Image: Archi Banal

BusinessJune 23, 2022

A complete timeline of the Christchurch stadium omnishambles

Guest writer

Image: Archi Banal

It’s all anyone’s talking about in the garden city: another cost blowout for the stadium project. What it’s all about, how is it taking so long, and why is it so expensive? James Dann tries to answer all those questions, and more.

Why does Christchurch need a new stadium? Don’t they still play at Lancaster Park?

From the late 19th century until the early 21st, Lancaster Park was Christchurch’s home of sport. It played host to too many important events to list, with rugby in the winter, cricket in the summer, and Catholic icons like Pope John Paul II and U2 also spreading the good word there. But then there were a bunch of earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, and Lancaster Park was, like much of the city, in need of repair.

So… did they repair it?

Well, no. While three loss adjustment firms concluded it would have cost about $50m to fix, the Christchurch City Council (CCC) argued it was beyond repair, and that they should be paid out the full amount insured of $143m.

They got the money then?

Yes and no. Lancaster Park was part of the council’s “global insurance payout”, which also included all the pools, libraries, community centres and other council facilities that were damaged in the quakes. The council received $635m in the payout, significantly less than the amount they claimed for.

The quake-damaged Lancaster Park being demolished in 2019 (Photo: Kai Schwoerer/Getty Images)

So did the council decide to build a new stadium?

Not really. The CCC released its draft recovery plan at the end of 2011, after a wide community consultation with more than 100,000 submissions. There was no mention of a stadium in the plan.

OK…

But the government rejected the council’s plan. Instead, they got a bunch of people together in a room to come up with the 100-day plan, released in mid-2012 and called “the Blueprint”. It introduced a number of “anchor projects” for the city that hadn’t been part of the council’s version, including the convention centre and the covered stadium.

So if it was the government’s plan, then the government was paying for it?

Not exactly. Some of the projects were to be led by the Crown, some by council, some run jointly. The stadium was to be developed by the Crown, but largely funded by the council. The two parties signed a cost-sharing agreement that set out who would pay for what. For the stadium, the government was to buy the land, $253m was to come from the council, and $216m was to come from a source “to be determined”.

$216m seems like a lot of money ‘to be determined’?

Yeah, there was a lot of pressure on the council from the government to sell off some of its assets to fund the costs of the Blueprint. But the council rejected this.

So is there still $216m that needs ‘to be determined’?

No. During the 2017 election campaign, Labour promised $300m to Canterbury to speed up the recovery. After they formed a government, $220m was apportioned to the stadium.

Great. So with that $220m from the government, and $253m from the council, they’ve got the $473m they need to build it. When does it open?

Um. Well, once they had the funding secured, design started in earnest. Then, in 2021, the design firm came back to council, worried about escalating costs. So the council voted to reduce the seating capacity from the originally proposed 30,000 to 25,000 to keep it within the original budget.

The empty Christchurch lot where the proposed stadium will be built (Photo: Radio NZ, Nate McKinnon)

Great. So when does it open?

Not so fast. After the council voted for a smaller stadium, a campaign was launched to restore the 5,000 seats that had been cut. The rugby people got angry, and an online petition demanding the 5,000 seats be put back in attracted 20,000 signatures. A new motion went before council for the bigger, 30,000-seat covered stadium, now costing $533m, and all but two councillors voted for it.

OK cool. That was a year ago, so construction must now be well under way.

Not at all. The consortium doing the design work reported back to council last month that the $533m agreed in August last year for a 30,000-seat covered stadium would actually only be enough for a 17,000-seat covered stadium. To build a covered stadium that seats 30,000 people, as agreed by council last August, would need up to $150m more, taking the cost to $683m.

$683m is a lot of money. At least it’s a final number.

It’s not. The council can’t guarantee that it won’t blow out again.

$683m is A LOT of money. At least we’d have the biggest stadium in the country.

It’d be the fifth-largest sports ground in the country, behind Auckland’s Eden Park, Wellington’s Sky Stadium (the Cake Tin), Auckland’s Mount Smart, and Forsyth Barr in Dunedin. The Cake Tin cost $130m in 2000, and Forsyth Barr cost $225m in 2011. Even after adjusting for inflation, we’re still looking at a project costing two if not three times more than its larger competitors.

2011 is a long time ago. Are there any more recent projects you can compare it to?

If we look across the ditch, the CommBank Stadium in Western Sydney was opened in 2019, seating 30,000 (semi-covered), and costing $AU300m. The slightly smaller Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville opened in 2020, seating 25,000, and costing $AU250m.

But they don’t have a roof.

The council reckons it could take out the centre part of the roof and save $35m, which is otherwise known as “two community indoor pools” or “one-and-a-half library rebuilds”. Scaling back the roof even further would produce greater savings, but they can’t accurately say how much. So let’s just stick with $683m plus the cost of the land.

$683m doesn’t include the cost of the land?

No, the government has already bought the land, and all the figures getting chucked around are just the construction cost. They initially budgeted $36m for this, but may have spent up to $60m. They also paid another $10m to decontaminate the land, so you can comfortably add another $70m for the land on to the project’s cost. But for now we’ll just stick to the $683m.

An artist’s impression of the proposed stadium (Image: Canterbury City Council)

Right. Well… where would the council get that sort of money?

From you. And your neighbour. Rates. It’s how the council gets money.

I saw somewhere that it would only be another $39 to pay for the stadium – that seems like a bargain to me.

To fund the extra $150m required by the latest blowout would require around a 1.25% annual increase, yes. But that’s just on top of the already budgeted increase to cover the stadium. Rates are set to increase around 5% a year for the next decade, though the stadium blowout will see them hit 8.5% in 2025/26. The council puts the contribution of the stadium to rates as an additional “$144 per annum per average residential property occurring progressively between 2025 and 2027. These amounts would decline slowly over 30 years as debt was repaid.”

Thirty years? So by the time we’ve paid this off, Ed Sheeran will be 61?

Yes. And he’ll probably still only play Auckland and Wellington.

Doesn’t Christchurch have some sensible centre-right councillors who oppose any sort of rates increase?

Yeah we do.

So what do they think?

They’re all voting for it. One of them is running for mayor. He’ll probably win.

I’m confused.

So am I. Just a year ago, five councillors, including mayoral candidate Phil Mauger, James Gough, and Aaron Keown, voted against the council’s long-term plan, concerned about the 54% rate increases projected across the next decade. Gough described the increases as “obscene and financially unsustainable”. Keown said council needed to “stop acting like drunken sailors at a spending orgy”. These so-called “frugal five” have routinely opposed council spending on things like cycleways, community pools, and libraries. But their frugality does not apply to stadiums, apparently.

Couldn’t the council sell something to pay for the stadium?

Well, the council had previously ruled out asset sales, but Gough has floated the idea again. It’s not clear which assets he means, though he has previously raised the prospect of selling off public libraries. The land under the current stadium could be sold. The council valued that at $2.6m, which won’t go far towards construction.

Yeah, about that. How did construction get so expensive?

Well, supply chain issues, labour shortages, pressure on the construction industry, inflation, Covid-19, issues with the site and land stability, war in Ukraine, lockdowns in China, the new Top Gun movie. Take your pick, really.

Oh yeah, Covid-19. Please tell me that all the projections for stadium usage factor in the ongoing global pandemic into their budgets.

I would love to tell you that. But I cannot. They do not.

That seems strange.

Strange is one word. Negligent might be another. The report prepared for the council states “this calculation is based on an optimistic use (maximum impact) scenario”.

The figures must be pretty impressive though.

The economic impact of the largest stadium is estimated to be $81.3m over a 10-year period. A bit over $8m a year for a $683m investment.

That … doesn’t seem great.

It’s not. The council’s own cost-benefit analysis put the return at 0.86, ie for each dollar we put in, we get less than a dollar back. And that analysis was undertaken when the stadium was meant to cost $473m, ie two blowouts ago. I shudder to think what the return would be now.

An artist’s impression of the proposed Christchurch stadium during a sports game (Photo: Christchurch City Council)

At least we’d get to see the All Blacks again!

Yup, the prospect of games against Scotland and Namibia is on the cards. Rugby’s back, baby!

What about the big games?

Oh, the stadium isn’t big enough to guarantee games against Tier 1 nations. New Zealand Rugby, unlike local councils, is run like a business. They put games where they can make the most money, so if you can sell 50% more tickets at Eden Park, you’re going to put most of the games there. The council’s own report suggests that to get the big games against Australia, South Africa or the Lions, it would have to pay an “incentive” to New Zealand Rugby.

An incentive? Sounds suspiciously like a bribe.

It’s not a bribe, it’s just paying the rugby union some money to make something that wouldn’t usually happen happen.

Riiiiight. At least rugby is putting some money towards the construction though?

Both New Zealand Rugby and the Crusaders have pretty definitively said they won’t contribute to the cost of the stadium.

Sorry, who are the Crusaders?

Oh, that’s the name of our rugby team. They’re quite good. Won again at the weekend.

Isn’t Crusaders a name given to a bunch of people who explicitly kill Muslims, and wasn’t Christchurch the site of one of the world’s worst anti-Muslim terror attacks?

Yes and yes.

And you have a sports team who call themselves the Crusaders, by choice?

Yeah. They refused to change their name, but they did take the man with the sword off their logo.

This doesn’t make any sense.

None of it does.

Christchurch City Council is looking for feedback from residents on the stadium, good or bad. You can have your say here until July 5.

Keep going!

Image: Getty / Archi Banal

OPINIONSportsJune 22, 2022

New Zealand Rugby’s big new strategy looks sadly familiar

Madeleine Chapman

Editor

Image: Getty / Archi Banal

New Zealand Rugby announced its “Reimagining Rugby” strategy on Tuesday. An underwhelmed Mad Chapman reports.

