BWEZ - what CAN we buy for $5b a year?

Five BILLION dollars. A year.

That’s a lot of money. So much, in fact, that we put our minds to what we could effectively spend it on for the benefit of Ballarat generally.

If we were lazy, we could go for the obvious option. Olympic-size and quality swimming pools. Given that our current pool came in at just under $14m, that’s… 35 brand-spanking, shiny new, Olympic-ready swimming pools*. Or one for every suburb in Ballarat, plus Miners Rest, and then a few up our sleeve for those new suburbs to come. Of course, we’ll need to start finding people to name them after. Perhaps former prime ministers. 

That’s a bit easy though, isn’t it? We need to invest creatively. So:

We could pay off ALL of Centrelink’s accumulated welfare fraud debt. In one go. 

We could bid for a Tesla factory. Or an Atlassian start-up.

We could invest it in buying all the Star Wars merchandising from The Force Awakens, making sure NO-ONE opens any of the packaging thus lessening its resale value; then putting it away in the cupboard for 40 years before slowly filtering it back into the market via eBay. This will require (a) a number of staff (b) a very large cupboard (see below).

We could buy out the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility. (See above).

Israel has requested a $5b a year increase in security aid from the US. Which is an awful lot of bodybuilders and black t-shirts and those funny numbers in plastic neck tags that don’t really seem to signify anything. Nevertheless, surely Ballarat can represent here.

It’s the equivalent of a year’s trade between Afghanistan and Pakistan. That’s a lot of AK47s. Resale? You bet.

We could buy Frank Lowy. How IS soccer going in Ballarat, by the way?

Or we could pay way too much for Tindr.

Bingo.

*Correction – a more mathematically-astute reader has pointed out this equals 350 new pools, not 35. So roughly one for every street.

Related story – Multinational agribusiness CHS moves its HQ to Ballarat