Go for Olympic host city gold - and go for broke too

Yet since 2012 Queensland's GSP has grown only 14 per cent, lower than the Australian average of 17.2 per cent, and well behind the growth gold medallist Western Australia on 19 per cent.

Perhaps if they had followed the sandgropers and concentrated on a few more mines, rather than the Games, things would have been different.

The pitch for the Olympics claims 5000 jobs a year will be created until the Olympics, and 130,000 in the year they occur.

Just how good a job generator that will be can easily be measured by comparing the Olympics with the Adani mine, which will employ 2000 a year not just for 10 years, but for 60. So one mine will generate employment of not much less than the Olympic year. There are nine of them proposed for the Galilee Basin.

They will also pay hundreds of millions each year in royalties, on top of GST, stamp duty, and payroll tax, plus the flow-on employment in service industries such as education, health and retail. All this without the government risking a single dollar.

Which highlights the real risks in the Olympics. Bidding for them represents a failure in governance.

If you need a sporting festival to justify building adequate roads and public structure, then you are not putting your electors first.

If you are going to take hard-earned taxpayer dollars into a high-risk undertaking with uncertain and probably negative outcomes, you have no respect for the hard work that has gone into those taxes.

And if you are going to sign one of those Olympic contracts, knowing the dire history of mismanagement and failure that almost inevitably follows them, you have no sense.