Greg Norman called the Saudi’s Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and body sawing just a “mistake”.

The Age’s Greg Baum (the only Melbourne sports journalist to regularly expose the Melbourne Grand Prix’s false claims) called it murder.

Now Victoria has shown that, like Greg Norman, we’re not that regretful about linking ourselves with those who have blood on their hands.

In Victoria we are taking the Saudi blood money to make a small dint in the millions of dollars we waste subsidising the Grand Prix.

The Grand Prix organisers constantly claim that it brings huge economic benefits to Victoria and we have just signed up for even more years of an event which burns money, fossil fuels, closes off one of Melbourne’s most diverse parks and kicks local sportspeople off their sporting grounds.

The Grand Prix also makes inflated claims about TV audiences and once even estimated its economic benefit by multiplying the hours the event was on by the going ad rate for the total claimed audience and claimed ludicrous claims of hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefit.

These claims are as dodgy as the Grand Prix attendance figures which are estimates – not accurate counts. When someone throwing a concert in a paddock can acquire the technology to track entrants and produce very accurate attendance figures it is odd, to say the least, that the Grand Prix can’t do the same.

But this year the Grand Prix has shown that that not only does it encourage fossil fuel consumption and the resultant carbon emissions but also celebrates some of the world’s biggest sources of carbon emissions – the Saudi Aramco. The first photo is from the Aramco website and the other two are from the actual telecast of the event.