars with another $2 billion in losses pending by the end of the contract in 2037, it has never shown value for money.

The indefatigable Save Albert Park group, led by Peter Logan, has been campaigning for years to expose the massive rorts involved. Sadly, as when Peter and the blog confronted a then Labor Deputy Premier about the Grand Prix, he confessed they couldn’t cancel it for fear of petrol head backlashes.

Nevertheless, Save Albert Park is not giving up and earlier this year yet again took the Australian Grand Prix Corporation to VCAT to fight the Information Commissioner’s decree for it to release its methodology for ‘estimating’ its attendances.

The Labor Government is allegedly strongly committed to fighting climate change, supporting the Grand Prix seems a very unlikely way to achieve that let alone considering the massive policy failures associated with  of the ongoing problems of a long history of ludicrously dodgy claims about attendancea and the dollar value to Victoria.

A media release by Save Albert Park from this week illustrates many of the problems. It asks:

“What other major event, or any event, would hire a legal heavy weight and go to VCAT to keep its methodology of counting its attendances hidden from public scrutiny? And contend it is in the public interest to keep it secret from the public because of the level of public funding it receives?

“Should attendance numbers be a reason for government to continue supporting an event that is an ever increasing burden on Victoria and an event largely attended by Melbournians? Should we pay for ‘loss leader’ entertainers like Robbie Williams to help boost attendance numbers?

“It claims ‘Record’ Grand Prix crowds? Well, yes, there are now bigger numbers, but what other major event would need to boost its numbers by offering around 40,000 free tickets every year?

“No other major event ‘estimates’ its attendance numbers or ‘counts’, as does the Grand Prix, some 70,000 credentialed persons, like security, caterers and delivery drivers, into their total attendance tallies. They are not ticket paying spectators but misleadingly and artificially increase Grand Prix attendance number ‘estimates’.

“What other event would ‘trial’ crowd counting devices over three decades and would claim it a ‘national security risk’ to tell us at what gates, if any, scanners are used?

“International exposure? For more than 20 years, the AGPC claimed an entire F1 season’s audience for their Grand Prix with successive Victorian premiers from Jeff Kennett to Daniel Andrews repeating those false boasts. How could they get it so wrong for so long and why weren’t the AGPC’s and the government’s claims fact-checked? Were GP contracts extended based on those false claims? Now, worldwide, all the Grands Prix virtually have the same circuit advertising. Where the heck is Aramco?

“Victoria’s other major events are not hosted in costly temporary venues at the expense of the proper and normal users of those venues. Nor do they rely on taxpayers to cover, by law, their annual operating losses – losses which are mounting alarmingly.”

“Victoria could save two billion dollars in forward losses.  It’s time we were rid of this Grand Prix white elephant.”

Australia is a country renowned for rorts of taxpayers money – from negative gearing to dividend imputation schemes. The Grand Prix rort is up there with the best of them.

But one can’t helping asking what the Victorian Government could achieve with climate change mitigation if the billions spent on the Grand Prix rort were directed there?