Kerre Woodham: Scalping outrage just the ticket

The outrage over ticket profiteering for big-name concerts and big-game matches is timeless and without boundaries.

An Englishman, now resident in New Zealand, told me that back in the 1960s, his much unfancied soccer team made it to a big cup final. Everyone from his home town was trying to buy tickets but they'd sold out in seconds and the fans' best chance of seeing their team in a never-to-be repeated final was to turn up at the gates and take their chances off the scalpers.

Sure enough, there at the gates was a bloke waving fistfuls of precious tickets, but he wanted a preposterous price for them - something like 600 to 700 per cent more than their face value. The Englishman's mate, a great big chap, told the scalper the price was unreasonable and offered to pay double the initial price, but the scalper was not to be reasoned with.

So the great big Scouse headbutted the weedy little scalper, grabbed the tickets off him and handed them out to his mates, left what he thought was a fair price and the lads got to see the game.

I'm not exhorting violence in the face of scalping but one base emotion - in this case, venality - often incites another, like brutality. Or profanity.

The Trade Me auction room makes for the most entertaining reading around at the moment, as sellers of U2 tickets and their supporters justify selling to the highest bidder against those who rail against their low morals and Gordon Gekko "greed is good" mentality.

Scoobydoobydo told Jaraham that the selling of the U2 tickets was immoral and shameful.

Jaraham replied: "This is the 21st century. The number of people who are moral these days is very low".

Most of the sellers put up pathetic excuses for selling - for example, their friends pulled out at the last minute or the tickets were bought as Christmas presents for parents but the parents bought their own.

Others were unabashed that they'd seen a commercial opportunity and gone for it, inciting further furious comments: "Your intentions were to secure tickets, not because U2 move you like no other band, but to scab hard-earned money off desperate fans. Your [sic] a poor excuse for a human being and I hope you choke on the money you make."

So sentiments are running as high as they were when the scalper in Manchester received a Liverpool kiss.

But while I don't agree with scalping, I would point out to desperate fans that if they were that desperate, they would be members of U2's official fan club. Apparently, members were offered the opportunity of buying tickets for the show a week before they went on general sale, so the true U2 fans with a bit of initiative are sorted.

I don't buy the argument that buying and selling tickets is like buying and selling a house for a huge profit - the analogy would only hold true if there were a very small number of houses and a huge number of people needing a place to live. The easiest thing to do would be to make scalping illegal - just about everything else is these days, so what's another little piece of light legislation?

And just a word to the wise rugby sevens fans heading to Wellington: tournament director Steve Dunbar says they've been doing their best to ensure as many sevens fans as possible can get to the games without being fleeced by scalpers and they've identified a number of tickets that have breached the terms and conditions of sale. They will be taking the appropriate action. In some cases, they know who you are so there may well be some very disappointed people come February when they're turned away from the gates.