Editorial: All is not well in the Garden of Eden

Sir Ray Avery with his LifePod baby incubators. Photo / Greg Bowker

Editorial

The failure of plans for a charity concert at Eden Park raises questions about the long-term future of the famous ground.

The historic stadium faces serious challenges to its financial security. Last year, on the back of a Lions rugby tour, the facility made a $5.5 million operating profit. But depreciation eroded its balance sheet, and the Eden Park Trust, which runs the asset, was left with a $3.6 million loss.

Sir Ray Avery's Waitangi Day concert to raise money for his baby incubators, or LifePods, could be seen as an element in the trust's strategy to broaden its offerings beyond sports fixtures.

The trust's chief executive Nick Sautner described the Live-Aid style concert as a "one-off, worthy event." In the event it became a month-long nightmare for the trust, though it was left largely to Avery to cope with the fallout from what in retrospect was a poorly-planned show.

The trust can have up to six concerts a year, as long as it gets resource consent. And there is the rub. As the collapse of the "Million Babies" LifePod event showed, consent can be a high and costly hurdle, which the cash-strapped trust was cleary not willing to gamble on.

The trust's due diligence on the Avery show appears patchy. Momentum behind the event was not helped when details of an Australian court judgment convering Sautner's dismissal from a stadium job in Melbourne did the rounds two weeks ago.

That forced trust chairman Doug McKay to publicly defend his CEO, and handed the park's most famous neighbour, former Prime Minister Helen Clark, more ammunition for her highly public campaign against the concert.

Clark claimed the concert was a Trojan Horse for future shows at the venue, and defended her right as a nearby resident to raise legal objections to turning Eden Park into an entertainment hub.

What probably sunk the show in the end were doubts whether money raised by the Waitangi Day concert would go towards buying the incubators, or into their development.

By that stage the game was mostly up, with the event dealt a mortal blow by the trust's estimate that consent would cost more than $750,000.

The trust knows its asset is hardly firing on all cylinders, and has partly blamed Auckland Council for its restricted use. The council, it points out, regulates activity at the park by setting consent conditions, and competes for outdoor shows through Regional Facilities Auckland, which runs the other city stadiums. But the council also has extended a lifeline to the trust with a $40 million loan guarantee.

Under the council's 10-year plan, this guarantee is meant to be settled. How this can be achieved given the collapse of the LifePod concert and the realisation that staging such events will remain virtually impossible is unclear.

Cashflow this year could be affected by the Blues' disappointing season, and in the immediate future by New Zealand Cricket's desire to play international games elsewhere, citing the cost of hiring the ground and its limiting rectangular shape.

The trust calls the park New Zealand's national stadium. It has been the stage for memorable sporting moments for decades.

It would be a bitter irony if the failure of a show to raise money to keep babies alive was the catalyst for the curtain to fall on what its fans fondly know as the Garden of Eden.