Opinion | Left Field: Misfiring Mega Events Fund must be revamped
The wrong people have held the purse strings of the government's funding body for too long and it's time to rectify the mistake
It has been almost five months since we last heard a chirp from the Mega Events Fund following public censure from the Audit Commission, which panned the Tourism Commission for a job badly done.
What has happened to our dear friends at the MEF who held sport in such disregard that despite having a kitty of HK$250 million, they supported only 24 events - half of which were not sports - since the body came into existence in May, 2009? Are they still wiping all that Audit Commission egg off their face?
The MEF will be back (possibly early next year) with a new outlook and, with any luck, a new disposition too. Let's hope the entire funding application process has been thrown out of the window and that the procedure has not only been streamlined but targeted at actually bringing events here.
This must be the bottom line as Hong Kong badly needs more big sporting events. Previously the entire foundation of the MEF was built on attracting more tourists to town. Some bureaucrat, who didn't know sport, thought that every sporting event must follow the footsteps of the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens which attracts thousands of tourists yearly.
Let's hope the entire funding application process has been thrown out of the window
Using the Sevens as an example, the MEF decided that it would only support sporting events which could bring in the tourists. They wanted to count numbers of bodies passing through turnstiles instead of realising that some sporting events attracted mega attention on television - like the Hong Kong Cricket Sixes, which was widely popular and reached millions of viewers.
This must be the raison d'être of the new MEF - how widely televised and how big the profile of the event is, rather than attracting tourists. We need to put our city on the world map as a sporting destination.
