Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Witness the new heights of absurdity and waste of the Australian Open (tennis).
The Open has become has become a multi-event extravaganza extending over three weeks. Clearly, it’s all about corporate commercialisation and fleecing the rubes with over-priced seats, food, under-whelming and inane commentary and idiotic novelty events. If our society has all this money to waste on promenading around over-priced precincts and then watching a little yellow ball sail back and forth over a net for hours on end, then we must have already fully solved our climate change, health, welfare, education, housing affordability and homelessness crises (to name a few). Oh wait, we haven’t.
“The Victorian government has invested almost $1 billion in upgrading Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open over the past decade. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Victorian government provided a $100 million taxpayer bailout to Tennis Australia to keep it solvent. This consisted of a $63 million cash payment and a $43 million loan which was later forgiven. There is also event operational, transport and logistic support provided by government.” (These examples in this paragraph taken from Google AI and slightly re-worded).
A society which has manifest runaway problems, as outlined above, (climate change, health, welfare, education, housing affordability and homelessness crises), cannot afford to throw away money and therefore resources on such circuses as the AO and professional sports in general (football, Olympics, Grand Prix etc. etc.). The fact that we do this is another sign of our bread and circuses mentality and the promotion and subsidisation of climate-destroying, society destroying, over-consumption and tourism. This is nothing less than another sign of our end-of-epoch, terminal societal and civilizational corruption leading to total national and global collapse.
None of this is sustainable. The collapse is getting very close.