Top of the pops

InSider, like many of our readers, is excited to be wrapping up for 2024.

Your weekly Friday scribe has had a busy year staying across Olivia Coleman’s Adelaide adventures, councillor shenanigans in Town Hall, underwhelming corporate rebrands and under-inflated Christmas decorations. Not even Victor Harbor’s horse tram horses escaped our scrutiny this year.

To celebrate the Christmas break, we thought we’d look back at the year that was by compiling a list of the people/things we mentioned most in 2024. Call it InSider’s 2024 wrapped – every other company is pushing one out these days, so why not us?

Coming in at number one as our most mentioned person/topic in 2024?

Henry Davis with one of his chickens in Aldgate. Photo: supplied

Adelaide City Councillor Henry Davis.

The lawyer, perennial Liberal preselection hopeful and Adelaide Hills chicken enthusiast has been an enormous well of content for us this year with a whopping 11 column mentions.

His first appearance in these pages came when, to the chagrin of his fellow councillors, he went on a golden cocktail jaunt to Bali to start the year.

He’s sustained our interest through 2024 with rap battles with the Lord Mayor, extraordinary cross-dressing antics and his penchant for putting an enormous number of questions on notice.

Asked for his reaction to being top of the InSider pops in 2024, Davis said: “It started with golden cocktails, then some crazy chickens then to Jane SlowMax-Smith.”

“We have dealt with some serious issues and had fun along the way,” he said.

“I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.”

Ominously, Davis, who is seeking Liberal preselection for the senate vacancy created by Simon Birmingham’s retirement, added: “2024 was just a warm up. Brace yourself for 2025.”

Coming in at second on InSider’s 2024 wrapped is RAA’s cursed mascot, Trev the Bee, who was thrust upon us and the rest of the state in May 2024. We’ve been going anaphylactic ever since.

Half-man, half-bee, very hairy, it’s Trev.

Trev has been described by us this year as “hideous”, “an abomination and a slight against nature itself”, “the chimeric spawn of Satan” and a “bristly weirdo” whose “existence laughs in the face of God”.

Despite our righteous fury, we’ve only watched Trev go from strength to strength.

The bee has moved from our screens to flesh with a $19.95 plush toy hitting the streets this month. Trev was also recognised at the Adelaide Advertising and Design Club awards in October.

We feel stung, and RAA’s chief marketing officer Michael Healy was more than happy to revel in our misery.

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“We understand there’s a lot of Trev plush toys under SA Xmas trees this year, so we just hope we don’t scar those lucky (?) children quite as much as we seem to have scarred the InDaily columnists this year,” he said.

Well played Trev.

Coming in third on our 2024 charts is the stalled Aboriginal cultural centre at Lot Fourteen, but more on that later…

Kicking the can down the road

With office workers across Adelaide winding down for the Christmas break, countless projects and reports are no doubt falling into the “that’s a 2025 problem” category.

But if you’re feeling any shame about kicking a task into the new year, just know that the entire South Australian government is guilty of the same thing.

South Australians will enter 2025 knowing as much about the stalled Tarrkarri Aboriginal cultural centre as they did one year prior.

For the second year in a row, the state government has pushed any decision on whether or not the project will go ahead into the New Year.

Advertising for the stalled Aboriginal cultural centre on North Terrace in 2023.

A quick recap: Tarrkarri was an initiative the former Marshall Government attempted to bring to life.

When he announced it ahead of the 2018 state election, former Premier Steven Marshall said it would be “the jewel in the crown” of the Liberals’ plan for the former Royal Adelaide Hospital site and had a price tag of $200 million.

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But Premier Peter Malinauskas put the Aboriginal cultural centre on ice in 2022 over concerns of a cost blowout and launched a review of the project.

The panel recommended the government spend “multitudes of $200 million” – potentially between $400 million to $600 million – to make Tarrkarri an internationally significant centre.

The most recent design concept for Tarrkarri – Centre for First Nations Cultures, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Woods Bagot. The centre was expected to display pieces sourced from the SA Museum, Art Gallery and State Library collections.

In the period since, the Premier and his ministers have said repeatedly they’d only progress with the project if a philanthropic partner or the Commonwealth government came on board to cover the extra costs.

