Another year, another appalling Grand Prix.

The sound of screeching hyenas has been ripping through the air of normally tranquil Albert Park this last week, you just know it must be Grand Prix time again. Oh what fun, the usual parade of tattooed petrol heads, pretty airheads in their summer frocks and flummery, corporate tsars on flying visits and that small, publicity-crazed army of Melbourne society types under tented roofs are at it again – for the fifth time. There’s no doubt the grand prix has its own peculiar buzz about it. It is for the hearty few a frenetic, adrenalin-rush that is all about noise, crowds and that elusive quality called glamour. Like celebrities who are famous for being famous, it is far from clear to anyone what it is about a grand prix that draws the crowds or what makes it such a profitable industry, which is exactly what it is. Profitable that is for those who run it around the world and, of course, for the drivers.

The very, very few serious “petrol-heads” aside – the kind of character who gets his kicks (and it is overwhelmingly a man) from driving a ten ton truck all week or taking an engine apart while half of his body is covered in oil – no one really likes the noise and anyone who values their hearing wears earplugs or mufflers. It can’t be the race itself because you can’t see anything these days, the machines move like jet planes through the air at a speed that defies the spectators’ capacity to see anything except a flash passing by in a millisecond. The crowds out on the track watch the race on big screens while the VIPs, the business crowd and the so-called beautiful people crowd into the corporate boxes and watch one of the innumerable television screens. That’s if they have any interest in the race at all. Overwhelmingly, the corporate types tire of the endlessly repeated image of cars going around the same corners time after time, by the second or third lap the intuitive response of most sensible people is “seen it once, seen it a thousand times…” They vote with their eyes.

Horse racing by comparison is real, you get to see the horses, the riders, the race, the drama and you might make a fortune in the process. Unless its rigged, the race you see is a battle of skills, of training and sacrifice. On the social side, the colour, the excitement and the sense of fun and theatre, particularly of the show-offs, beats a grand prix gathering hands down.

In short, the grand prix as a spectator sport is one of the most boring events imaginable. The attraction for many is simply the crowd dynamics, people watching and, for the more important or self-important types, being seen. The real secret is that hardly anyone is there to watch cars go around and around and around the same circuit up to a hundred times (not counting all the qualifying heats), no matter how impressive the circuit backdrop (not that you can see much of that if you are actually there). With all that against it you would think the people who run the sport would want to re-inject into the race the only thing that might redeem it – real danger and risk. Alas, increasingly, grand prix racing is shedding that one last remaining element which might provide a compelling human attraction – the battle between one solitary driver and another, the drama of the individual driver pitting his skills and character against his rivals and the forces of fate.

The fact is the financial and marketing investments are now so huge that the teams sort out between themselves ahead of time who will take honours. In short, even the outcome itself is often “fixed”. Put all these elements together and you would have to conclude that grand prix racing is something of a pseudo event – its not a real race, the human combat element is smothered under a ton of corporate and financial calculations and, to top it off, most of crowds are there for reasons other than to watch a car race. It is, I suppose, not that surprising that the people most involved with this global pseudo event, excepting possibly the drivers – increasingly a bunch of mute mechanical nerds but who still possess a rapidly fading remnant of gladiatorial charisma – generally tend to be pseuds themselves.

Besides the curiosity of why the drivers take the risks – although those risks have progressively been removed one by one in the cause of efficiency and cost-effectiveness (at the expense of genuine excitement) – the only other interesting thing about grand prix racing is the peculiar kind of megalomania that seems to afflict the big boys who run the sport. And unlike any other major international sport – if indeed one can even call it a “sport” – this is a global enterprise effectively run by one man – the diminutive, ex-East End barrow boy Berni Ecclestone, a secretive billionaire who calls all the shots.

His Melbourne agent and all-purpose fixer is, of course, Ronald Joseph Walker, otherwise known as Ron, friend of Jeff, Lloyd and Rod (Carnegie), sports impresario par excellence, man about town and a legend in his own super-heated dreams.

Ron’s big dream, of course, has come true – staging the grand prix in Albert Park. He finally got his way, but was it all worth it? Was it worth driving over the objections of a whole community just so that the world’s television could get a glimpse of the city skyline in the background (the ostensible reason for all the mayhem) when the very same backdrop could have been had at Docklands, which genuinely needed the publicity and the buzz (even more so now with all the failed projects)? Was all the bullying, the secrecy and the arrogance really necessary? It has conservatively cost the taxpayer something like a hundred million dollars to put the show on – and every year it costs a few million more. As for the supposedly redeeming argument that Albert Park has been upgraded and looks a lot better than it used to (excepting the few months, not weeks as promised, when the ever-extended infrastructure is being put up or pulled down), a tenth of the money spent would have restored Albert Park to prime condition. The rest was for personal glory and securing an enterprise of real interest to a small minority of Melbournians.

As a former mayor of South Melbourne and vocal opponent of the Grand Prix put it in a letter to the Age in 1994, Frank O’Connor, “The clear evidence is that a private individual, Ron Walker, acting in concert with the Premier, committed undisclosed millions of dollars of public money in an allegedly irrevocable contract with a car promoter in London. This arrangement was then imposed as a fait accompli on the government and the public without any cost benefit analysis and has now be placed outside of any public scrutiny through the provisions of the Grand Prix Act.”

