Submission to Christchurch City Council consultation on Te Kaha / Christchurch Stadium

A monument to a shortsighted older generation who grew up in a black-and-white, entertainment-starved, pre-internet past.

Kia ora,

My local government authority Christchurch City Council has designed a shiny new covered 30,000-seat stadium in the Metaverse (it looks great!)… but are somehow considering spending NZ$683M to build it in real life… (that’s NZ$1,087 for every one of the 680,000 people living in Canterbury = a 4.6% rates increase for Ōtautahi ratepayers).

I generally stay out of political debate in this country because it is so short-termist and I don’t have much to add one way or the other. But I am strongly of the view that this is a huge, massively misguided and uninformed investment which will saddle the city with long term debt and a white elephant building which will loom empty for decades to come. The money could be put to far better use elsewhere. Plus the CO2 emissions which will be involved in the construction process go completely against the Council’s — and the country’s — climate crisis priorities.

The CCC is obliged to consult ratepayers so I put in a submission today emphasising my point of view. Unlikely to be particularly popular but given the experience of Ōtepoti/Dunedin, surely common sense might prevail and future generations will be spared the need to pay for this?

Submission below for the (“I told you so”) record. I don’t expect to be on the winning side.

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I favour Option 3: Pause and re-evaluate the project. 

In particular I recommend that the Council:

1. Carry out another round of future utilisation modelling of the facility in light of emerging entertainment technologies arriving soon.

2. Re-evaluate whether there is a need for a roof.

3. Re-evaluate options to relocate the current temporary stadium to the new site and then decide to build an upgraded stadium stand-by-stand over years, *IF* the city can afford it and the investment case stacks up.

Further comments:

A decision to invest $683M+ on a physical stadium in 2022 feels uninformed by industry trends in the technology of future entertainment. The physical-gathering-place model of live sport / entertainment is increasingly a thing of the past (accelerated by Covid) and is swiftly moving online. From now on, live Rugby competes with Netflix, Playstation and Tiktok. Younger generations are just not interested in paying to watch the Silver Lake All Blacks (let alone Crusaders) play live and will be even less so in future.

US technology giants Apple, Meta and other tech companies are investing tens of $billions per year in R&D to bring about a human-retina-quality "metaverse" ... if they are successful then augmented and virtual reality is likely to provide a more engaging entertainment medium than any live physical spectacle, and will feel just (if not more) "real". Within a small number of years we will all be wearing smart glasses instead of carrying a smartphone (the iPhone was launched in 2007¹...tech is accelerating... I expect mass adoption before 2030).

Plus AI-generated, photorealistic "deepfake" rugby games will be designed and sold for cents to provide pretty much the same entertainment / engaged eyeballs as the real thing...

Have these factors been taken into account when modelling future demand for live sports events at the proposed stadium? If not, I strongly recommend that a new, dispassionate remodelling of future demand for live rugby events is carried out, which details exactly which future demographic is expected to want to pay $200-plus to watch a live sports game, eat zero-nutrition food and drink flat, tasteless, overpriced beer, let alone risk catching the latest virus mutation spreading among the other people sitting nearby?

Plus music gigs are moving into virtual and augmented reality too - check out the Abba Voyage show happening in London right now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABBA_Voyage) it won't be long until these theatre-scale live events will be simulcast to headsets around the world, removing the need for large venues.

My primary concern as a concerned citizen is that if the stadium is built it will stand completely empty for over 330 days per year and require constant financial support from the city council as the events that are put on lose money every time. It will be a monument to a shortsighted older generation who grew up in a black and white, entertainment-starved, pre-internet past and didn't notice the winds of technology change blowing when they were plain for everyone to see.

Other concerns:

683 million dollars will likely continue to increase given current pressures on construction. The construction bill will go up and up... pausing until the current construction inflation rate is back down is just financially prudent.

And don't even mention the tens of thousands of tonnes of CO2 which will have be processed into the atmosphere from all the concrete and steel used in construction. This is not a climate-friendly project - Councillors must take this into account at the highest priority.

Save the money. If there is still the view that people must have a stadium in the CBD, Nick Lovett has a highly pragmatic idea to relocate the current temporary facilities to the proposed site and refurbish them, while also building some strong foundations for future structures and then invest stand-by-stand, decade-by-decade *if* there's an investment case. (Unlikely in my view) (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/false-dichotomy-christchurch-stadium-debate-nick-lovett)

A radical suggestion instead: save the money and spend some of it on public land purchases and rapid reforesting / restoration of all of Banks Peninsula / Horomaka. That will be a truer cultural and environmental legacy for many future generations to come than an empty concrete box.

1. Corrected from original which said “2008”… but same point stands! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone