Olympics? A bucket of Lego would cost less and give a better return

IOC President, Thomas Bach with Annastacia Palaszczuk. Picture: Greg Martin/IOC.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is excited. So excited that she has brought forward her government’s decision to make a bid to stage the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane.

“The pride that (a 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games) will bring to Queensland and across our nations as well, it could be a golden age for Queensland and it sets Queensland’s future up with jobs and investment for decades to come,” the Premier breathlessly said on Tuesday.

A golden age for Queensland? Wow. A quick Google flip reveals Premier Palaszczuk referred to a golden age for Queensland just last year, in respect of trade -- a circus of a different stripe. If my knowledge of the hierarchy of precious metals is anything to go by, should Brisbane host the 2032 Olympics, it would kick it up beyond gold, past platinum to a glorious rhodium age for Queensland.

If the bid does go ahead, we can expect this sort of rah-rah drivel from the Premier and a host of others on an almost daily basis.

Look, I’m not opposed to a party. I’ve been known to attend a few in my time and pop the lamp shade over my head at all the right times but I am concerned that when the circus pulls up the pegs, the bill arrives and people who didn’t get to sit in corporate boxes and who paid top dollar for the cheap seats if indeed they went along at all, have to pay a large chunk of it.

The lowest form of politics is the bread and circus variety but ironically, Olympics are circuses that cost a lot of bread.

It’s not as if we are dealing with this in the abstract. We’ve had the data for years. The 2000 Sydney Olympics cost the people of New South Wales somewhere between $1.7 and $2.4 billion in 2000 dollars.

The organisers of the Sydney Olympics, SOCOG, had prepared a detailed budget which estimated a cost of $3 billion with the public bearing just $363.5 million.

In 1998, the NSW Auditor-General took a red pen to the SOCOG budget, estimating the real cost of the games was almost $6 billion and the real cost to the public purse almost six times the projected figure.

It turned out the Auditor-General’s projected costs were spot on and SOCOG’s fell a long way short.

If it is an Olympic circus you are after, there are three main cost centres. Operational costs broadly cover the costs of staging the games, including technology, transportation, administration, security, catering and medical services.

Direct capital costs include building competition venues, the Olympic village, media centres. Indirect capital costs include transport infrastructure – rail, road and airports, hotel constructions and upgrading accommodations for guests and other public and private investments not directly related to staging the games.

According to the Auditor-General’s report, SOCOG had only counted “those direct costs which have an additional cash effect on the budgets of relevant agencies.”

Helpfully, the original Sydney bid budget did include all potential revenues, including $600 million of increases in tax income to state and federal governments.

The SOCOG budget was a feat of Vegas-style legerdemain. The people of New South Wales were sold a pup and after the circus moved on, the shortfall on the state’s budgets in the ensuing years saw great wads of cash heaved out of education and health spending to pay for the losses.

Economic cost analysis of staging an Olympics is more exacting now.

Unsurprisingly, equestrian centres and shooting ranges don’t make money and only by the most creative forms of accountancy can they be considered infrastructure. Similarly, great, stonking stadia that need 100,000 people to pass through the gates to stop them looking like mausoleums make little or no money in the short term.

Less than twenty years after the Sydney Olympic (ANZ) stadium was finished, it is now due for an expensive refurbishment which will put it out of action from 2020 until at least 2022. Its original capacity reduced from its Olympic heyday to now 80,000, it fills twice a year.

Brisbane has no world class stadium so one will need to be built. Whether by public or private investment or a cocktail of both, that cost will impact on the Queensland budget for very little return.

The other argument for staging the world’s largest circus is that people who aren’t Australian will feast their eyes on the innate beauty of Brisbane and more widely Queensland via television coverage and pop straight into a travel agent to book flights, head over and immerse themselves in their new-found Queensland-ness.

There is just one problem. In Sydney, tourist dollars did not materialise. Where there was growth in tourism in Australia post-Sydney 2000, it was less in Sydney than elsewhere in the country. In other words, travellers from around the globe studiously avoided the place.

There are other costs, too, of which it is impossible to attach a dollar figure. In New South Wales, security was boosted not just by additional police on the streets but with new laws to accompany them. During the Sydney Olympics the good people of the Emerald City could expect to be accosted by sniffer dogs or told in no uncertain terms to move on from public places or face criminal charges.

Hand on heart, the Carr Labor Government promised to revoke these laws after the cork popped out of the last Dom Perignon jeroboam, but they remain on the books. If you don’t believe me, head on down to Central Station and on an estimated 75 per cent false positive sniff from an otherwise adorable puppy, you will be obliged to drop your strides behind a concertinaed screen on a railway platform for some rough rubber glove love.

God only knows why premiers get so impetuous about Olympic circuses. Perhaps Palaszczuk’s obsession falls under the old, arcane measure of a good political leader -- that they ‘build things.’ Premier, have you heard of Lego? We could sit you down on the floor with a big bucket of it and it would cost a whole lot less with about the same return compared to what you’ve got planned.

Perhaps the best way to put this is in the manner of a parental lecture to an excitable teenager. You can have a party for two weeks or you can have schools properly resourced, hospitals adequately funded with surgical waiting lists reduced but you can’t have both.

That shouldn’t be a hard decision for anyone in the public service business to make.