Dress up time for government’s ‘super hero’

As costume shops across Adelaide prepare for a weekend assault from parents searching for last-minute outfits for their children’s Book Week celebrations, the state’s Education Minister Blair Boyer is keeping his own wardrobe choices under wraps.

Boyer is well-known for his annual Book Week dress ups but failed to buckle under intense InSider questioning about this year’s chosen outfit, preferring to keep it secret until the official unveiling at school visits next week.

The minister did, however, hint at a number of costume changes, saying that “Bluey might make an appearance or maybe even a dinosaur”.

Casting a spell: Education Minister Blair Boyer in his Harry Potter costume for a previous Book Week. Photo: Facebook

Book Week is a special time of the year for the Education Minister whose father was a teacher, giving him the chance to sport superhero and the ever-popular Harry Potter costumes.

“I’ve previously dressed up as Harry Potter and last year joined about 30 other Harry Potters at a school book parade – Harry is always a popular choice,” Boyer said.

“Book week is one of my favourite school celebrations and is an innovative way to encourage and inspire kids to read. Books are a terrific gateway for imagination and learning – and who doesn’t love dressing up?

“I still remember sitting down as a kid and reading with my Dad, and now I read the same books to my daughters.”

The limits of Adelaide’s major events pull

Alain Prost in his last race at the 1993 Australian Grand Prix, held in Adelaide. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Losing the Formula One Grand Prix to Melbourne remains an open wound in South Australia’s political and cultural history – a wound Premier Peter Malinauskas tried to heal last year.

The Advertiser ran a story in June 2022 headlined: “How Adelaide nearly snatched back the Formula One Grand Prix from Melbourne”, detailing a “secret heist” and “middle of the night pitch” from the Premier to F1 boss Stefano Domenicali in April 2022.

The paper reported that the Italian Domenicali was “very excited” about the SA government’s interest but informed the then-newly elected Premier his bid had come too late.

But a new account of the negotiations from interstate has a slightly different retelling of how close South Australia came.

The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday published a lengthy feature about a “high-octane bidding war” between the Victorian and New South Wales governments for the next Australian Grand Prix contract.

Citing “well-placed sources from both states”, the Herald reported that the NSW government offered F1 a 10-year, $1.5 billion contract to get the annual race out of Melbourne.

For context, the $150-million-a-year bid is higher than the South Australian Tourism Commission’s entire estimated expenditure last financial year ($142.2m), and nearly four times higher than the SATC’s total spend on tourism events ($39.5m).

The Herald reported that NSW’s bid forced the Victorian government to pay overs to keep the event in Melbourne with an offer that was close to, but just under, $1.5 billion.

As for SA’s bid? The Herald gave it one brief mention: “South Australia, under newly elected Premier Peter Malinauskas, had also joined the fray, making a late bid to return the race to Adelaide, but the offer was not seriously considered by F1.”

If the South Australian government hopes to “nearly” snatch back the F1 again, they’ll have to wait a while – Melbourne is contracted to host the Grand Prix until 2037.

Truly grounded in history…

The Australian War Memorial has unveiled a fully restored North American Rockwell OV-10A Bronco, model 639, which played a key role in the Vietnam War as part of the commemorations of Vietnam Veteran’s Day today.

The Bronco with Kim Wood. Photo: David Whittaker

The Memorial has been working on the front-line Bronco since it arrived from the Philippines on HMAS Tobruk 16 years ago in a dilapidated state.

“The OV-10A Bronco stands as an icon of a lesser known story of the alliance between the U.S and Australia, and nowhere was that alliance more evident than with those Australians who flew as a forward air control in Vietnam,” Australian War Memorial director Matt Anderson said.

“Every step in this restoration process has been about overcoming challenges; from bringing it back to Australia to the intricacies of the needed repairs.

“This restoration stands as a testament to the perseverance of the FAC veterans who saw the Bronco as an item of great personal importance and ensuring that this aircraft remains a living memory of service and sacrifice.”

A total of 36 RAAF pilots flew with the USAF 19th and 20th Tactical Air Support Squadrons with 23 of those pilots flying in Bronco aircraft.

The Memorial’s Kim Wood, a licensed aircraft maintenance engineer, led the restoration at the Mitchell storage facility.

“When it arrived, Bronco 639 was in poor condition. The aircraft was suffering from corrosion, was covered in paint that was not of aviation origin and more akin to what would be used on an outdoor building structure or a bridge,” he said.

“It was full of rubbish, old rats nests, and generally filthy. To start, the fuselage had to be disassembled, paint stripped, cleaned out, corrosion treated, repaired where required then reassembled. It was also repainted to represent the aircraft as it stood on the flight line in Vung Tau 13 July 1970 Vietnam.”

