Commercial-in-confidence

For the right to operate the Australian Grand Prix in two weeks time the Victorian Government will pay Bernie Ecclestone $47 million.  In a civilised society politicians who abuse public trust in this way should be sacked and then jailed.  It is a totally disgraceful waste of public monies.

The $47m figure has only just been revealed.  Apparently Ecclestone threatened to take the Grand Prix away from any Government which reveals his fee. State Premier Brumby when asked of the fee claimed it is 'commercial-in-confidence'.  I wonder.  I suppose I have a nasty, suspicious mind but could it be that political leaders from Kennett to Brumby have paid these bribes to Ecclestone to secure a handful of petrol head votes from among the morons who go in for this 'sport'.  It would spoil the pollie fun to have to tell the adult population of Victoria - most of whom have zero interest in this retarded activity - that they are paying for it.

The Auditor General of Victoria claims that benefits from the Grand Prix had been overstated by $100 million.   There is no demonstrated net economic benefit to the state from it. Let's end this nonsense foreover - no more attempts to buy a few lousy votes for an environmentally-unsound, pointless activity.  If moron petrol heads want to watch this sort of activity let them pay for it entirely and include in that the cost of the externalities (reduced amenity values, emissions, noise and increased traffic congestion around the venue).

Golf & the Australian Open Championship

I attended the final day's play of the Australian Open at Royal Sydney Golf Club.   I endorse entirely Robert Allenby's criticisms of the organisers of this event and of the attending Aussie print media.  The hounding of the visiting American professional John Daly because he smashed a spectator's camera against a tree was stupid.  The foolish fan rammed the illegally-held camera (cameras were supposed to be banned at the event) in Daly's face while Daly was taking a difficult shot.  Also stupid was the positioning of a booze-centre at the back of the 17th green from where offensive, drunken louts hurled insults and hooted at players who hit bad shots or indeed anyone who they took a dislike to.  It was an  ugly interlude in what was otherwise a fascinating day.

I followed Allenby for a while that Sunday. What a great golfer and what a genuinely decent guy he is. He chatted amiably with spectators and played entertaining, aggressive golf - Allenby is a star and hardly a prude.  His comments should be taken seriously by golf officialdom and the gutter press.

Why is it that so many Australians cannot enjoy watching sports without getting aggressively and moronically drunk? Why cannot the Aussie media ever resist the temptation for a bit of cheap scandal?

Howard Government destroyed our youth with user pays

It will take years - possibly decades - for the wickedness of the Howard Government to loosen its grip on Australian society. And it is our young brightest minds, our ‘future’ who are paying the highest price.

In today’s Sunday Pravda we learn that the La Trobe University women’s football team had to forgo trips to Vietnam and Thailand because they had to pay $700 to go to the Gold Coast in Queensland to play football. Prior to the Howard Government’s abolition of compulsory student union fees they could have got to the Gold Coast for only $300 with the remaining portion of their costs then being cross subsidised by non-sports playing students. At this cost they could afford to go to Queensland and take an overseas trip.

It is worse than this elsewhere – the Deakin University volleyball club has folded.

It just isn’t fair! Hang your head in shame, John Howard. Shame! Shame! Shame!.....

Sunday golf lesson with Kevin Rudd

Almost no politics, no economics for most of yesterday - I’ve been practising my golf. I’ve been watching, then pausing, bits of a clip which shows you how to make the perfect golf swing. It really is pretty good and it is free.

Then my Sunday was disturbed by the big event - the debate at 7-30pm between John Howard and Kevin Rudd. It left me unsettled. JWH looked a bit nervous initially and Rudd was throwing clichés and slogans left, right and centre. A bit like the aimless, somewhat neurotic, character of my golf game. JWH the optimist and Rudd the gabby, baloney merchant espousing the need for an unspecified plan to take Australia out of its currently deprived state. We are all facing imminent peril unless we elect Rudd and pursue his personal ‘vision’ for Australia and its ‘working families’ (repeated 50 times).

Any politician who tells the Australian people to adopt his vision should be turned into Pal.

Rudd is dangerous because he does not understand his vision is based on romantic deceit. Let all the poor kids have laptops. Working families told him so.... He was unconvincing.

It is hardly surprising that I think Rudd would be a calamity as PM. 2050 carbon targets with no idea what they will be in 2020 and criticising JWH for not pursuing this idiocy. How will he cut petrol prices and better the work of endless ACCC inquiries? How will he cut home prices and would you want to? This dill still wants us to accept culpability for damage done 100 years ago to Australia’s aboriginals. How will he enginner an 'education revolution' with a pittance? It is verbiage without policy substance.

Rudd will cut petrol prices and make housing less expensive – no he won’t. It is nonsense.

But Rudd will do well among those who value glibness. The Channel 9 worm endorsed him as did a foolish post at Troppo by James Farrell that I commented upon.

