More losers than winners in business community

In 1993 when International Olympic Council president Mr Juan Antonio Samaranch announced Sydney was to stage the 2000 Olympic Games, the city's business community rejoiced.

Within hours of the announcement having been made, Qantas - Australia's biggest airline - issued a press release forecasting that Sydney's staging of the games would swell its coffers by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr Tony Thirwell, then director of marketing services at the airline, said 250 million Australian dollars (#137.57 million) would be generated by visitors to the games in addition to the increased advance revenues from Olympic related passenger cargo traffic.

But now that the Olympic dust in Australia has settled, a much more bleak financial situation has emerged. The Australian economy, far from basking in the games' afterglow, is still coping with an Olympic-sized financial headache.

In February, Qantas announced a major downturn in its fortunes for the six months to December 31st 2000, the period which included the Olympics. Net profit fell for the first time in six years, down 22 per cent to Aus$264 million. And while rising aviation fuel prices, and the slowing Australian economy, were cited as two major reasons for the profit slump, the Olympics was also singled out as a major culprit.

New Qantas chief executive Mr Geoff Dixon pulled no punches in explaining the impact of the Games on the company's bottom line. "The anticipated big Olympic spending surge simply never materialised and corporate Australia stopped".

The company added that while revenues on international routes were up due to the Olympics, those gains were more than offset by the losses domestically.

Retailers and restaurants were also particularly badly hit. "We knew the Olympics would be disastrous and it was," said Mr John Hart, chief executive of Restaurant and Catering Australia. "About 10 to 12 restaurants did exceptionally well because they were located by the main foot traffic. . . We think everybody else stayed home and watched the Olympics on TV."

For retailers there was a similar story. "The Olympics did not help retailing unless it was specifically related to the Olympics," said Mr Phil Naylor, chief executive of the Australian Retailers Association.

"For most retailers, it had a negative impact, perhaps because Olympic tickets were so expensive."

The games also proved a nightmare for the construction industry with building grinding to a near standstill in September and yet to recover.

The number of jobs on offer in Australia also nosedived during the Olympic period with the ANZ bank's survey of job ads in major metropolitan newspapers showing an 18.3 per cent decline in September to their lowest level since February 1998. Like construction, the employment market is yet to recover. Even increased tourist numbers attributed to the influence of games have been offset by falling numbers from Japan due to that country's financial woes.