… to flying high

The Bronco isn’t the only old plane unveiled this week. During restoration of the University of Adelaide’s beautiful Reading Room, staff uncovered a squadron of ageing paper planes flown by distracted students into various nooks and crannies.

“The Barr Smith Library’s Reading Room restoration project required the removal of over 20,000 books from the shelves so that specialist cleaning of the ceiling and painting could occur,” said University Librarian Siân Woolcock, who was involved in overseeing the restoration work.

“The walls and columns were repainted in heritage colours selected in consultation with architects Swanbury Penglase and Heritage SA.”

During the heritage restoration project, 61 paper planes were retrieved from various locations around the ceiling of the Reading room – some planes dating back more than 30 years.

“The paper planes were a fun discovery. We always knew they were up there but could never reach them to find out just how many. They were found on the ledges and windowsills and there was even one lodged vertically in the ceiling plaster, which would have been a tough shot,” said Woolcock.

The newly refurbished Reading Room at the University of Adelaide.

Some of the older planes are even suspected to have been created using paper torn from the library books themselves.

“We were delighted upon unfolding one plane to discover that it had been created from a University flyer that dated back earlier than 1991, meaning the student most likely made and flew it over 30 years ago.”

Library staff hope to display the planes in a future showcase and are calling for any past students who may have flown a paper plane into the Reading Room’s ceiling to get in touch and tell their story.

Girl Maths explained… yawn

Thanks to our Kiwi cousins, #girlmaths is blowing up Tik Tok.

But there’s nothing like an academic press release to vaccinate viral fun quick smart.

The release stated that the boffins at RMIT University are “available talk to media about the TikTok phenomenon ‘Girl Maths’ and why it’s not doing girls any financial or social favours”.

Ah, no need to call them, it then rolled out Dr Janneke Blijlevens from marketing to lecture on how the idea started by Kiwi radio hosts about justifying a purchase you can’t afford is all about “behavioural biases and heuristics”.

“Girl Maths is a perfect display of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, mental accounting being applied to consumption decisions,” Blijlevens comments.

“It all starts with cognitive dissonance. You want the dress, but you know that financially you can’t justify it. So to get rid of that dissonance – the space between what you want and what you should do – you apply biases and heuristics (or shortcuts) to your thinking to make that go away.

“Confirmation bias is a bias where you justify your decisions by considering only the evidence that supports what you want and ignore the evidence that would mean you’d have to make a different decision.

“You justify buying the dress because you have several events coming up, which means you’ll wear that dress at least four times and won’t have to buy dresses for those other occasions. And we all know considering cost-per-wear is being financially literate and savvy.

“However, you are ignoring the fact that 1) your bank account is still going to show a deficit if your disposable income does not match this expense, 2) you could re-wear a cheaper dress all the same, and 3) your power and gas bills will have gone up by the time you wear it for a third time.”

Um, yeah, we know.

A house for ‘better housing’

“Better Housing” advertising on the corner
of Rundle Mall and Pulteney St. Photo: InDaily

While the state government might not have the funds to lure F1 here, it certainly has enough to spruik its housing policies.

In fact, the government has deemed that its new housing commitments are so important that it will fork out the equivalent of a new house in metropolitan Adelaide to advertise them.

The government’s latest advertising approvals report published this week shows a $750,000 budget has been ticked off for an advertising campaign about the government’s “better housing” policies.

Scheduled to run from June 15 to November 30 in SA media (including ours), the taxpayer-funded campaign is spruiking measures such as abolishing stamp duty for eligible first home buyers, a ban on rent bidding and residential land releases in the outer suburbs.

Ads about South Australia’s “better housing” future have been running across media since mid-June. Image: Department of Treasury and Finance

The advertising campaign is worth more than the June median house price in metropolitan Adelaide, which according to the Valuer-General was $700,000.

It also has five times the budget of a public health campaign, also ticked off in June, to raise awareness about flu vaccinations for children aged six months to five years.

State government advertising spending reached a record high $41.2m in 2021-22. The InSider is keenly awaiting the figures for 2022-23.

Stuff you should know…

InSider loves it when marketers send stats trying to prove something or other. Having no idea what the release about the number of female billionaires per country was trying to sell, the fact that Australia ranks fifth (or seventh, depending on how you look at it) with less than a tenth of the billionaires the US boasts is simply bizarre.

But the release is very kind, stating “Australia’s self-made billionaires stand-out. Australia’s female billionaires include Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins (net worth$3.62bn) and mining magnate Gina Reinhart (net worth $43.17bn), who are both from Perth, Western Australia.”

Countries with the most female billionaires