In us we trust: the powerful cabal pulling political strings over NSW stadiums

They’ve been described as Australia’s equivalent to the Vatican: small but immensely powerful and a law unto themselves. The Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust is peopled mostly by men who wield extraordinary power, disproportionate to the size of their empire.

Alan Jones, Sydney’s talkback king, has been a trustee for 23 years. That’s longer than most popes. Tony Shepherd, the former head of the construction company Transfield, is its chair. The former head of News Corp, John Hartigan, and a former New South Wales premier, Barry O’Farrell, enhance the trust’s political clout.

But although this is just a public-sector board managing government assets, it sometimes seems the trust is calling the shots with the NSW government.

After weeks of lobbying, it is likely cabinet will approve a $2bn plan to redevelop Sydney’s stadiums, possibly as early as Thursday. The lion’s share of spending will be on rebuilding Allianz Stadium at Moore Park and ANZ Stadium at Homebush.

The former is controlled by the trust; the latter by Venues NSW.

Most insiders believe it will be the trust’s preferred plan – to demolish and rebuild the Sydney Football Stadium to create a new 45,000-seat stadium by 2019 –that will prevail.

That would overturn an earlier announcement by the former premier, Mike Baird, that the priority was improving ANZ by making it into a more intimate, rectangular ground with steeper seats and lights that would curtain off empty balconies.

It now seems likely that ANZ will be the second cab off the rank. The bill, too, has increased from $1.6bn earmarked by Baird to more than $2bn.

That’s considerably more of the proceeds from selling the state’s assets going into sporting venues than will go into hospitals and schools.

Why are we heading this way? Good question.

The reason is that successive governments have been too timid to deal with the power of the trust.

Despite several reports – one from PwC to Infrastructure NSW in 2012, and another from the former opposition leader John Brogden in 2015 – suggesting that the governance of stadiums needed an overhaul to ensure sensible decision making by bringing them all under the one body, successive governments have persisted with the separate trust.

The result is this cabal of retired politicians, sporting figures and media mates continues to behave as if it is running its own empire.

There’s agreement that Sydney needs to upgrade its major sporting facilities to attract big events and compete with cities such as Melbourne and Singapore. But where is the business case for either project?

Each time the government attempts to decide how much should be spent, how big they should be and which project takes priority it descends into a kind of wrestling match between rival facilities.

The worst example in recent history was in 2016 when the trust made a grab for another slice of public open space at Moore Park for a new 65,000-seat stadium. The old football stadium site was to become a giant car park.

It was knocked on the head by Baird, who was swayed by the political attraction of doing a big project in western Sydney. But decisions about spending taxpayers’ money shouldn’t come down to egos.

Surely it must be possible to analyse Sydney’s needs and come up with a coherent business case for improving the state’s major sporting facilities. If that has been done, it certainly hasn’t been made public.

Instead we have had an unseemly bidding war behind the scenes, as the trust pushes its case and Venues NSW backs its proposal. Each is flanked by seconds: the clubs and codes that use the rival facilities.

Five years ago PwC concluded that NSW had over-invested in stadiums and that it had been done in an ad hoc way. Now we are about to be put on the hook for a further $2bn in spending – $400m more than two years ago.

This year there was a stadium strategy that promised a “commerciality framework” to ensure efficient investment. It too seems to have bitten the dust.

Attendance figures show both stadiums are rarely used to capacity and use is well below that of the equivalent Melbourne venues. With lacklustre attendances, it’s all the more important that taxpayers’ money is well spent in the right place and on the right type of facilities.

A spokesman for the sports minister, Stuart Ayres, said the government had no plans to change the governance structure of the Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust.