Rio Olympics
The head of Brazil’s Olympic Public Authority (APO), the organisation responsible for coordinating centrally the country’s efforts, across 3 levels of government, for the 2016 Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games, has resigned. This was amid a political dispute just two weeks before the International Olympic Committee’s next inspection visit to Rio scheduled for 1-2 September.
There are suggestions that Ministry of Sports' Secretary for High Performance Sports, Ricardo Leyser, may be selected for the head position. And separately that the APO may be given a new remit or even done away with.
Read the full article including other items on the Rio Olympics, now just three years away, at the New Millennium Business website – click here to read.
Our warm congratulations to Kitty Chiller on her appointment by the AOC as Chef de Mission for the Australian team in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Fabulous!
Those marvellous BRICs…a little unravelling?
Have you been watching some of the recent economic turn-arounds, especially among the BRICs, those darlings of the world…as long as they continued to register substantial growth. Well, perhaps a bit like the Asian financial crisis of the late 90’s…and thankfully in this part of the world at least we learned a lot from that experience…we are seeing the results of exuberance and insufficient risk management coming home. In essence, the several years of borrowing of US dollars by the BRICs and other developing countries has become an enormous anchor as their currencies have shifted, declining in value against the dollar and rendering many investments unprofitable and many loans and debts almost unpayable. And so the screws turn even more. You can see this happening in India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and even with China except that they have the reserves and international clout to offset the impacts and manage their exchange rate. It may get messy.
Spending on the Arts
With the arrival in Melbourne next month of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson…Boris Johnson, Mayor of London… to speak at the Melbourne Writers Festival where he will deliver the opening address, it is interesting and instructive to look at the spending of main states across cultural and arts activities, facilities and installations. Certainly, after building over 20 years a formidable array of ‘fixed’ international sporting events, Victoria, has more recently pursued the arts…again with a good measure of success.
Arts is a part of culture but gets funded in ad hoc ways…
Sydney and Melbourne often compete to be seen as the nation’s arts capital. The media does its bit to ramp up the competition. Recent data shows however, that State government funding in Victoria does outweigh that by New South Wales.
Victoria spent $42.10 a person on arts in 2011-12, far more than the $28.10 spent on each NSW resident by their state government. Victoria's 2011-12 arts budget of $234.7 million is still the biggest of any state or territory government, but NSW is catching up. The NSW arts budget more than doubled from $89.8 million in 2007-08 to $203.6 million in 2011-12, with spending on capital works rising from $8.7 million to $60 million in this period.
The film and television production story is the same. Largest state, NSW spent $18 million on film and video production and distribution in 2011-12, less than the $41.4 million spent by Victoria and the $19.7 million spent by South Australia, and barely above Western Australia's $17.2 million film budget.
Excerpts from “Back on the Block”, published 24 August 2014.
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