Does anyone really believe that Robbie Williams wouldn’t have come to New Zealand without a taxpayer-funded sweetener? 

Tourism minister Louise Upston was excited when she announced that Robbie Williams will play two shows in Auckland and Christchurch later this year. “It’s fantastic to welcome a showstopper act like Robbie, giving fans the chance to see him entertaining us,” she said in a press release.

The Robbie Williams concerts will receive funding from the government’s $70m major events and tourism package. Upston was definitive that the government funding was essential in securing the concerts: “Without government investment, New Zealand would not have been part of the global tour,” she said.

The fund was in part a response to the public perception that a number of high-profile international acts had skipped New Zealand in recent years, including Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. But does Robbie Williams really fall into that category?

The two concerts this year will be the 13th and 14th times that Robbie Williams has performed in New Zealand. In 28 years, Williams has never toured Australia without including New Zealand.

Linkin Park were among the first recipients of the government fund, announced in December. They performed to a packed crowd at Spark Arena last week. It was their fifth show in Auckland and their fourth at the same venue. Like Robbie Williams, Linkin Park has never toured Australia without playing a show in New Zealand. Auckland is far from the most obscure city the band is visiting on their 100-stop From Zero tour – the upcoming leg features Nürburg, Germany, Donington Park, England, and Werchter, Belgium.

Would Robbie Williams and Linkin Park really have skipped New Zealand if not for a juicy taxpayer-funded bribe? Or did the government merely buy a line spun to them by touring promoter Live Nation looking for some extra cash?

It’s impossible to say for sure. The fund is not openly contestable; it is by invitation only, from a list of events drawn up by MBIE (the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment). This has been controversial, with many complaints about a lack of funding for local festivals such as Splore.

Other events that have received funding include a Six60 concert in Christchurch, Synthony in Auckland, and the Ultra Music Festival in Wellington.

Prime minister Christopher Luxon has been an active promoter of the major events fund, saying that the government-funded concerts were “important for economic activity, economic development, regional economic development”.

In her Robbie Williams announcement, Upston claimed that “for every dollar spent on live performance, $3.20 is returned in benefits to the wider community and that’s why we’re investing in them”.

That’s a change of tune for Upston, who last year told RNZ: “We need to be realistic about whether concerts generate economic value for New Zealand. Some may generate an economic boost for the region where they’re held, however overall, the profit tends to go offshore.”

There has been long-running criticism from economists that promoters and politicians consistently overstate the economic impacts of concerts and sporting events. A 2013 meta-analysis by MBIE looked at 18 major events and found that organisers and consultants had overstated their economic impact by 350% – claiming $143.8m in impact when it was really $32.1m.

Tātaki Auckland Unlimited’s impact evaluation of the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup included a headline claim of $48.9m in net benefit, but the majority of that – $35.6m – was calculated from non-financial benefits such as improved “visibility and perception of women’s sport”, “long-term benefits for football in Auckland” and “national pride”.

The direct financial impact of the world cup was calculated as $13.3 million, but even those financial figures are questionable – the report claimed Auckland had received $8.6m worth of media exposure, calculated using advertising equivalent value, a PR industry metric that is widely dismissed by economists.

One of the most egregious recent examples came in 2018, when Dunedin Venues Management Limited claimed it had generated $38m in economic benefit from three Ed Sheeran concerts, including “284 job-years of work”. That figure was reported credulously by media, but the underlying data is full of holes.

Firstly, there’s what economists call “leakage”. Much of the money spent in Dunedin, especially on tickets, went to an international touring and promotion company and did little to support the local economy. Then there’s “substitution” – these economic impact studies often assume that money spent on concert weekends is new money generated out of nowhere. In reality, New Zealanders are simply shifting their entertainment budget from one thing to another. An estimated 67% of attendees were from outside Dunedin – mostly Christchurch and Southland – and the impact of their dollars at bars and restaurants will have boosted Dunedin, but that’s money that would mostly otherwise have been spent in those people’s home cities.

The “job-years” figure is just a calculation of total hours worked, and this almost entirely reflects hospitality staff working overtime or shifting hours to cover a busy weekend, not new job creation.

These reports typically assume that every tourist dollar spent in a given weekend is generated solely by the event, but that’s rarely true. Many people plan trips they would have taken anyway around major events. Data from the 2011 Rugby World Cup shows that international tourist numbers declined immediately before and after the tournament, suggesting that a significant number of visitors had simply moved existing holidays rather than making an additional trip.

And what about the figure that Louise Upston cited, that every dollar invested in live performances generates $3.20 in economic impact? That number comes from a 2024 Massey University study that is littered with suspicious maths. The report claims that live performances generate $17.2 billion in value per year to the New Zealand economy – about 4% of total GDP, and $6bn more than the dairy industry.

The $17.2bn calculation includes $7.5bn in “sustained wellbeing benefits” for attendees, including “personal satisfaction, mental health and civic engagement”. The direct financial impact has been heavily massaged too. From the 25,000 jobs created by the live performance sector, the research estimates $5.4bn in economic impact, or $216,000 per full-time worker.

How’s that possible? Thanks to one of the most abused economic metrics, known as the multiplier effect. If you spend $100 at a bar before a concert, the owners and staff will get extra money that they might spend at a butcher, who then might spend the money at a bakery, who then might spend it at a candlestick maker and so on and so on. By this logic, a dairy farmer’s income ripples through so many businesses that the true “economic contribution” of a single cow is several million dollars.

None of that is to say that concerts have no economic and social benefits – they clearly do, just not at the scale that Upston and Luxon are claiming. If the government simply wants to make people happy, that’s a legitimate political calculation – bread and circuses have kept rulers popular since ancient Rome. But that’s not the argument they’re making. Instead, they’re dressing up a popularity exercise in fabricated economic statistics. The most charitable interpretation is that they’re simply repeating numbers fed to them by Live Nation or MBIE without looking too closely. But Upston’s comments to RNZ last year suggest otherwise. She knew – until knowing became inconvenient.