Hire a stadium?

A letter in this morning's Dominion Post got me to thinking about the "Stadium Aotearoa, ouwww" debate. $700m (or $500m depending on which report you read) for a stadium that'll probably get filled to capacity maybe a couple of times a year does seem a bit extravagant. As one barely coherent caller to Murray Deaker on Sport Radio managed to articulate between a series of neanderthine grunts: "think of all the hip operations that could fund!"

Ah yes, the old 'hip operations' argument. What did the whingers do before hip operations became common place?

Anyway, this letter suggested hiring Stadium Australia, and snarkily remarked that the savings made on construction could be used to fund the flying of the NZRFU, Helen Clark, Trevor Mallard and co. across the ditch to watch the Final.

Which got me to thinking, why not just fly all the Kiwis who want to see the final to Australia? How much would it cost?

Let's assume we're shifting 40,000 people (I assume people from Aussie and overseas can get their via their own steam). Current cheap return airfares to Sydney from Auckland are about $650 a pop (and remember that Air NZ is the official All Blacks airline, so there may be discounts in the making there as well). Pull a number out of a hat for the Stadium hire - $10m. Assorted costs, whack another $10m on there. So...

Airfares: 40k x $650 = $26,000,000
Stadium Hire = $10,000,000
Miscellaneous = $10,000,000

TOTAL: $46,000,000

That's under one-tenth the cost of building the thing, everyone gets a holiday in Sydney, and we don't end up with a white elephant sitting on the waterfront at Auckland. And I'll take a 10% commission from the savings made, thank you very much.