In a letter to the Age in February 1995, Barry Humphries put it this way: “We’ve got the Grand Prix now, so ya-boo-sucks Adelaide! Provincial one-upmanship and old fashioned civic vandalism are alive and well at Albert Park as our self-seeking little politicians get themselves worked up into a latter of excitement about this noisy and incredibly tedious motoring event…”

Just to refresh our memories, the striking confluence (and alleged conflict) of influence involving Jeff, Ron and Lloyd revolves around the timing of the casino tendering process, the securing of the secret deal for the Grand Prix (Albert Park being just down the road from the casino) and the fact that Hudson Conway, which Ron was joint managing director of with Lloyd, not only won the tender and got a long-term monopoly licence but was allowed, after the licence was granted, to triple the size of the casino’s hotel to 1000 rooms, making it Australia’s largest. Throughout all of this, the premier acted as a public relations enthusiast for Ron, the grand prix and, most questionably, for the casino itself. The casino has subsequently demonstrated little restraint and markets itself as if it were true, to cite its earlier and particularly outrageous marketing line, that “Everyone’s a winner at Crown”.

If the latest profile of Ron in the Age is anything to go by, he’s got away with it with flying colours. Painted as a great survivor, the full-page piece (9 March 2000), by feature writer Alan Attwood, has a lead-in that reads…”In the passing parade of Melbourne public life, Ron Walker has outlasted many of his fellow travellers”, a clear reference to Jeffrey, and describes Ron as “a man still firmly in the driver’s seat.” Its an interesting, well-written piece but its mostly an ego-massage with hardly a sharp observation to its credit. With mock humility, his repeated refrain throughout the interview is that he wants nothing for himself, its all for others, the public good, and as for those who put the Grand Prix on and do the hard work, he’s just one of the boys, no rank, no lording it over, its all a happy family. As our fly-on-the-wall correspondent relates (“On the Job with Ron”), nothing could be further from the truth – the man dominates all around him with an allegedly tyrannical fury and the modesty bit is pure flannel. Other than those who have cause to know the real Ron in action, the image he projects to the media is all they will know. This is particularly true given that he now has all the big media in his pocket. As the long-time

The old crusading Age, which, on the Melbourne media scene, almost single-handedly opposed the high-handed contempt of the Jeff-Ron juggernaut of the early 1990s, is well and truly gone. These days they wouldn’t dare, even if they were inclined that way (which they aren’t). Steve Harris, now the Age’s publisher and editor-in-chief, was a key cheerleader for the grand prix when it was getting off the ground and getting all the flax in the early 1990s, when he was Rupert’s editor-in-chief at the Herald Sun. In those days, circuses and the lucrative supplements and advertising that came with backing Jeff’s and Ron’s big-event mania was where the money was and Steve has a keen sense of money. In those days it was said that Ron would simply tell the Herald Sun what he wanted as the lead story and it was almost invariably delivered. The link is even closer today. As the Age informed us in the Atwood piece, “(Walker) was closely involved in recent meetings and negotiation resulting in Brian Powers, the chairman of Faixfax (publisher of the Age)…steering the US financial firm Hellman & Friedman into a 37.5% share of (Bernie) Ecclestone’s F1 holding company.”

Bernie’s empire is now worth billions of dollars, resting above all on his canny and ever-so tenacious grip on the television rights to the world-wide grand prix operation (including Melbourne’s). Ron and Bernie are bosom pals and Ron is even a trustee for Bernie’s “charitable trust”. Given what we know about these characters, it simply stretches credulity that in bringing Bernie loads of even more bucks, Ron hasn’t looked after himself in the process. Just like pulling off the casino coup, in the space of a few short years Ron has managed to convert his $16million shareholding in Hudson Conway (itself generated from a $30,000 investment each from Ron, Lloyd and Rod in 1977) into $75million worth of Kerry Packer’s PBL shares, not bad just for being a selfless public philanthropist and good mate of the premier! Of course, it goes without saying that the Packer media empire, like Fairfax, and to a slightly lesser degree Murdoch, will look to their wider interests in all future coverage of Ron, the casino, the grand prix and all related interests (which, when you calmly think about it, takes in a huge domain of public issues and doesn’t leave much room for hard journalism).

Above all, the Australian Grand Prix at Albert Park is a monument to a number of quite ugly human characteristics which sum up the dark side of the Kennett era – captured in the self-defining labels of Kennett and his mates Ron Walker and ex-casino king Lloyd Williams. They read like the chapters of a “how-to” book for aspirant mafiosa godfathers – government should be run like a business, whoever is not with us is against us, crash-through or crash, whatever it takes, the end justifies the means…. When in January 1995 the Sunday Age voted Ron and Lloyd “Victorians of the Year” for 1994, it noted that the Grand Prix and the Casino had been “hailed and promoted as tangible symbols of the new Victoria, a state now thrusting out of the economic disasters that drained its wealth and sapped its confidence…Both embody the expectation that they will enrich this state by boosting its economy and broaden its cultural experience. This is truly a government that believes in bread and circuses, of which Messrs Williams and Walker are the principal ringmasters”.

It continued, “Whether they and their spectacular doings are to be applauded or deplored has deeply divided the community. Most criticism has centred not so much on the concept of a casino and the prospect of a prestigious international motor race as it has on the way each was procured, planned and presented as a fait accompli…” The Kennett government’s crash-through style, it noted, was one that spurned consultation, disregarded due process and habitually attributed low motives to its critics.

While Victoria benefited from the dynamism of the early Kennett years (and particularly the financial stewardship of Alan Stockdale), simply to get out of the economic mess bequeath by the Cain-Kirner years, did we really need the arrogance, the self-serving cronyism and the contempt for ordinary people that, particularly in the latter years, became the government’s defining characteristic? And nothing summed up that distasteful, contemptuous hubris more comprehensively than Jeff’s smirking pride in the campaign slogan carried on a local pop radio station in his last run for public acclaim – “Jeff fucking rules”. That might no longer be the case, but Ron sure does.