Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it? South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’ showcase LIV Golf event, which he so enthusiastically championed in the face of sustained criticism of its reputational, financial and civic costs, faces likely extinction.
The news of its imminent demise is all the more embarrassing given it came in the very week Malinauskas’ government commenced the controversial $45 million LIV-focussed redevelopment of the North Adelaide Golf Course it seized without notice from previous long-term owner, Adelaide City Council.
The premier had gone all in on LIV, an early plank in his “major events strategy” for SA when the poaching of Victoria’s MotoGP was a mere twinkle in his eye. Promoted for its much-vaunted “party atmosphere”, LIV attracted large crowds in Adelaide that particularly embraced the “Legendary Watering Hole” at the 12th, where you could celebrate great shots by throwing plastic beer cups on the course to a DJ-driven soundtrack. Critics of the tournament were sneeringly dismissed by the Minister for Planning Nick Champion of wanting to “snowdome Adelaide” and keep Adelaidians “bored out of our mind”.
But Malinauskas and Champion are discovering the downside to doing business with an organisation that serves as a handy distraction from the Saudi government’s propensity to murder journalists and dissenters. Funded exclusively by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) since its formation in 2021, LIV Golf is unlikely to survive PIF’s April announcement of a sparkling new five-year investment strategy geared toward “sustained value creation, with a strengthened focus on maximising impact, raising the efficiency of investments, and applying the highest standards of governance, transparency and institutional excellence”.
Apparently deciding a bunch of squabbling golfers and a couple of viral hole-in-ones are not sufficient return on a $7.3 billon investment in the breakaway league to date, PIF will withdraw all funding at the conclusion of the 2026 season in August, and despite LIV Golf’s brave announcement it is forming a new independent board to “secure other long-term investors”, one suspects replacing PIF’s lazy $1 billion a year will prove a challenge.
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Malinauskas bristled at those who suggested SA’s role in LIV Golf made it an undignified patsy in the Saudis’ sportswashing agenda, insisting the partnership was “consistent with a value system that every Australian holds dear” and that critics were hypocrites if they condemned the Saudis’ golf subsidiary while watching Netflix or attending Live Nation concerts, organisations in which the PIF holds minority stakes. He rammed a takeover bill of the North Adelaide Golf Course through parliament while the lord mayor was out of the country and handed his new BFF and then LIV CEO Greg Norman the lucrative contract to remodel the course without the inconvenience of having to tender — both abrogations of process necessary, we were told, to have LIV in its new home by 2028. Six hundred trees would fall, sections of Adelaide’s prized parklands would be commercialised, and famed restaurants would be forced to close in pursuit of the party premier’s dream of LIV in the heart of the city, all of which was explicitly justified by an extension of the LIV Golf contract until 2031. It “sets us up for the future”, hyped Malinauskas in February last year, as “we didn’t want to invest heavily in North Adelaide and face the prospect of (LIV) being lost from South Australia”.
With that prospect now a reality, whither the North Adelaide Golf Course upgrade and SA taxpayers’ $45 million? Malinauskas is attempting to erase his 2025 comments from history and last week touted the expensive works as a worthy investment in public sporting infrastructure, similar to the improvements to the suburban football fields in camera-friendly locales instrumental to the success of the wildly popular AFL Gather Round.
But while they both demonstrate the government’s fondness for using copious amounts of public money to entice wealthy sporting organisations of dubious ethics to take SA seriously, an unnecessary and controversial upgrade to an already excellent golf course that comes with collateral damage to Adelaide’s famed parklands cannot be sold in the same way as the arguable over-investment in local sports facilities that are used by community clubs in the 51 weeks of the year the AFL isn’t there.
Off the back of his landslide election victory in March, indications are that Malinauskas will blithely ignore the LIV-related egg on his photogenic face. There are reports the announcement of SA’s new three-year Gather Round deal, originally slated to be part of last weekend’s Showdown celebrations, was held back by the premier’s office to be a standalone announcement this week. That this news will blow the LIV debacle from the headlines of the state’s parochial papers is mere coincidence, I’m sure, but while Teflon Pete may believe his “Bread and Circuses” strategy bolsters his reputation as the state’s ringmaster, his ill-advised and ill-fated embrace of the blood-drenched LIV Golf competition makes him look more like a clown.