Former Treasurer Kevin Foley and then-Premier Mike Rann on election night, 2010. Photo: James Baker, AAP.

The former Treasurer and Deputy Premier now sits on various boards and runs his own consultancy – which he reveals advised the Japanese Government in its unsuccessful bid for Australia’s $50 billion Future Submarines contract.

In a candid and revelatory discussion on Adelaide podcast Rooster Radio, he shines an extraordinary light on the machinations that saw the Adelaide Oval redevelopment green-lit – a momentum-changer that contributed to the Rann Government’s re-election in 2010 – including how he as Treasurer concealed knowledge of a multi-million dollar budget blackhole that would certainly have cost Labor victory.

He said to them: ‘Understand one thing: any of you guys rat-f*ck me, I will f*cking destroy you’

He described how the situation came to a head in an explosive high-level meeting held in secret with senior executives from the AFL, the Adelaide Crows, Port Adelaide Power, the SANFL and the SACA.

“By this stage [then-AFL CEO Andrew] Demetriou had totally bullied both the SANFL and the Crows into submission,” Foley explained.

“He was totally brutal: he basically said, ‘You’re doing this [relocating to Adelaide Oval] or I’m going to cause havoc’.”

Foley reiterated a previous assertion that Demetriou had threatened to relocate the Power’s home games to the city, tear up a contract that ensured one AFL game a week must be played at AAMI Stadium and leave the Crows stranded at West Lakes.

But, by his telling, it was the former Premier that really put the frighteners on the sporting executives.

Rann scared me: this guy, he takes no prisoners

“Rann could be a really scary… he was really agitated and pissed off, which was a little odd because this was supposed to be a harmonious meeting, but this was how Mike operated,” he recalled.

“He looked around the room and [asked each of them]: ‘You’re all in?’

“He said to them all: ‘Understand one thing: any of you guys rat-f*ck me, I will f*cking destroy you!’”


He said Demetriou, along with now-CEO Gillon McLachlan and the league’s communications manager, left the room bemused.

“And it’s become folklore in AFL House [because] they’d never heard the term ‘rat-f*ck’. Rann and I used it all the time – well, Rann did and I copied it… but I’d go and see these guys and they’d say ‘Hey, been rat-f*cked lately?’

“They loved it, they thought it was a hoot… so they introduced the term rat-f*ck into the AFL!”

The full podcast is below – but be warned, there is some colourful language!



As it transpired, “no-one did rat-f*ck us”, but Foley still had a hard task warming his Labor colleagues to the plan.

Rann’s belligerence, he revealed, was rooted in the fact he was never in favour of the proposal to start with.

His political gut feel was that this could be bad, this could upset a lot of people and it’s not going to be clever politics

It was taken up initially with the then-Treasurer by Demetriou, who took Foley to task when he announced a $100 million upgrade to AAMI Stadium in the 2008 budget, a cash-splash that was set to be the centrepiece of a wholesale rejuvenation of the western suburbs, including a tramline extension to West Lakes.

Foley recalls Demetriou telling him words to the effect of: “What the f*ck have you done that for? That’s a pile of dog sh*t down there!”


The AFL favoured a revamped Adelaide Oval, but “Mike was very hesitant because [he was worried about] the state seat of Adelaide, the North Adelaide residents – and he wasn’t sure what [then-Adelaide MP Jane Lomax-Smith’s] view would be on it”.

“His political gut feel was that this could be bad, this could upset a lot of people and it’s not going to be clever politics,” Foley recalled.

“I had a direct opposite view – I thought this could be a political game-changer and be incredibly popular, but he wasn’t convinced.”

He said the Government even did internal polling, which was “iffy”, suggesting Labor “could lose the seat of Adelaide” – which, in the event, it did.

Foley, as has been previously revealed, hijacked Rann with a surprise meeting of the AFL stakeholders in Melbourne – “he got really sh*tty because I set him up” – but the Premier was ultimately convinced.

Yet if the stakeholders were on board, the cabinet was not.

“If we had to put it to a vote I wouldn’t have got it through cabinet,” Foley revealed.

“But the Premier supported it, Pat Conlon got in behind it and a couple of other key ministers, so we got it through [but] support was very lukewarm.

“There were certain individuals conniving with my colleagues to try to stop me doing this.”

In this climate, shortly before the 2010 election, with the upgrade having been officially announced as Labor policy, came another game-changer – one that was instrumental in Foley’s political downfall.

I couldn’t tell anyone, because we were promising to build this Oval for $450 million… so I kept it to myself

“The mistake I made was I popped in to see [SANFL chief] Leigh Whicker, and he said ‘mate, $450 million is not going to be enough [to get the project done]’.”

Foley was told another $85 million was needed to clear SACA’s debt.

“I said ‘Oh sh*t’, [and thought] ‘oh well, we can’t do anything between now and the election, we’ll have to wait till after’ – if we won.