In September of 2023, the Premier said the state cabinet wanted to decide the future of the Centre for First Nations Culture by the end of the year.

In December of 2023, InDaily asked whether it was feasible for cabinet to make a decision by the end of the year. The Premier said: “We had hoped that we might land a position before the end of the year, but now it’s likely to be the new year,” he said.

Twelve months later, we’re still left without a decision on Tarrkarri.

Throughout the year, InDaily and other outlets asked at press conferences about the status of the project and whether it had attracted extra funding. Reporters were told the government would not comment on the project until funding was secured.

This continued into December, with InDaily asking Treasurer Stephen Mullughan earlier this week at the Mid Year Budget Review whether there was an update on the funding structure for Tarrkarri.

Mullighan said: “We’re not going to pursue the project unless we’ve got a funding partner with the Commonwealth or maybe even with private contributors to the project.”

“I know that the Premier and other ministers have continued to make representations to the Commonwealth about this project, but until we get a positive response from them with a definitive offer of money on the table we’re not going to announce that we’re proceeding with a project because it just requires a level of expenditure that we don’t think we can justify going it alone on.

“We’re still interested in the project. The site’s still there…but we’re just waiting on a definitive answer about funding from the Commonwealth.”

With the federal election season coming early next year, InSider wonders if the extra cash could appear in an election promise. In the meantime, though, the can has been kicked well and truly down the road.

Mighty Kingdom can kick cans too 

In other news about delayed announcements, InSider has been patiently waiting for updates on a planned capital raise from ASX-listed video game developer Mighty Kingdom for weeks now.

The company, which recently said farewell to its third CEO since January 2023, has been in an extended voluntary suspension from trading on the ASX since November 6.

At the time, the firm said it had a pending announcement regarding a “proposed material acquisition”, and said it would resume trading on November 8. It then requested the voluntary suspension be extended until 12 November.

On that date, the company announced that the “proposed transactions are unlikely to proceed at this time in their proposed form”.

“The company is nevertheless focused on capital raising initiatives, which are at this point in time incomplete,” the company said.

Since then, the voluntary suspension has been extended 10 times. Most recently, Mighty Kingdom told shareholders it was still negotiating the capital raise that’s expected to be announced on December 23.

Fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me. Fool me ten times..?

We have Hozier at home

Last month, we reported that Adelaide had jumped on the global look-alike contest bandwagon with a Hozier edition of our own.

The trend began with a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest in NYC, crashed by Timmo himself, and made its way to SA with a group of Hozier look-alikes sweating through Victoria Square on a 41-degree day.

We checked back in with r/Hozier for the results and were pleased to see that first, second and third place were crowned. However it did beg the question, were these the only three that showed up?

Apparently not, with organisers confirming for InSider that a crowd of about 25–30 attended. A brave feat given the Irish musician is rarely sighted without layers.

There was consensus across the Reddit thread and TikTok video that first prize was well deserved, with the TikTok garnering a whopping 28.9K likes and 306 comments with 3,958 sharing the clip.

TikTok was, shall we say, a thirstier crowd, with comments like “biblically accurate Hozier” and “Hozier lookalike contest in my room please”.

Reddit was harsher: “Are they the only three that showed up? 2 & 3 look NOTHING like him” and “that reminds me, I have some things to iron today”.

Perhaps the biggest crime of the contest however was the fact that the song selected on the TikTok sharing the results was ‘Diet Pepsi’ by Addison Rae – a banger, but surely a missed opportunity.

Give or take a billion or so

Plenty of stuff lands in InSider’s email each day that is duly ignored… but a pre-prepared infographic is too good to pass up on a Friday afternoon before the Christmas break.

The lads (InSider assumes) from BestBrokers compiled a list of super-rich dudes (plus Melinda French Gates) who managed to get even richer last year. Yeah for them!

Notable is that mega-rich white guy Elon Musk didn’t make the cut, having only increased his $400 billion wealth by 38.61 per cent in the study period. InSider is confident he’ll pull his finger out in 2025 now that he’s co-president of the US of A.

Source: BestBrokers