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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-10-17 Daily Xml
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LANCE ARMSTRONG

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Leader of the Opposition) (15:38): We all have heroes, and to many Lance Armstrong was just that: seven times a Tour de France winner, cancer survivor, triathlete, Tour Down Under competitor—drug tsar. Lance Armstrong's hero's image is a mirror in a thousand pieces. The man lauded and feted here and around the cycling world has been exposed as a cheat of the worst kind: a phony, a hypocrite, a virus infecting his team and the events in which he competed.

He disgraced the Tour Down Under. He has disgraced South Australia and, in my estimation, he has done so with the complicity of the then premier, Mike Rann, and his government and cabinet. For three consecutive years (2009, 2010 and 2011) Rann and his entourage took millions of dollars, perhaps as much as $3 million per race, out of the pockets of hardworking South Australians into offshore bank accounts held by the contemptible, weak-veined Armstrong.

In 2003, when a Tour Down Under stage winner was found to have used performance-enhancing drugs, local organisers said nothing publicly. Italian rider, Giampaolo Caruso, won stage 5 of the Tour Down Under and tested positive for an anabolic agent. That October, the UCI announced Caruso had been banned for six months. The Tour Down Under organisers then awarded the prize for that stage to second-placed Steffen Wesemann. Organisers did not announce that to spectators, the state or this parliament. Because of that failure, the public could not have guessed that the Italian was no longer officially the winner. According to race director Mike Turtur, and I am quoting him directly now:

It would have been published on the International Cycling Union's website that he was found to be in violation of the code and that's how it's dealt with.

That's how it's dealt with? Rubbish; that is how it was not dealt with. This sordid, grubby world is not Lance Armstrong's alone, it involves Mike Rann and his cabinet, because Armstrong did more than cheat his way around three tours. Armstrong and Rann were cheating and corrupting the process of open and accountable government in this state.

While Armstrong was here ostensibly to race, what he did was campaign for Mike Rann in the upcoming election. If Armstrong had fallen off his bike, he would not have had to go to a public hospital. He would not have had to use Adelaide's appalling public transport—he was supplied with a car. He did not get sacked while broken industries were locking their factory doors. He did not have to face the state's crippling public debt, watch our economy shrink compared to other states or live under the right-wing goons who ran the ALP.

He admitted he did not know what the issues in the campaign were, or who was running against Rann, but he sat there on the stage next to the premier and told voters to support 'his mate Ranny', and here, for us in Australia, is the real scandal. Mike Rann looked after Armstrong with cash and kind. We deserve to know how much he was paid, how much public money was funnelled through Rann's slush fund to fund this vote-enhancing drugster. This government, this Premier and this tourism minister say its contract with Armstrong is commercial-in-confidence. It is 'con-mercial'. It is a con.

I want to know if there was a morals clause in that contract. When the government was putting its signature on that document, it already knew that Armstrong was under strong suspicion of using EPO. Despite his former media secretary, Jill Bottrall, going on ABC radio this morning in a lame, rambling attempt to exonerate her boss, the evidence is quite clear: there were enough grounds existing, and quite public at the time, for a morals clause to be included; that is, if Armstrong cheated, all bets would be off and the millions we paid to him would be returned.

Mr Armstrong, I want that money back. Mr Premier, I want that money back. Ms Minister, I want that money back. I want Mike Rann, his former tourism minister, Jane Lomax-Smith, his former sports minister, Michael Wright, and his former press secretary and apologist, Jill Bottrall, to apologise to me and to the people of South Australia. I want our honour as a state restored. I want a Tour Down Under I can be proud of once again. I want an end to drugs in cycling and I want an end to vote buying. I want Lance Armstrong's apology for letting down millions of Australians who believed in him and I want an apology from Mike Rann, and from Labor, for using our money, tax money, for manipulating the 2010 'Lance Armstrong' election.

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