As a sports nut, who will lose sleep to watch events held on the other side of the world and who cares enough about track and field to live-tweet the World Cross Country Championships, the decision to cancel the 2026 Melbourne Commonwealth Games filled me with a mighty … indifference.
To be honest, the Victorian premier Daniel Andrews’ announcement was chiefly notable for reminding me that Victoria was hosting the event.
It’s hard to get outraged about something not happening you forgot was even planned to occur.
And while questions should be asked about why the Victorian government thinks there is a cost blowout to $7bn (US$4.8bn) after initial estimates of $2.6bn, one hope is that this becomes a precedent not just for the Commonwealth Games, but all events pitched as being great for the economy.
There was little shock that premiers in other states greeted suggestions that they could take on the games with a uniform and quick, “yeah, nah”.
Commonwealth Games, just like Olympic Games, are notorious for being justified by economic benefits that are more observed in potential than actuality.
One report after the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games boasted the games created 21,128 full-time equivalent jobs over nine years. Given right now there are around 1.98m people employed full-time in Queensland, that is not a big boost.
The report also suggested the Games would increase Queensland’s economy by $2.5bn over those same nine years. That seems large until you realise that in 2018-19 the annual Queensland economy was $350.4bn.
Worse was that $1.4bn of these benefits was expected to come into the economy from 2018-19 until 2020-21.
I sure hope nothing happened to disrupt that prediction…
That’s not to say the games were bad or should not have happened, only that justifying them on economic grounds is a silly way to do it.
A similar smokescreen is that such games and elite sports foster increased participation in sport and thus reduce obesity and heart disease.
Such claims are as fanciful as those made in the 1990s that kids around Australia were all learning how to bowl leg spin due to Shane Warne.
Unfortunately, there is no real link between elite sport and junior participation.
In 2009, the Crawford Report in the Future of Sport in Australia found that while Australia had “been very successful” at the Olympics from 1996 to 2008, there had “also been a ‘blowout’ of adult and child obesity and little change in participation numbers in sport”.
Pointedly it also noted that “nor does hosting major sporting events such as the Olympic or Commonwealth Games guarantee sustained increases in participation”.
It’s not just major games. Each year the Melbourne Formula One is justified as generating employment and revenue. But it’s all a boondoggle.
Ernst and Young, for example, estimate the Grand Prix creates 734 full-time jobs each year. Given the event cost the Victorian government $78.1m, that is $106,403 per job.
We spend far too much time using economics to justify things.
You could for example argue raising the jobseeker payment above the poverty line is smart economic policy. But do we really need economic modelling to tell us that lifting people out of poverty is a good and right thing to do?
There is nothing wrong with governments paying for events that otherwise would mean most people would never get to experience them – be it a Grand Prix, art exhibitions or even funding for regional cinemas to keep them open.
But remove the dodgy economic justifications, and you are left having to explain that you are funding them because you think they will be popular or maybe just good for the soul and society.
It actually forces you to justify why you spent the money on that and not on more social housing or more medical research or raising jobseeker, or indeed junior sports.
Without the facade of economic modelling, you are faced with awkward questions in which you need to explain why you are unable to properly fund other things that mean many people in this rich country go without.
Too often the cost of things is ignored because of mythical benefits, while things that provide actual benefit to society are avoided because of a focus purely on the price tag.
Yes, we should fund sport and sports events and arts and culture, but we should not rely on economic modelling spruced up by consultants paid to get a good outcome to do so.
If instead governments justified things because they believed them good for society, that might make voters think about some other things in society that also would be good, and indeed, necessary.