The key issue is whether this debate will disturb my Tuesday golf game?

Probably.

Ben Cousins

The AFL’s Ben Cousins was arrested yesterday in Perth and charged with allegedly possessing unspecified illegal drugs. His arrest seems to have been pre-planned by police and news camera people were on hand to photograph Cousins, naked from the waist up, waiting in his car as it was searched and then as he was taken away. Cousins seems to have ongoing problems with methamphetamine. It is a tragedy for this good-looking, athletic man with an engaging personality to stumble in this way.

I can’t help thinking that earlier this month his buddy Chris Mainwaring died after what seems to be a bout of drug taking. Cousins was with him just before he died and was a pallbearer at his funeral.

The wolves are baying for Cousins blood. Caroline Wilson in the Melbourne edition of Pravda argues that Cousins’ career should now be permanently terminated – he should be sacked from the West Coast Eagles. Send him off to the Gulag, Caroline.

I am strongly anti-drugs but the treatment of Cousins seems completely over the top. The guy is recovering from a chemical dependency and relapses are almost inevitable due to ongoing cravings even after withdrawal has ended. There were additional pressures on Cousins particularly with the recent tragic death of a close friend.

Give this guy a break. Punish his illegal drug use and his refusal to take a drug test in the normal way. But leave it at that. How will a media-generated appeal for blood and a program of seeking to destroy Ben Cousins’ career help anyone?

Update: Cousins was in possession of a valium-type drug. How ridiculous! This is a widely-used, though, addictive tranquiliser. That Cousins was using it is consistent with my view that he was under pressure from the death of his recent friend and from his cessation of use of amphetamines. He was sacked from his club yesterday and denounced everywhere in the media. What a tragedy.

Update: Police admit they were mistaken in arresting Cousins but the Eagles say his sacking will stand. He was never convicted in a court of any offense. I hope Ben sues the pants off these people. Totally outrageous, immoral and unfair.

Taking the big snip to free up your golfing weekends

It is Friday again and time to lighten up and forget about the horrific prospect of Labor victory.

I had been reading how to eliminate 70% of my golf driver errors with a ‘no-backswing swing’ in Golf Magazine when I noticed a curious ad on page 120 for vasectomies provided by Marie Stopes International. I’ve never wanted to take the big snip myself – humanity may still call upon me to spawn new dynasties in as yet untraversed lands.

But I did lazily wonder 'Why this ad in a golf magazine?'

It took two seconds for the penny to drop but then ….ah….of course….smart, precisely-targeted marketing.

Football strength heads south

As a youth I supported Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles (effecting numerous illegal entries into Brookvale Oval via a storm water drain that crossed a ground boundary) but, with my long-term change in residency, my allegiances have shifted to favour the Melbourne Storm who pulled off a remarkable NRL Grand Finals Victory last night at Telstra Stadium. The Sea Eagles put up a good fight but were outclassed by formidable defence and a generally better team.

Unusually, it was a football-dominated weekend for me with Saturday afternoon being taken up by the total annihilation of Port Adelaide by Geelong in the AFL Grand Final. For Geelong it marked the end of a 44 year old drought and, on the day, their victory was overwhelming – the 119 point margin being a record for AFL Grand Finals. Yet again, Melbourne is the sports capital of Australia and perhaps the world.

Rejoining ranks of the golfing greats

I have started playing golf again and have even invested in a new set of clubs and buggy. It is amazing how golf clubs and golf gear generally are so much cheaper – in nominal not only real terms - than when I last played seriously a decade ago. The good economic reasons for this are, of course, that China has become the world’s centre for golf club and golf gear manufacture – producing 60% of all gear. The resources boom which has helped to keep the Aussi dollar strong has helped to get me back on the golf course. Praise be to our mineral extractors and to flexible exchange rates!

Apart from cost the technology of golf has changed drastically with different clubs and even different balls. It turns out that a golf ball can potentially be hit further the more dimples there are in its exterior by enhancing its Magnus lift. According to the AFR this morning (subscription required) this technological innovation has shortened the effective length of the older golf courses so that for professional golf players even long par 4s are a drive and a pitching wedge. Top golf courses have been lengthening their golf holes each time an innovation occurs to keep the courses challenging.

According to the AFR the course managers have probably now run into Ricardian land availability limits that have pressed them into urging a forced reduction in the number of dimples in a golf ball to reduce the distance it can reach by 50 metres. The claim is that golf ball dimples and course lengths are substitutes in delivering the golfing challenge – some disagree.

So I will stock up on enough heavily-dimpled Chinese golf balls to keep me going until my expected expiry date in 2049. I’ve got new clubs, gloves, buggy, instructional DVD and I have booked in for lessons with the local professional. It would have been nice to have more youth on my size and a smaller gut but I am determined to get my handicap down to about 15 which is almost as pointlessly ambitious as my letters confirming romantic interest to Britney Spears.

