Each October, months before a single Supercar turns a wheel, temporary fencing begins climbing around the oval and cricket nets of Adelaide's Victoria Park, parkland held in public trust since the city's 1837 survey. By the time the grandstands for the bp Adelaide Grand Final are complete in late November, a slice of the East Parklands has been off-limits to joggers, dog-walkers and junior sports clubs for close to two months — fenced, humming with generators, waiting for a race weekend that fills the city's hotels for four days and is gone within a fortnight. The resident who has lost a running loop for the season is not wrong to notice the trade-off. Somewhere between that fence line and the state government's press release citing tens of millions of dollars in economic benefit sits the real question this article asks: is South Australia's events strategy actually worth what it costs, or is it a genuinely good story told with numbers nobody outside government gets to check?
That question extends well beyond motorsport. Under the Malinauskas Labor government, first elected in March 2022 and returned in a landslide on 21 March 2026, South Australia has pursued an unusually deliberate identity as a "festival state" — layering a long-running arts calendar (the Adelaide Fringe, the Adelaide Festival and WOMADelaide, all held in February–March) onto a sport and entertainment portfolio (the AFL's Gather Round, LIV Golf Adelaide, and the revived Adelaide 500) built almost entirely since this government took office. Each of those newer events now carries a multi-year, increasingly multi-decade, financial commitment from the state. Together they are central to how Adelaide is sold to the rest of the country, and to how the government defends its record in office.
What the government did
The clearest example of the government's approach is the Adelaide 500. The Supercars street race around Victoria Park ran from 1999 until the Marshall Liberal government cancelled it in October 2020, citing falling attendance, rising costs and the end of the locally-made Ford and Holden models that had defined the category. As opposition leader, Peter Malinauskas campaigned explicitly on reviving the race; after winning office, his government's first budget allocated around $75.9 million (approx.) over four years to bring back the Adelaide 500 and the Adelaide Motorsport Festival, on top of $40.0 million (approx.) over four years for a general Major Events Fund (SA Budget Papers, 2022-23). The race returned as the Supercars season finale in December 2022, and the government has since locked in an extension to 2034 — a further decade of commitment announced in November 2025 — alongside a new bid to host MotoGP on the same street circuit from 2027.
Gather Round followed a similar arc. Introduced by the AFL in 2023 as one full round of matches — all nine games — played entirely in one state rather than spread around the country, it is a competition South Australia bid for and has repeatedly re-won the exclusive right to host, most recently extending the arrangement to 2029. What the state actually pays the AFL for that exclusivity has never been published: the government describes the fee as commercial-in-confidence, and when media reporting in early 2026 put the value of the arrangement at close to $80 million in cash and non-capital investment over three years, the Premier's office disputed the figure without supplying a corrected one.
LIV Golf Adelaide, the Saudi-backed golf tour event first staged at The Grange Golf Club in 2023, follows the same non-disclosure pattern: Premier Malinauskas has said the hosting fee is commercially confidential, even as the government has separately committed around $45 million (approx.) of public money to redevelop the North Adelaide Golf Course — a project explicitly linked to keeping the tournament in Adelaide, under an extension agreement that runs the event through to 2031.
Layered under all of this is the older, homegrown festival calendar the government inherited rather than created: the Adelaide Fringe, tracing its lineage to 1960 and now the world's second-largest fringe festival; the curated Adelaide Festival, also from 1960; and WOMADelaide, the world-music festival in Botanic Park running since 1992. Here the government's role is funder and promoter rather than creator: the 2026-27 Budget continues around $20 million (approx.) over four years for the Fringe, and the Adelaide Festival received a further $3.1 million (approx.) in new state and philanthropic investment after its 2025 season. The South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC), which runs the government's Events South Australia division, has set an explicit target of growing leisure event expenditure in the state to $750 million by 2030 — a target that makes plain the calendar is treated as a pillar of economic strategy, not incidental tourism marketing.
The strongest case
A small state that has made itself impossible to ignore
South Australia has a genuine structural problem that its events strategy is a rational response to: a population of under two million, a manufacturing base that has shrunk sharply since Holden's Adelaide plant closed in 2017, and a national media market that defaults to Sydney and Melbourne. A dated, recurring calendar of festivals and sporting fixtures is one of the few instruments available to a state government that wants to put Adelaide in front of a national and international audience repeatedly rather than through one-off announcements. The scale is real: the 2025 Adelaide Fringe drew more than a million ticket sales and over five million attendances across five weeks, generating $197.7 million in total expenditure — of which $144.2 million was identified as new money entering the state economy — and supporting an estimated 16,128 jobs across the season (Adelaide Fringe, 2025 Impact Report). Visitors to the autumn arts season stay for just over a week on average and spend close to $4,800 each. Gather Round and LIV Golf Adelaide have each drawn tens of thousands of interstate visitors in the shoulder season: over 132,000 interstate visitors across Gather Round's first three years, and more than 79,000 visitor nights from LIV Golf's 2024 tournament alone, with the average LIV Golf visitor staying close to four nights (SATC, 2024-25 Annual Report). Unlike a single mega-event such as an Olympic bid, this calendar is spread across the year, filling hotel rooms in months that would otherwise be quiet, at a fraction of what a Games would cost a state this size. On the government's own account — and consistent across successive treasurers — that is a defensible use of a comparatively modest capital and marketing budget to build an industry that outlasts any single race weekend.
The evidence
Layered together, the state's own reporting credits its events calendar with substantial economic weight. The SATC's 2024-25 Annual Report states that major events added $546 million (approx.) to the South Australian economy in the year to December 2024. Individually, the 2025 Adelaide Fringe is credited with $197.7 million in total expenditure; the 2025 Gather Round with a "record" $113.9 million result (Premier of South Australia, media release, 2025); the 2025 Adelaide Festival, including WOMADelaide, with $62.6 million in gross expenditure and a $47.1 million net addition to Gross State Product; and the 2024 LIV Golf Adelaide tournament with $71.1 million, itself a reported 10 per cent increase on its first year.
The critique
The gap between the state's confidence about the benefits and its silence about the costs is the central problem with this strategy, not an incidental one. Economic-impact figures of the kind reported for the Fringe, Gather Round, LIV Golf and the Adelaide Festival are produced using standard input-output modelling that is well understood to run in one direction: it captures gross visitor and organiser spending but does not reliably net out "deadweight" — spending by South Australians who would have gone out and spent the money in Adelaide regardless — or displacement, the possibility that a hotel room filled by a Gather Round visitor is one an ordinary business traveller could not get, or paid more for. These are commissioned reports, produced by or for organisations with an institutional interest in reporting growth, and none of them has been tested by an independent reviewer. The Auditor-General's Department, whose annual reviews scrutinise the state's spending closely enough to have qualified its 2022-23 controls opinion over how some sporting and infrastructure grants tied to election commitments were selected and valued, has not published a dedicated review of the major-events program's cost-effectiveness.
South Australia knows exactly what it says its festivals are worth. It will not say what they cost.
That asymmetry compounds because so much of the actual public cost is confidential by design. Gather Round and LIV Golf Adelaide are each secured under hosting agreements the government has declined to publish in full, on the standard justification that disclosure would damage the state's position in future negotiations. That is a real commercial consideration, but it also means South Australians are asked to accept, on trust, that a return reported at $113.9 million for Gather Round or $71.1 million for LIV Golf exceeds whatever the government paid to secure it, without being able to check the arithmetic themselves. When reporting in early 2026 suggested the Gather Round arrangement could be worth close to $80 million in cash and in-kind investment to the AFL over three years, the Premier's office rejected the number but did not supply a corrected one — leaving the public with a disputed estimate rather than a fact.
Cost discipline on the one flagship event the government does disclose in full has also been uneven. The Adelaide 500's revival, budgeted at a combined $75.9 million (approx.) over four years in the 2022-23 Budget, ran roughly $14 million over its first-year allocation according to that year's Mid-Year Budget Review — a pattern of announced costs growing once delivery is under way. And the strategy's exposure is growing rather than shrinking. South Australia committed around $45 million (approx.) in public money to rebuild the North Adelaide Golf Course specifically to retain LIV Golf through 2031, only months before Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — LIV's principal financial backer — told the league in May 2026 that it would stop funding it, forcing LIV to seek an estimated $350–490 million (approx.) in emergency capital and shrink its schedule. The 2027 Adelaide event has already been downgraded from The Grange to the smaller Kooyonga Golf Club, and the government says it needs "clarity" from LIV by October 2026. South Australia is not merely subsidising an event here; it has built permanent public infrastructure around the continued existence of one financially troubled private competitor, with the golf course a sunk cost regardless of what LIV Golf does next.
The risk to the future
A decade of contracts, funded by a state that hasn't shown its workings
By the early 2030s, South Australia will be carrying simultaneous, decade-scale commitments to Gather Round (to 2029), LIV Golf Adelaide (to 2031) and the Adelaide 500 (to 2034), on top of the recurring arts calendar, at a public cost the state has largely chosen not to disclose and an economic return it has chosen to measure itself. None of that guarantees failure: the Adelaide Fringe's growth over more than six decades shows a festival can genuinely compound in value without heavy state subsidy driving it. But the sporting side of the portfolio is increasingly a bidding war against other states — South Australia's pursuit of the 2027 MotoGP round came at Victoria's expense — that tends to push hosting fees up over time rather than down, and at least one of its three flagship sporting contracts is now tied to a competitor whose own financial survival is genuinely in question. A state budget already carrying a rising net debt load has no independent, published test of whether any of these events pay for themselves once the true fee is weighed against the claimed return. If a future Auditor-General, or a future government forced to renegotiate one of these contracts in less favourable circumstances, ever does that arithmetic in public, the reckoning attaches to whichever administration is in office at the time — not necessarily the one that signed the deal.