I’ve been absent through the latest developments of the cursed stadium saga, so here is a brief recap. The team putting together the proposal ran the numbers again, and discovered that there was a cost blowout to the tune of $88 million. They took this back to the council, who voted for a smaller version of the stadium that still costs way too much, but not as much as it might have. The right-wing block of councillors, fresh from running the ruler over the cost of cycleways and arguing that rates need to be cut, then cut again, came out to tell us that now was not the time to be financially responsible. They were championed by Press columnist Mike Yardley, who seems to be the brains - if that is a fair use of the word - behind these councillors.
Following some arguing around numbers, we are now being told that the bigger stadium - just 5,000 seats bigger, which might get filled once every two years - is now only $66 million more expensive. A bargain! We’d be idiots not take the deal. So the whole damn thing is getting voted on again at council this week.
My views on the whole stadium thing should be well-known at this point. It’s too much money. In the wrong place. Based on all sorts of dodgy projections about usage. Should be funded by the rugby union. The money would be better spent on housing, or climate change, or building one line of a light rail network. But if we have to have one (which we don’t), then we should at least try and make sure it doesn’t totally cripple the council financially for multiple generations to come. The extra seats - whether they cost $66m or $88m or blow out and cost even more - are something we can’t afford.
The idiocy of this whole debate starts and ends with Mike Yardley (and those at the Press who continue to publish him). He’s unelected, and yet he gets to set the political agenda of the city with no consequences to himself. He would love for you to think that he’s just a sensible centrist, but as with most people who claim that mantle, he’s about as far right as you can get without being put on a government watch list. He sees no value in what council does, constantly bitching about rates and rate rises, about how we need to cut red tape and stop building cycleways. We’re told it’s because small C conservatives like him know how to spend money better than the wasteful bureaucracy. All of this austerity and sensible financial management then goes out the window when the stadium is up for discussion, but “Canterbury has a proud sporting history” and “we deserve this”. Rock solid arguments from an intellectual titan.
There can be no clearer example of how this argument is one of ideology against evidence than his most recent column on the subject (to which I am not linking; he and the Press should not be rewarded with any more clicks for this horseshit) in which he calls the councillors who want a bigger stadium “the Frugal Five”. Words. What do they even mean any more? I’m assuming Mike doesn’t know, so here is one definition of frugal:
Simple and plain and costing little.
Sparing or economical as regards money or food.
Mid 16th century from Latin frugalis, from frugi ‘economical, thrifty’
The five councillors he is championing are trying to get the vote to happen again, so they could write a blank cheque to the people building this white elephant for at least $66m, but almost definitely more. This is the complete opposite of frugality. The frugal councillors are those that Mike has a go at on a weekly basis, those who would rather see the council spend money on libraries and pools and cycleways and things that regular people use on a regular basis. Yardley and his five mates aren’t frugal; they are quite happy for the council to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, as long as it is on something that benefits those already at the top of society who can afford to spend hundreds of dollars going to see the All Blacks or Ed fucking Sheeran.
Apart from not being at all frugal, the problem for this frugal five is that there are only five of them. That’s no enough to change this decision. That said, we shouldn’t take any of this for granted. If you care about the future of this city, then I would strongly urge you to get in touch with your local councillor, and to let them know that you support the decision for a smaller stadium. There has been so much media supporting this idiotic idea that they may be wondering if they have made the right choice. They have, but it doesn’t hurt to get in touch and let them know. One can only hope that the vote this week is the last we hear on the matter of the stadium - and if we were to dream even bigger, that it was the last we hear from Yardley and his five followers.
They should just excavate a big pit in the Red Zone, throw in some scrap wood from the demo'd houses from the quake and driftwood from the recent floods, douse it with a bit of gasoline and spark it up. Give every Christchuchian $150* in $5 notes to throw into the burning pit at an ornate ceremony desinged to pay homage to the Gods of Capitalism and Waste and Local Government Ineptitude.
*Working: $66 million ÷ 380,000 Chch reisdents = $173 and change. I figure it'd cost a bit of money to dig the whole, cart the fuel, and send out the money. But the cool thing is that all this would have the exact same, if not better, impact on Chch's economy as building the stadium.