Greenwash

"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 Centre’s 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 Sydney’s 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, OCA’s 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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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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