When you watch the All Blacks train, you watch from a distance. At the Auckland Grammar hockey fields on Tuesday, invited guests of New Zealand Rugby stood the width of a field away from the players as they mostly stood in a team huddle. It felt like exclusive access while also providing little to no insight into how the team operates.

Moments later, as CEO Mark Robinson walked media through New Zealand Rugby’s strategic plan (“Reimagining Rugby”) until 2025, it felt the same. The presentation, across 90 minutes, seemed full of potential and the stage was well set for a new approach to our national game. Here’s the landscape in which this new strategy was revealed:

Concussions and rugby is a topic that’s not going away. Just last week, Stuff reported that World Rugby will extend the mandatory concussion stand-down period to 12 days, nearly double the current requirement. After years of incremental action from the global body, the move has been welcomed as a necessary step to increasing player welfare.
Rugby is facing a participation drop in this country, but girls and women playing rugby has increased in recent years (though Covid has negatively impacted participation across the board).
New Zealand is preparing to host the 2021 Women’s Rugby World Cup in October, a huge opportunity to dramatically grow interest and engagement among the wider rugby community.
Earlier this month, a $200 million deal between US private equity firm Silver Lake and New Zealand Rugby was confirmed, with a promise of heavy investment in numerous aspects of the game.
Mere hours before the event began, Leinster rugby player Nick McCarthy publicly came out as gay and received widespread support from players and fans alike.

As someone not often present for such sport media events, I assumed this changing landscape would be heavily referenced in some detail throughout a medium-term strategic plan for New Zealand Rugby as a whole. Instead, what was presented looked eerily similar to the strategic plan of 2020, itself proposed as a five-year undertaking. The new four-year plan has four pillars: “winning with mana”, “rugby at the heart of our communities”, “unleashing rugby’s commercial potential” and “loved game, loved brands”.

The pillars are hard to disagree with and feel like givens for any national sporting body. But it was hardly “Reimagining Rugby”. I wanted to hear about how NZR will be capitalising on hosting a world cup to slingshot the women’s game (arguably the only part of rugby consistently growing) into the national sporting psyche. Instead, the tournament received a passing mention in Robinson’s introduction.

I wanted to hear about how NZR will encourage parents to sign their kids up for rugby while providing assurance that those same kids would be looked after physically. It’s not an easy task for a sport that has sold itself on its physicality and toughness. One might say it requires a bit of (re)imagination. Observations around tackling technique differences in boys and girls were shared by NZR’s research scientist Danielle Salmon, and I can only hope those observations will lead to tangible outcomes for future players at all levels.

I wanted to hear about how the notoriously inaccessible NZR will adapt to the changing social media landscape where perceived access and familiarity with talent reigns supreme. Where fans don’t want to feel like they’re being advertised to, they want to feel like they’re hearing things straight from the players. Where players like Ruby Tui, who went viral by being the most interesting NZ Rugby interviewee in history (she was great but the bar was low), have single-handedly built a genuine and engaged following by being open and honest about their daily struggles.

Instead, there was a joke about (traditional) media being critical of NZR and both parties doing their jobs, and then a pledge to be more accessible with no elaboration on what that would look like in a practical sense.

I wanted to hear about how NZR will be truly making itself more inclusive and open to those who don’t fit the “bloke” demographic. Would there be more integration of the elite men and women players considering how much more inclusive the women’s game (where a number of players are gay and open about it) appears, and acknowledgement of how that could potentially unlock a whole new audience for the game? There was in fact very little said about the women’s game. The cover of the strategy (presented four months before the women’s world cup here in New Zealand) featured only All Blacks.

There were no Black Ferns present – presumably exempt from media responsibilities so shortly after winning the Pacific Four series – and no current women players full stop. A promotional video – put together by the women’s world cup department and released last week – was shown. That video, featuring high school poets, NZR officials, commentators and fans, felt like something new for NZR. The fact that it also felt very out of place within the strategy presentation is exactly the problem.

At the end of the event, Robinson introduced an exciting new development in tech for NZR, and on the big screen appeared a computer-animated woman wearing a Black Ferns jersey. She introduced herself as Maa (pronunciation unclear), “the world’s first digital Black Fern”, and it was explained that she will be used in promotional videos speaking in a variety of languages to rugby fans all over the world. Considering how hard it is for journalists in this country to speak to real-life Black Ferns, it felt bitterly ironic that the only one present was computer-generated.

The world continues to evolve and industries and organisations continue to adapt to new expectations. People want to feel connected to a player, a team, a sport. The faceless power of a world-class, polished organisation means nothing to a casual observer wondering why the All Blacks and Black Ferns are huddled on the other side of the field. There may very well be moving parts behind the scenes that simply weren’t quite ready for presentation. I can only hope – because they didn’t open the floor for questions.

Update: the promotional video for the women’s world cup was produced by World Rugby, not New Zealand Rugby.