Maybe I was unfair to the Gourmet Escape, maybe Eventscorp just had a bit of bad luck and Tourism WA is a winning corporation making the most of our money. Maybe.
Anyone seeking to invest is always told that past performance is no indicator of future success. True.
But in our everyday private lives we do tend to want references and evidence of past success when we are making important decisions. Has this carpenter ever fitted a kitchen before? What success rate does this cardiac surgeon have? That sort of history does not offer any guarantees, but it reduces risk significantly. Growing experience slowly is the way that business used to develop, and most family enterprises still do. Very few people would sell their home and invest their life savings in a money making scheme that was new and for which there was no reliable data.
But that appears to be what can happen with public funds.
Public money is only available to organisations who can state that they will attract huge numbers of visitors to this state. No checks are made on the figures provided. This system immediately introduces a bias towards those who are prepared to exaggerate and inflate in order to obtain what they want. More conservative individuals are out of the game, we only give large sums of public money to people who can "talk up" their project.
It was shocking to read Kim Hames comments on the ISAF event that was held in 2011.
“What I have said to Tourism WA is I don’t want us to worry
too much about return on investment,” Dr Hames said. “In all the events we do, I want to stop the focus on return
on investment and have events that are fantastic for WA. If it ends up as
$30million or $40 million, I don’t really care.”
His view on local traders who
lost money;
“[ISAF] cannot guarantee those figures [of visitor numbers].
You can’t drag people out of their houses to come down to the world village.”
While he is not worrying too much (or even at all) about the return on investment we, the paying public, can watch as our money is distributed among the corporations. Why would we be happy with that?
He doesn't have any empathy with local traders who paid high prices for pitches and then lost money.
So how does he define "fantastic for WA"?
So how does he define "fantastic for WA"?
When you look at the millions of dollars being spent it is clear that we need a very different strategy if our own, shire based, small local producers are to be given the assistance that they deserve. For just a few million, far less than the Gourmet Escape cost, a locally based event could be organised, by local people. This would boost our local economy, not anonymous corporations and we could have the added advantage that some real accountability could be built in.
I'm pretty confident that we have the enthusiastic producers, and very competent chefs locally who could develop a wonderful event without needing to bring in outside celebrities. The attitude that because its public money we don't need to worry about return on investment is just syphoning the benefits away from our community and into the corporate coffers.