State Government funding of 'special events'

Billionaire Bernie Ecclestone threatens to take the Formula 1 Grand Prix away from Melbourne unless it runs the races at night. This is apparently because Ecclestone wants to see the live TV coverage in Europe. The current contract runs out in 2010.

It has never been made clear what Victorian taxpayers contribute to Ecclestone to stage the Grand Prix here in Melbourne – the size of the fee is private information although for the life of me, as a taxpayer, I cannot understand why any government should agree to this. Currently Ecclestone is negotiating with Valencia, Spain to run a single annual event there and this gives some idea of the transfers being made to Ecclestone:

Valencia's Partido Popular has agreed to pay €26 million ($42.2 million) a year for the rights to hold a F1 event, which might give a good indication of what Melbourne
will have to fork over.

Gulp. One does not know the size of the public component of this transfer although the overall public subsidy for the Grand Prix was $21 million last year. It is forecast to be close to $30 million this year We also know that $66 million is allocated in the 07/08 Victoria budget towards tourism promotion. A further $34.2 million is allocated to Special Events promotion in the State over the next 4 years. The Victorian Auditor General has called for more analysis and less spin in assessing benefits from these events.

Mr Bracks seems unwilling to give Mr Egglestone what he wants. Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu wants the Grand Prix retained on terms which accord with Mr Ecclestone’s desires. Excuse me but, as a supporter of the conservatives, I feel ill. If you are making a loss on a dumb deal and the party making the gain threatens to take the loss away from you, well....

A report was tabled yesterday in the Victorian State Parliament that examines benefits from the 2005 Grand Prix event. It claims that overall Victoria made a loss from the Grand Prix and that the Government had overstated benefits frtom the event by more than $100 million. It also claimed that that the methods used by the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research to assess the economic impacts of the report were questionable.

‘Key to the differences between the Auditor-General's figures and those of the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research are projections of full-time employment created by the grand prix.

The institute estimated these at 3600, while the Auditor-General’s report suiggested the event would create between 400 and 600 jobs. Tourism revenue from the event was $9.1 million according to the institute, but the Auditor-General found it was of uncertain value’.

Disclosure: I provided input to the Victorian Auditor-General’s Report. I think the Auditor General's report is a fair one and a valuable input.

Football & the tedious media

I have enjoyed watching several AFL games over the past few years – but even this limited interest has recently waned. The dominance of match reports, sick, injured and drunk player reports, tribunal hearings, tipping guides and, most recently, events associated with the suspension of Ben Cousins, that have dominated the Melbourne public media over the past weeks, leave me suffering from footie indigestion. Moreover, with only a month of autumn gone, the footie season has only just started.

It is not only boring – the obsession with AFL is an indictment of what is an asinine aspect of Melbourne’s culture and of course, part of the general Australian obsession with sport.

I tire of the AFL dominating news broadcasts and lunchtime conversations. I don’t care if players in this game get suspended, suffer injuries, make love with other team-player’s wives, fight in bars, stick white powder up their noses, go into rehab or get sympathy messages from Shane Warne. I don’t care if Melbourne is, or is not, the sporting capital of Australia. AFL is a sporting game and, beyond the game itself, players are unworthy of the attention given to them.

Indeed, I suspect many of them might not enjoy the media spotlight. Certainly the egos it helps build seem unhealthy. Very plausibly the over-exposure is partly a sickness associated with the incentives facing commercial television. Interviewing players and describing the details of the latest scandal or poor performance is a cheap way of filling out spaces between advertisements in news programs and I suspect, despite the vast sums cited, a relatively cheap way of filling out other programming time as well. Commercial television news in Melbourne is dominated by football reporting. Moreover, the sickness is creeping into the ABC’s television coverage and, like a southern-based cane toad invasion, has spread Australia-wide.

This obsession is partly exaggerated. It does not fairly reflect demand – 2.5 million Australians attended AFL matches last year but 2.7 million attended the theatre. About the same number of people watched Rugby League as went to a classical music concert while more went to a dance performance. The ‘couch potatoes’ who stayed at home prefer movies and sport to the football.

OK I am overstating the issue a bit and being somewhat hypocritical. I am, in fact, a fan of watching cricket – although not of talking about it or hearing gossip about Shane Warne’s mobile phone bills. On TV, I only watch cricket intensively over the Xmas break. And I don’t really dislike football - indeed I'll start taking my son top AusKick over the next few weeks. It is just that there is an overexposure to the trivia associated with football. I am completely disinterested in such detail and have convex preferences - my tastes don't specialise to a single form of entertainment.

How to change things? I am unsure - the Anti-Football League has recently been reconstituted.