It's all a waste of time if PNG and the Bears are allowed in.
The Perth side will flounder if it isn't a genuine attempt at an authentic Perth/WA side, but I guess that doesn't really matter when the whole point is just to use Perth as an avenue to get the Bears back into the league. At that point who cares if the WA side of the venture struggles, the team isn't really for them anyway.
There's no legitimate business case behind the PNG side and all the proposed geopolitical advantages of giving PNG an NRL license have already been consistently disproven by the PNG government continuing to actively deal with China throughout the whole bid and being in the process of selling off ownership of their power grid to China. It's just an expensive gift from the Australian taxpayer to the corrupt oligarchs of PNG, while the average Papuan continues to live in abject poverty.
The NZ bids that are public lack any substance at all. Who knows what's going on behind the scenes and the NRL could definitely make NZ work if they were willing to get proactive, but they've consistently proven that they're not willing to get proactive when it comes to expansion and why put that effort into NZ over more lucrative markets if that changed.
More Brisbane/SEQ sides is just pandering. Any new teams there are superfluous luxuries at best, and necessity should always trump luxury.
The next 3 sides being Perth, NZ, and Adelaide shouldn't even be up for debate, and the long term consequences of not going down that route will be significant. It's literally Arko and Quayle being celebrated for pandering to their mates in Sydney and the media while frogmarching the sport to disaster 2.0.
