A horse clip-clops into a pub.

The bartender looks up and says “Why the long face?”

That should be the end of the joke but not if you’re one of South Australia’s police greys. So far, the joke is on them.

Not only do they have the gorgeous long faces they were born with, they now find themselves cantering on one of the weird, dopey and avoidable public policy loops that are something of an Adelaide specialty, an equine version of the Britannia Roundabout.

It all started to go wrong for the horses of the SA Police Mounted Operations Unit when the Malinauskas Labor Government decided to boot the nags out of their tranquil home among the olive groves at the Thebarton police barracks, on the very fringe of the CBD.

The government will bulldoze the heritage police buildings on the 20,000 square metre barracks site to build its promised new $3.2 billion Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

The former Marshall Liberal Government had plans to build the new WCH on the railyards adjacent to the Royal Adelaide Hospital – a sensible, cheaper idea.

But Premier Peter Malinauskas argues that location won’t allow for future expansion so he’s decided the police barracks are the bees’ knees, even though the project cost is blowing out by the hour and the new children’s hospital will be separated from the RAH by a rail bridge.

They think patients and clinicians might need to travel between the two hospitals by driving golf buggies in the open air. What could possibly go wrong with that concept?

The Thebarton police barracks was identified after a review of six potential sites by Jim Hallion, a public service supremo in previous Labor Governments.

The Hallion review’s conclusions left me wondering why anyone would think bulldozing a heritage precinct in the park lands would be a good option apart from one notable point – park lands land is free land.

The Premier doubled down on his luck, when it was revealed the mounted police unit could be relocated to a “run down” section of the south park lands.

Have you noticed that whenever a government wants to develop something on park lands, the area suddenly becomes “run down” in that exact same spot?

Maybe that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t, not by a long straight.

All this could have been avoided if the government had simply stuck with the original railyards site for the new kiddies hospital.

The issue ignited a heritage and park lands protest by the usual suspects, only this time it was supercharged by a formidable, articulate advocate from Labor’s recent past – former Labor Minister, now the city’s Lord Mayor, Jane Lomax-Smith.

It’s not a good look for a Labor Government, even a Right-wing Labor Government, to be painted as both wanton destroyers of the city’s built heritage and tramplers of park lands space.

It’s worse when the protestors see the Liberals, led by David Speirs, an excellent environment minister in the former Marshall Government, as their white knights.

In an embarrassing backdown, Premier Malinauskas dumped the south park lands option for grazing the horses and housing the mounted unit’s new multi-storey office and training buildings.

They’ll now go on an acreage of disused Adelaide Airport land, once used to agist horses. This land, on the cusp of the airport runway, genuinely deserves the “run down” label.

The plan is that when the greys are needed, they’ll be loaded onto floats and taken to a new CBD staging area – a “run down” pocket handkerchief of vacant land on the corner of King William and Wright Streets, adjacent to the “run down” Supreme Court buildings.

Already this plan has caused a flurry of worry from local businesses and allegedly some learned judges.

This week, FIVEaa breakfast’s David Penberthy aired an email from an Adelaide City Council source expressing concerns from local residents, including that rats and mice would be attracted to the hay and feed strewn about by the greys.

The horses may yet end up at another option at Gepps Cross or maybe Oona-Woop-Woop.

If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then that is what’s happened with the government’s Plan B for the horses.

It’s a messy solution. You can bet that Police Commissioner Grant Stevens is not thrilled.

This sort of argy-bargy isn’t confined to Adelaide.

The new Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade headquarters in Canberra was delayed for years because it threatened to erase a small patch of lowland temperate grasslands.

Time dims the memory, but the long grass was home to either the endangered Earless Dragon, the Golden Sun Moth or the understandably threatened Striped Legless Lizard. Or maybe all three.

But it’d be a mistake to presume that the Premier’s backflip was all about the many rare revegetated plant species in what he saw as a patch of dust only good for horses.

It is also being influenced by a political struggle over two key seats where these issues loom large – Adelaide, won by Labor’s Lucy Hood last year, and the ultra-marginal Dunstan, held by former Liberal Premier Steven Marshall, where a by-election is expected sooner rather than later.

Labor was spooked by Lomax-Smith on nightly TV news bulletins, acting like the de facto MP for her old seat of Adelaide, going in to bat for issues that matter to many locals.

And the Liberals know that while park lands and heritage issues aren’t front and centre for voters trying to hold onto their homes in marginal outer suburban seats, they matter in seats like Dunstan.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course, but these horses hold a special place in South Australian hearts.

An Adelaide Airport site has been chosen as a possible new home for the police horse barracks. Photo: Matt Turner/InDaily

The SAPOL greys are “unique amongst mounted police units across the world”, the SA Police Historical Society explains.

While our police force used some grey-coloured horses in the late 1800s, their numbers grew during World War I when the Army procured most of SA’s available, darker-coloured horses.

Lighter-colour horses weren’t deemed suitable for “military purposes”.

When the SAPOL Mounted Cadre was formed in 1951, it became official policy that police horses were to be exclusively “greys”.

The horses aren’t just popular with children at the Christmas Pageant, or late-night revellers in Hindley Street, they’re highly effective when things turn ugly.

Back in the day, I was covering a rowdy night-time protest outside a hall in Findon where One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was the star attraction.

When a group of right-wing thugs literally punched their way through the crowd, all hell was about to break loose.

The greys, nostrils flared, their ghostly white shapes towering above us, held the crowd back and calmed things down.

All this could have been avoided if the government had simply stuck with the original railyards site for the new kiddies hospital.

But the Malinauskas Cabinet increasingly looks to be edging into the red zone on the Smug Index.

Before opting to trash a heritage precinct, and make the greys homeless, it would have been smart to first have all its boxes ticked.

On a far bigger scale, we’re now seeing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese trying to retrofit legal assurances on limits to the proposed Voice to parliament, walking backwards from the deliberately vague wording of the referendum question to change the Constitution.

If most major public opinion polls are any guide, it may be too little, too late.

In politics, it is rarely a good idea to put the cart before the horse.

Matthew Abraham is InDaily’s political columnist. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.