You know it by now, Key, English, and Joyce have said it often enough – National’s formula for the economy is more mining, selling assets, and convention centres. We’re actually making less money from mining now than 5 years ago. Asset sales have been a predictable failure. But we’ve got 3 new convention centres coming – SkyCity, Christchurch, Queenstown – that’ll bring in the international revenue and turn around the collapse in international tourism revenue that Tourism Minister Key has presided over, eh? Nah.
See, the international convention market is shrinking.
There’s a body that collects stats on international conventions – it’s an imperfect art, there’s an artificial upward bias in the numbers because they find out about new convention centres all the time. And despite that upward bias, the numbers are flat or falling:
2002 6,155
2003 6,405
2004 7,642
2005 8,121
2006 8,745
2007 9,536
2008 10,149
2009 10,346
2010 10,406
2011 10,070
And our grand plan is to build 3 more bloody convention centres to this stalled market that already has surplus capacity. Oh, and we’re going to build them in New Zealand – because convention organisers are just so excited to add an extra grand to each of their attendees’ flight costs.
Maybe, just maybe National’s gimmicks aren’t the key to a healthy economy. Maybe the key to a healthy economy is a lower dollar, affordable, quality housing rather than a housing bubble funded by overseas debt, fairly priced electricity, and sustainable transport projects that we actually need rather than roads to nowhere…..
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