It appears that the usual default position for anyone holding an event is to declare that it is "an exciting tourism opportunity that will bring significant tourism dollars." This is code to demand that others should subsidize and and bear the risk.
True to form, Chris Hipkins appears to have been sucked in with the emotion and has said:
"The government ought to be proactive in finding ways to bring events like this to New Zealand and to help the Rally of NZ. Instead they have just sent them away. It's a do nothing government with no ideas for how to create jobs and grow New Zealand."We love motorsport and anything else that burns copious quantities of fossil fuels, however if Rally of NZ organisers are unable to extract private funding from the competitors, spectators, sponsors, media outlets etc then just maybe they should be be trying harder to raise the profile of their chosen event. Maybe the organisers don't have the ability to host future international events or maybe the scale of such an event has gotten beyond the capacity of a country of our size.
Frankly we do not know the answer, however if the expectation of corporate welfare was removed from the equation we suspect that the Kiwi petrol-head fraternity would extract from their masses the funding and the acumen that would host a kick-arse event of an appropriate scale that would reap substantial economic rewards.
We need to move on from the left wing mentality that governments create wealth and jobs. Tourism businesses and events should not be given favour and propped-up with centralist wealth redistribution. Unlike socialists wowsers, we have faith that the tourism and event marketing sectors will still be able to take on the world without the distraction of corporate welfare .
