Rugby World Cup a looming financial disaster?

So beyond the manufactured World Cup chatter regarding ADIDAS, fake Rugby World Cups and every sperm is sacred abstinence plans that block real news discussion about the fact we have 210 000 NZ children living in poverty while the richest 150 families skip to the bank with $7 billion, shouldn't the mainstream media be asking some much tougher questions about all the supposed gold at the end of the Rugby World Cup rainbow?

Are the Mainstream media muted in their criticism because they are all media sponsors and as such have a deeply vested interest in clapping along rather than questioning?

The canaries in the coalmine have been dropping like ADIDAS sponsored partys. The Eden Park luxury uber expensive penthouse suit extension at the posh part of the park was dramatically scaled back from a double story to a single story after a complete lack of interest in pre bookings. This elite part of the clientele are supposed to be the profit margins for these events, and to date the uber rich ain't commin. This is born out by the collapse last month of a local business set up with rugby legends of old as front men to hire exclusive homes out to these same class of rugby spectators. Add the appalling ticket sales to date alongside news that cheaper seats are being released because tour operators can't sell them, and increasingly it's looking less and less likely that the Rugby World Cup is going to be the vast money maker Treasury were hoping like hell it would be.

Why does any of this matter?

It matters because according to Treasury, the Rugby World Cup alongside the Christchurch rebuild will be the two main economic drivers of this year. Did I say two main, I meant 2 only. Now one doesn't need to be Ken Ring to predict that the Christchurch rebuild won't really start this side of December, so that leaves the Rugby World Cup and in terms of that, the latest news that we have used numbers so questionable it suddenly makes our supposed growth prospects very, very, very, very optimistic.

How optimistic? Well Christ on a bike, turns out the 95 000 tourists here for the Rugby World Cup are actually made up of 70 000 tourists who would normally be coming to NZ anyway, leaving a mere 25 000 actual rugby fans. Oh. My. God.

RWC: benefits 'wildly overestimated'
The economic benefits of the Rugby World Cup may have been wildly overestimated by the tournament's backers, a senior academic said yesterday as the Reserve Bank hosed down expectations of a $700 million boost to the economy.

So we've cooked the books to pretend that 95 000 rugby fans were coming when it's really just 15 000 to 25 000 rugby fans who will be actually turning up, drunkenly pissing off and annoying the normal 70 000 tourists we would get anyway.

When will we start to wake up to the possibility that we've been scammed here and what wider economic ramifications this scam causes to the wildly optimistic growth forecasts suggested by Treasury that enables the budget to look plausible?

Meanwhile homeless people on Queen St continue to be harassed every day by the $20 000 private security firm who have been charged with twice daily sweeps to make sure the tourists don't see that NZ is the 7th most unequal country in the OECD.

Charming.

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