Further to Brian’s comments about state sponsored tourism, it gets much worse here in South Australia, where the state government not only advertises for tourists, but funds ephemeral events to attract them. Brian would assume that everything else in this state is a mess- and he’d be quite right.
The state government is addicted to these things, and has been for a long time. We have just finished the Adelaide Festival of Arts which I read in the Adelaide Advertiser’s dead tree version cost the taxpayer $7 million. A far cry from the start of the Festival in 1960, which was wholly privately funded. And it’s not only the artistic classes that are well catered for. The Clipsal 500 motor race was held last weekend, a festival of motorsport for the petrol head community. The spending of public money on motor sport is also a long Adelaide tradition which I wrote about here and even in the Age of Google, it is quite difficult to get an actual number in answer to the question “how much taxpayer money was spent on this race?”.
Given that, and the way the Adelaide Advertiser keeps telling us how good it is for our economy, one is inclined to think the worst.
Unhappy is the taxpayer forced to pay for public circuses.
No kidding. My city (Houston, TX) recently hosted the Superbowl and tried for the Olympics. Thankfully we failed on the Olympics bid. We were told that they would bring in lots of tourist dollars and make the city a “world-class city”. In addition, we’ve spent loads of public money on building various sports arenas, including a new football (America) stadium right next to our existing stadium.
The NFL has studies that show that the Superbowl brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. A number of economists take issue with the studies, pointing out that they neglect the fact that money spent on bowl-related activities would mostly be spent anyway and that comparing hotel occupancy and sales tax revenues to previous years shows little difference.
Oh, and we don’t necessarily spend public money directly, instead reducing or eliminating taxes and other subsidies that let the proponents claim that “no taxes were spent on the [stadium|Superbowl|etc…]”.
Bolie IV