A little bit of Adelaide died when they removed the Mad Mouse from sideshow alley at the Show.

Originally developed as the Wild Mouse, or Wilden Maus, in Germany in 1957, the little red rollercoaster was rebadged the Mad Mouse, to save on signage costs, when the operators of Sydney’s Luna Park brought three of the rides to Australia.

While it had less than half a kilometre of track, the Mad Mouse thrills came from the skateboard-sized wheels set toward the back of the cars – making it seem as though they were about to fly off the tracks as they whiplashed you around the circuit.

I’ve ridden Disneyland’s Big Thunder Mountain – or Big Chunder Mountain as it should be known – and it didn’t hold a candle to the Mad Mouse.

The useful website Amusement Ride Extravaganza says it had no huge rollercoaster drops compared to today’s monster rides but “lots of tight, unbanked 180-degree ‘switchback’ turns and speedy dips”.

It sounds very much like the dizzying ride the Malinauskas Government is taking taxpayers on to find a new home for our police horses.

Forget the rip-off prices at the Show, the latest version of this ride is set to cost taxpayers $90 million to house SAPOL’s 30 or so police greys, and some police dogs, at Gepps Cross.

Every government is allowed to make one or two dumb decisions in its lifetime, like the Albanese Government’s decision to suck up to Qantas.

But the Malinauskas Cabinet’s 50 shades of police greys effort is so dopey it’s orbiting in a parallel universe all of its own.

One Twitter wit, Michael Gilbert, suggested that for $90 million the government could buy each of the horses a character $3 million house in Malvern, with change left over. The dogs could bunk in the backyards.

New Liberal MP for Bragg, Jack Batty, went one better.

“This week India landed a rover on the moon for $75M and Peter Malinauskas proposed to build some horse stables at Gepps Cross for $90M”, he tweeted on Sunday.

This is correct. On August 23, India’s Chandrayaan-3 space mission became the first to touch down near the moon’s south pole, doing so for roughly $74 million.

When asked how they got the small craft and robotic rover to the moon so cheaply, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, Sreedhara Somanath, reportedly laughed.

“I won’t disclose such secrets,” he said. “We don’t want everyone else to become so cost-effective.”

Perhaps he could have a quiet word to our Premier who struggles with the “cost-effective” thing.

While the government has been faffing about with finding new digs for a few horses, details have leaked of another relocation north of the city, but this one will have a devastating impact on the local economy.

The farcical quest to find a new home for SA’s police nags and pooches began when the Premier decided to bulldoze their current home at the state heritage-listed Thebarton barracks.

The superb barracks will be razed to make way for the new Women’s and Children’s Hospital after the government junked the initial hospital site – earmarked by the previous Marshall Liberal Government – on the western fringe of the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

At first, the government merrily backed SAPOL’s first choice of an eight-hectare site in the southern park lands near Greenhill Road for the greys.

Faced with a community revolt, and electoral damage to the ALP’s MP for Adelaide, Lucy Hood, the government devised another cunning plan.

The horses could live on disused land on the south side of Adelaide Airport, and be trucked in floats to more disused land at the back of the Supreme Court buildings in the CBD.

The police weren’t happy with this contaminated patch of dirt and the travel time to the city.

So last Friday the government announced what Mad Mouse fans might describe as a tight, unbanked 180-degree ‘switchback’ turn.

It will use government-owned land near the State Sports Park around 9km north of the CBD to build 32 stables, an undercover arena, a separate area for kennels and training facilities for the SA Police Dog Operation Unit, at a cost to taxpayers of $90 million.

The Police Commissioner Grant Stevens has previously said the Gepps Cross site is “not optimal”. This is Stevens-speak for he thinks it stinks.

The police union thinks it stinks too.

Police Association president Mark Carroll blasted the move as “one of the most cynical, self-serving actions I’ve ever seen from an SA government”. He accused the government of being willing to “dud everyone” to protect its Adelaide MP at the next election.

Treasurer Stephen Mullighan had the unenviable job of polishing the manure, stating the government was “working closely with SA Police to deliver a new, purpose-built home for the police greys and dogs”.

“Unlike the current site, Gepps Cross will meet the needs of police for decades to come,” he said. “This is a vital step towards a new Women’s and Children’s Hospital and we are getting on with the job.”

If you’re “working closely” with the cops, Treasurer, why do they think it’s such a bad idea?

None of this creates any confidence in the cost-benefit thinking behind Cabinet’s decision to build the new WCH on the old Thebby barracks – that’s if the government has even bothered with a cost-benefit analysis.

The government argues the original site adjacent to the RAH doesn’t allow for any future expansion for both hospitals.

Not everyone agrees. Colin Best, an experienced engineer, has prepared an exhaustive analysis that argues the government will needlessly spend an additional $700 million by building the children’s hospital on the old barracks site.

He reasons that a hospital built on the western side of the RAH could cost-effectively expand over the railway yards, if it needs to, just as the Adelaide Convention Centre has done a few hundred metres up North Terrace.

Best says two independent reports, by two eminent Fellows of the Institution of Engineers Australia, both with many years of relevant experience in similar infrastructure work to this project, should “provide confidence that there is no restriction to expansion to the west, over the railway lines”.

“These reports were presented to Government, independently over a six-month period, with no serious response to each of the authors,” he says.

His detailed submissions have run into a political and bureaucratic brick wall.

While the government has been faffing about with finding new digs for a few horses, details have leaked of another relocation north of the city, but this one will have a devastating impact on the local economy.

As part of the federal government’s Defence Strategic Review, it appears that the Adelaide-based army units 7th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (7RAR) and 1st Armoured Regiment (1ARMD) are likely to be “absorbed in the country’s north”, as the ABC put it.

In other words, they’ll be moved from their current base in Edinburgh to Darwin, taking with them 1500 secure defence jobs.

To put this into context, the closure of Mitsubishi’s Lonsdale plant in 2008 saw between 700 and 800 jobs lost. The shutdown of GMH’s Elizabeth factory in 2017 cost 950 jobs.

While the move has yet to be confirmed, Premier Malinauskas should be yelling down the phone at the nation’s golf-loving Defence Minister Richard Marles to kill this stone dead.

This is one move north where the Premier can’t afford to horse around.

Matthew Abraham is InDaily’s political columnist. Matthew can be found on X (Twitter) as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.