{"id":622132,"date":"2026-10-06T09:30:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T09:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/622132\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T09:30:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T09:30:25","slug":"government-showstopper-events-the-40m-gamble-that-counts-happiness-as-economic-success-kate-macnamara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/622132\/","title":{"rendered":"Government showstopper events: The $40m gamble that counts happiness as economic success – Kate MacNamara"},"content":{"rendered":"

The related Cabinet paper cast the spending as part of the Government\u2019s Going for Growth strategy.<\/p>\n

Was there an economic benefit? MBIE refused to release the evaluation work outside the Official Information Act, but the economics consultancy Fresh Info, which supplied the work to MBIE, filled in many of the blanks. <\/p>\n

You wouldn\u2019t know it from the proactively released snippets but international visitors made up just 2000 of that 76,000 total, less than 3%. <\/p>\n

Their spending is estimated at $2100 a head, then discounted by 65% to account for the fact they buy and use resources, which leaves 35% as economic benefit, call it $1.4m. Fair enough. <\/p>\n

\"NewNew Zealand vs Chile in the Government-funded Fifa friendlies at Eden Park in March. Photo \/ Joshua Devenie www.photosport.nz <\/p>\n

But there\u2019s not a lot more economic value than that. Sensible evaluations don\u2019t ascribe much value to out-of-town Kiwis attending events because it\u2019s widely recognised these visitors have simply moved their money around the country, absent the concert or the football and they\u2019d have spent it anyway, probably closer to home. <\/p>\n

The locals who attend the events do a version of the same thing, shifting spending that would have happened anyway. <\/p>\n

That leaves us with a clear economic loss for the evaluated events, which Fresh Info managing director Shane Vuletich confirmed to the Herald. <\/p>\n

The total net benefit was generated on the strength of what economists call \u201cconsumer surplus\u201d. According to the analysis, the events generated $21.2m worth of it. <\/p>\n

For the uninitiated, consumer surplus tallies the extra value, call it the joy, that represents the difference between the actual money a punter spends to attend the event and the hypothetical additional amount they would have willingly spent for the great pleasure derived. <\/p>\n

If it sounds like pixie dust, that\u2019s because it is. You can survey people all you like but you can\u2019t really know if someone would have paid more for a ticket unless they actually do pay more. <\/p>\n

So count it a win for pick-me-ups and good vibes, which are, after all, useful to an incumbent Government in an election year. <\/p>\n

\"TourismTourism Minister Louise Upston claims the first four Government-funded big events from the Events Attraction Package returned a net benefit of $15 million. That figure was entirely down to a “consumer surplus” value for something akin to good vibes calculated at $21.5m. Photo \/ Michael Craig<\/p>\n

In fairness it\u2019s a step up from the numbers Upston peddled to justify the events spending in the first place; every dollar spent on live performance returns $3.20 in benefits to the community, she noted in her Cabinet paper. <\/p>\n

That gem comes from a Massey University paper of 2024: Measuring and Articulating the Value of Live Performance in Aotearoa. <\/p>\n

The work manages to find that the economic benefit of live performance in New Zealand, in the year to June 2024, was a whopping $17.3 billion. For scale, that\u2019s not far off the size of the country\u2019s education budget that year. <\/p>\n

The total breaks down into $8.7b of joy and wellbeing and $8.6b of economic value, the latter reached by tallying all sorts of economic ripples and knock-ons through widely discredited input-output modelling. Bags of Crown money left in town squares would also have a similar effect but that doesn\u2019t make the idea a good use of public money. <\/p>\n

What impartial academic body funded this work? The Ministry of Culture and Heritage, whose raison d\u2019etre includes handing out public funds for live events. If they were a drug company you\u2019d rightly dismiss the academic findings they\u2019d funded. <\/p>\n

How much did we pay? A cool $780,000, doled out of the Covid-era Cultural Sector Regeneration Fund and it bought the academic paper as well as sector engagement, data collection, research (including a novel decolonising methodology), and a presentation of findings to the National Summit on the Economic and Wellbeing Value of Live Performance in November 2024, held at Massey. <\/p>\n

The work even included a free (to use) live performance value calculator. It\u2019s a lot of fun. I ran my wedding through it \u2013 ticket price $0; expected patrons 100, number of volunteers 20; average hours per volunteer 25 \u2013 and it calculated a total social and economic value of $95,000. Priceless.<\/p>\n

Stay ahead with the latest market moves, corporate updates, and economic insights by subscribing to our Business newsletter<\/a> \u2013 your essential weekly round-up of all the business news you need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The related Cabinet paper cast the spending as part of the Government\u2019s Going for Growth strategy. Was there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622133,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84619,806,21972,138,10712,113068,95661,10668,219,3685,1888,3011,240014,266,7237,17646,2517,61812,264730,1132,6722,130,111,139,69,106462,3240,306169,3502,131,1361,223,10097,306170,117204,80],"class_list":["post-622132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-40m","tag-as","tag-benefit","tag-business","tag-claiming","tag-counts","tag-delivering","tag-economic","tag-economy","tag-events","tag-first","tag-four","tag-gamble","tag-government","tag-governments","tag-happiness","tag-kate","tag-louise","tag-macnamara","tag-million","tag-minister","tag-more","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-produced","tag-recently","tag-showstopper","tag-success","tag-than","tag-that","tag-the","tag-tourism","tag-trumpeted","tag-upston","tag-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}