https://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.a...t/news-story/f638d6dd0954c8064f7da375b6e43f0a
Gold Coast sport clubs handicapped by unfair charges from Queensland Government
Gold Coast Bulletin
April 20, 2018 12:00am
WHO the hell does Mick de Brenni think he is?
Here’s a bloke who’s never had a job — having worked his way up the ranks as a union hack — bagging the Gold Coast and its footy teams from his Brisbane ivory tower.
A scan of the sports minister’s CV betrays a stark absence of corporate or private sector experience.
Perhaps that helps explain his ignorant and stupid response to a legitimate, considered and rational case put forward by the Suns and the Titans to end the unfair tax on their businesses by the State Government.
Mr de Brenni has angered people across this city with his suggestion that our clubs are financially struggling because they are losers.
No Minister, you are the loser.
Your suggestion that the clubs’ problems would dissolve if only they started winning ignores one glaring inconvenient truth: they are handicapped by the unfair charges with which your government slugs them.
The facts are that both the Suns, with their onerous sinking fund charge, and the Titans, with their expensive rental bill, are short changed by the Queensland Government, via Stadiums Queensland.
To break it down more simply, let’s start with the Suns.
They are charged the highest transport and police costs in the AFL, at the insistence of Stadiums Queensland.
It amounts to about $8 per spectator, compared to about $2 per fan at the MCG.
Secondly, they are forced to pay $850,000 a year into the sinking fund which is established to fund refurbishments as the stadium ages.
However, that charge was based on the assumption that Metricon would host 24 events each year. Since its inception, the most it has ever hosted is 13.
So if usage is 50 per cent of what was projected, it follows that the funding requirement for refurbishment should fall.
Moreover, the Government has just spent up to $30 million sprucing up the stadium for the just-completed Commonwealth Games.
Hence, much of the expected deterioration of the arena has already been fixed.
But Mr de Brenni’s department mandarins hide behind a legalistic argument that because there was no clause stipulating that the contract with the Suns could be reviewed, it must stay in place unchanged for 25 years.
This is just plain silly and the government should know better.
In the case of the Titans, the rent charged amounts to an unfair tax that leaves the club $500,000 worse off per year than its Sydney rivals.
CBUS has also never been properly developed to cater for parking. The difficulty patrons have to get there acts as a deterrent to building consistently higher crowds.
Moreover, CBUS lacks the surrounding amenities enjoyed by Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. It’s a regional stadium yet its tenant is charged big-city rates.
If, as the Government insists, these charges are reasonable, why is it that neither Metricon nor CBUS attract any other events?
In the case of CBUS, the Titans are the only tenants. If this unfair tax helps kill them off, the Government will have a shiny stadium that nobody uses.
It’s time the Government got fair dinkum and ended this Brisbane-centric bias against the Gold Coast.