“I couldn’t tell anyone, because we were out there promising to build this Oval and in all our costings it was $450 million, so I can’t tell Rann, I can’t tell our campaign committee – because all of a sudden our costings have got a hole in it… so I kept it to myself.”

Foley’s stunning admission will be cold comfort to the Liberals, who ultimately imploded in the final week of the 2010 campaign on the back of frontbencher Steven Griffiths’ costings blunders – with Foley the prime aggressor over their budgeting blackhole.

While concealing the Oval blowout helped get Labor over the line, it came back to bite Foley when “I had to explain to my colleagues after we won the election that we needed this extra dough, and they had to approve it – much to their disgust in many ways”.

He later denied in parliament that he had ever been briefed about the extra $85 million required, which saw him narrowly survive a no-confidence motion after he apologised, explaining that he had forgotten ever having had the briefing.

“I’d misled parliament, no question,” he acknowledges now, but insists the crucial point is whether he had done so deliberately.

“I didn’t, in all honestly… no-one probably believed me in the parliament at the time [but] I just instinctively answered a question in the wrong way.”

In the event, it was Weatherill – Foley’s long-time factional adversary – who was the electoral beneficiary of the Oval’s grand opening, two years after Rann and Foley left office in concurrent by-elections.

But Foley – who Weatherill challenged for the deputy leadership after the 2010 election, largely off the back of his ‘crash-through-or-crash’ style typified by the Oval campaign – says now that Weatherill has become “a bloody good Premier”.

“And he surprised me – he’s a lot better Premier than he was a minister,” he said.

“This guy has stepped up in a way that I didn’t think he was capable of… [he previously had] a narrower band of views, largely from a left-wing perspective, but when he became Premier he just blossomed.

“He decided he had to have a much broader position on a lot of important things, and I think that’s what a leader has to do.”

People like Jay Weatherill desire leadership from the moment they get into politics

He reveals he had designs on the leadership many times but ultimately “didn’t have the courage” to challenge Rann, with whom he ultimately formed a close bond.

“I didn’t have the guts or the courage or the overwhelming belief or desire to be Premier… if I had, I would have challenged Mike on at least three occasions and probably knocked him off,” he revealed.

“I got excited when people said ‘let’s count some numbers and we might be able to get you up [as Leader of the Opposition before the 2002 election]’, but I didn’t have the guts.

“Rann scared me: this guy, he takes no prisoners, and [you’ve] got to be prepared to cop a lot of sh*t, and I didn’t have the courage to do it.

“People like Jay Weatherill, Mike Rann, Kevin Rudd – not so much Tony Abbott – but certainly Malcolm Turnbull… these are people who desire leadership from the moment they get into politics, and their whole career, in their view, it’s as if it will be measured by whether they become Prime Minister or Premier. And I don’t have that.”

Foley, who spoke openly during his time in politics about his battles with depression, said his successes as Treasurer came because of the “security blanket” of knowing that “at the end of the day I had Mike there as leader”.

“I wasn’t prepared to knock a bloke off to get there,” he said.

“It’s funny in a lot of ways because I didn’t really know Mike very well [at first] and the minute I got into parliament there was immediate talk that I’d be a future leader – there were only [10] of us there!

People looked at us like we were Nazi war criminals

At the time, in the wake of the State Bank collapse, “people looked at us like we were Nazi war criminals”, but the sense of being pariahs galvanised the small Labor caucus and “we just threw the kitchen sink at [the Liberals] and kicked the sh*t out of them”.

“It was like a boxing match – the more you belted someone in the face, the better you felt… the more you destroyed someone’s career, the better you felt.

“It was macabre, and sick in many ways [but] they were their own worst enemies, the Liberals self-destructed,” he said, detailing regular leaks to the then-Opposition from high-level Government sources.

“You would go to your letterbox and there would just be a document sitting there… it would happen certainly every couple of months. I had one Liberal minister ring me, and my wife answered and said ‘there’s a ‘Mr Anonymous’ on the phone’. Mike Rann got a [call] from a Liberal minister 10 minutes before Question Time telling him what questions to ask.”

But all the while, Labor’s own internal disquiet rumbled on, albeit not as publicly.

“Mike, without doubt, had one eye over his shoulder with me for some time, and there were many times in Opposition where Rann’s popularity was that of a piece of dog sh*t, almost,” Foley said.

“[But] I think Mike worked out pretty quickly that he had my measure; I think he realised I didn’t have the ticker to take him on.

“When we got into Government he could have been very aloof to me, but in fact he was quite the opposite… the guy was just so inclusive, [and we had a] genuine friendship.

“It would be like knifing your mates at your footy club… and I didn’t want to do it – and that disappointed a lot of my colleagues who wanted me to step up.

“There were a lot of people who didn’t want Jay Weatherill to be the next Premier – they wanted Kevin Foley to be the next Premier.”

He concedes through his various well-documented public indiscretions “I tarnished my brand pretty badly”.

“But I am what I am,” he said.

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