Rudman's city: Stadium ambitions of regional council smack of cargo cult

By BRIAN RUDMAN

In Tanna, one of the remote islands of Vanuatu, there are those who believe they can entice planes loaded with goodies to land, simply by building an airfield and displaying replica wooden aircraft.

Up at the Auckland Regional Council headquarters in Pitt St they seem to be relying on much the same tactics to get a new stadium built at Mt Smart.

The wishful thinkers of Tanna have been waiting in vain for 60 odd years.

Maybe ARC chairman Phil Warren and his fellow cargo cultists will have more luck. But I'm not exactly shoving a bottle of champagne in the icebox in anticipation.

The ARC's latest replica stadium is certainly an object to worship. That's if you go for size.

It's not quite in the ill-fated London Millennium Dome scale of things, but grand it certainly is, with a roof that opens and shuts and an 11,000-tonne, rugby-field-sized pitch which slides in and out of the building like the litter tray of an enormous budgie cage.

Save your biggest hallelujahs, though, for the price tag. We Aucklanders are being offered this $175 million entertainment temple for FREE.

The project was dangled in front of the ARC this month by Otto Groen, chairman of the Netherlands New Zealand Business Association.

Half a century ago, while the Tanna islanders were busy building model planes, Mr Groen came ashore in uncivilised Auckland to introduce us to the delights of fine dining. His Gourmet Restaurant in Shortland St was an instant success, earning in 1961, seven years after it opened, a place in history as the city's first licensed restaurant.

Not the Lazy Boy kind of senior citizen, Mr Groen read last year of a wondrous new stadium that had been built back home in the Netherlands at Arnhem, and seems to have decided that building one here would be the perfect retirement project.

He invited Fritz Bakker, the project manager of the Arnhem stadium, to speak about it at last October's Festival of Europe in Auckland.

Mr Bakker works for HBG, one of the world's largest construction companies and patent holders of the sliding pitch.

The outcome is a consortium with dreams of building a New Zealand version of the Arnhem Gelredome on the site of the existing Ericsson Stadium.

The consortium of the Netherlands NZ Business Association, the TSE Group of architects and engineers, Ca Bella Construction and McConnell Dowell will work with HBG on the project.

"Very impressed" with the proposal, the ARC has given the consortium until September 30 to come up with a comprehensive financial study.

The ARC has also agreed not to do a deal with anyone else in the meantime - an easy decision that, given that no one else seems to want to touch the Ericsson site with a barge pole.

Mr Groen ducks for cover when you ask where the $175 million is coming from. He told me: "If it's good enough, the money will be there."

He told the ARC his consortium "is confident that we will find the support to present this project at minimal risk and no cost to the ratepayer."

To the wannabe stadium-builders of the ARC, this was such music to their ears that they don't seem to have given a thought to whether Auckland actually needs such a venue - 33,000 fully seated, 49,000 for concerts.

Nor have they pondered what effect it would have on existing venues such as Eden Park, the short-of-cash North Harbour Stadium and Manukau's planned Pacific Arena.

The ARC also doesn't seem even to have checked the information presented to it.

For instance, in his March 19 presentation Mr Groen held up Eircom Stadium in Dublin as one of those under construction by HBG.

But a quick check of Eircom Park's website shows the project was abandoned on March 9 without a sod being turned. Mr Groen claimed Eircom was to cost $223 million. The Irish Times says the actual costings were around $453 million.

A similar HBG stadium in Coventry, England, is behind time and above budget. The latest estimate has total costs at $577 million, with $201 million of that to go on the arena itself.

Looking at these other arenas highlights the obstacles facing the Ericsson dream.

Of the four European ones I found, each had, or looked forward to having, the financial security of being the home of a rich, income-producing soccer club.

They all had large population bases. The AufSchalke Arena in the heart of the Ruhr, for example, has 6.4 million people living within a 50km catchment area.

In this context, the Groen scheme seems an impossible dream. One which wiser politicians might well have ducked.