"Openness
not the Australian way: Games chief" was the headline of the
Sydney Morning Herald after the Sydney Olympic Coordination
Authority continued to refuse to release documents relating to the
tendering process for Olympic facilities. The Herald reported
that the head of the Authority, David Richmond, had "said there
was a commercial culture in Australia which made it difficult to
release the information, even though similar documents were made
public in the privately funded Olympic Games in Atlanta and Salt
Lake City" (Moore 1998).
The
Australian media were effectively closed to criticism of the Sydney
bid before the winner was announced. The Australian Centre for Independent
Journalism published a special Olympic Edition of its newsletter
Reportage which covered a number of stories that were not
being covered in the general media. The Centres director,
Wendy Bacon (1993) noted that the few journalists who wrote critical
stories had been "attacked as unpatriotic, eccentric, inaccurate
and negative". Meanwhile, public support for the bid had been
mobilized using a "pervasive media and marketing exercise"
which included putting the bid logo on milk cartons, car registration
stickers, buses, and many other places.
The
state government began releasing information about the contamination
of the site to the media shortly after the bid had been won, carefully
framing the information in terms of the clean-up. "Restoring
Homebush Bay for the 2000 Olympics, billed as the biggest environmental
repair job undertaken in Australia, is reversing decades of environmental
abuse at a cost of $83 million," reported an article in the
Sydney Morning Herald, which went on to reassure the public
that the clean-up would make the site perfectly safe.
After
it was announced that Sydney would host the 2000 Games, the Freedom
of Information Act for New South Wales was amended to ensure that
Sydney Olympic committee documents could not be accessed. This decision
was criticized by the NSW Ombudsman, who pointed out that the exemptions
to the Act had been added without public consultation (Totaro 1994).
The
amendment specifically denied the public access to contracts, proposals
for the various Olympic facilities including the athletes
village, the criteria for selecting contractors, progress reports,
committee meetings, and public opinion surveys. Contractors who
worked on the facilities had to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Even the contract between the NSW government and the International
Olympic Committee remained a state secret.
In
1996, Herald environment writer Murray Hogarth reported on
the continuing secrecy surrounding the Games: "Though we are
less than four years out and closing fast, there are five rings
of secrecy enveloping key aspects of Sydneys Olympics. They
are the often-impenetrable International Olympic Committee (IOC),
the State Government with its spin doctors, the 30-year Cabinet
secrecy rules and the ban on Freedom of Information requests, SOCOG
and its media Games-keepers, OCAs ICAC-inspired probity requirements,
and finally big business, with a tangled web of confidentiality
agreements."
In
1997, Nathan Vass of the Herald reported that the state government
was considering setting up a multi-million dollar strategy to deal
with an expected 5,000-or-so international non-accredited journalists
who would be hanging around Sydney before and during the 2000 Games
looking for stories. Such journalists, unlike the 15,000-or-so officially
accredited journalists there to report on the sporting events, were
likely to be the source of critical stories.
In
preparation for this feared onslaught of scrutiny, the Olympics
manager of the Australian Tourist Commission recommended a "crisis
media management program" to deal with negative stories about
the environment, the ozone layer and Aboriginal issues. The plan
called for seeking money from Olympic sponsors to establish a centre
to house and respond to such journalists, thereby ensuring that
"the non-accredited media present Sydney in a very positive
fashion".
In
the years following the winning of the bid, the story of the toxic-waste
contamination of Homebush Bay was well covered by the Australian
media and also received some international coverage, especially
in Germany. But as journalists from throughout the world began arriving
in Sydney to cover the Olympics, were they able to see through the
"media management" that wasbeing geared up to greet them?
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References:
Bacon,
Wendy, (1993) 'Win or Lose: Media's Role Questioned', Reportage,
September, p. 2.
Hogarth,
Murray, (1996) 'Five-ring Circus: The Secret Games', Sydney Morning
Herald, 26 October, pp. 1s, 4s.
Moore,
Matthew, (1998) 'Openness not the Australian way: Games chief',
Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1998, p. 2.
Totaro,
Paola, (1994) 'Ombudsman attacks new FOI exemption', Sydney Morning
Herald, 8 August.
Vass,
Nathan (1997) 'Special Olympic plans to tame the media beasts',
Sydney Morning Herald, 24 June.
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