Venues Ōtautahi best-placed to achieve cost savings on events

Tuesday, 12 August 2025

The work of Venues Ōtautahi in attracting events to council-owned facilities will scale up with the opening of Christchurch’s new stadium in 2026. (File photo)

Mike Yardley is a Christchurch-based writer on current affairs and travel. He is a regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: Is Christchurch getting enough bang for its buck from the millions of dollars it spends on economic development activity? Or are council-funded agencies duplicating similar roles while exaggerating the value they deliver?

The Christchurch City Council (CCC) is undertaking a formal service review of its economic development activity expenditure. It’s not small beer. Economic development activity funding currently averages nearly 4% of your rates bill, and $295 million of the rates take over the 10 years of the long-term plan is allocated for it.

That’s currently costing you more than $100 annually, accruing to more than $1000 over the next 10 years, without change.

Malcolm Alexander, former chief executive of Local Government New Zealand, was tasked with reviewing the quality of the expenditure, its cost-effectiveness and outcomes. In other words, are we getting value for money from this discretionary council activity?

His blistering report was received by council last month and has since been publicly released. It makes for a very sobering – even scathing – read.

He finds that current responsibilities are fragmented across different entities, “creating duplication and inefficiency”.

As The Press reported last week, his report recommends transferring all commercially oriented event functions from ChristchurchNZ (CNZ) to Venues Ōtautahi, which would be renamed Events Ōtautahi. “It would streamline delivery, improve accountability, and enable stronger commercial management.”

As an interim measure, he alternatively recommends all of CNZ’s events functionality be transferred in-house to the CCC.

Alexander is particularly unimpressed by CNZ’s track record on urban development and investment attraction. He strongly urges reducing staff numbers and costs by confining the agency’s scope to inward investment and destination promotion.

You might be surprised to learn that about half of CNZ’s 75 full-time equivalents (FTEs) earn over $100,000, with more than six employees earning over $200,000. Over 80% of CNZ’s revenue comes from the council, totalling more than $16m annually.

I was particularly disturbed to read that Alexander’s report accuses CNZ of embellishing its record of performance. Take, for example, long-lasting job creation: one FTE person employed over a three-year period is presented by CNZ as creating three FTEs, not one.

How does CNZ chief executive Ali Adams defend that? Adams tells me she is open to refining “an imperfect science. Our current approach is a genuine attempt to estimate the impact of our work over time.”

ChristchurchNZ chief executive Ali Adams “has come out swinging against the recommendation to strip CNZ of events functionality”, writes Mike Yardley.

The report exposes that, despite CNZ touting BioOra’s establishment of a high-tech facility in Christchurch as a key success story in its investment attraction role, BioOra’s arrival had “little to do with ChristchurchNZ”.

Chief executive at Venues Otautahi, Caroline Harvie-Teare, on a tour of the Christchurch stadium site in 2023.

Adams has come out swinging against the recommendation to strip CNZ of events functionality. “It is global best practice to manage major and business events alongside the wider visitor economy function within a single organisation.”

Adams claims that hospitality and tourism leaders are very concerned that events will end up being “focused on council-owned venues, rather than spread among the city’s wider sectors”.

But as the report highlights, Venues Ōtautahi – which it wants to see evolve into Events Ōtautahi – is a “well-managed and well-governed” events management company, with “a greater drive to achieve commercial independence from ratepayer funding”. It already has management contracts for non-council-owned venues, too.

I agree. It’s absolutely best-placed to achieve cost savings for ratepayers in the events space, with proven commercial nous.

As The Press has reported, Business Canterbury chief executive Leann Watson objected to the report’s release, claiming it’s not the time to “be airing our dirty laundry in public”.

Like Adams, who argues that the report risks slowing “the city’s impressive momentum”, Watson claims there’s a risk that events will go elsewhere amid the upheaval. There’s no such evidence.

Rather than settling for closed-shop mediocrity, I expected Business Canterbury to be assertively cheer-leading for greater transparency, and maximising economic impact, efficiencies, and relief for the ratepayer.

Watson doubles down, characterising the report’s recommendations as “rearranging the deck chairs”. She wants more ratepayer dollars pumped into events bid funding, which is a fair point.

But let’s suppose $5m annually can be saved under this recommended restructure. That would free up more funds for event bidding, while also easing rates pressure.

Government-mandated rates capping looks inevitable, and economic development funding is a non-core council activity. It must demonstrate greater bang for buck.