Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Melbourne was very quiet last weekend, as most locals sought to avoid the annual Grand Prix disruption to the south of Melbourne. It is one of the characteristics of this event that it is constantly inflating claims of the value of this event to our city. The Victorian Premier, Denis Napthine, claimed that 450 million people tuned into watch Melbourne's race. But—dare I dare say—not for the first time, the Premier has uttered something that is not believable. The ABC's Fact Check blog has reviewed the Premier's claim and labelled it as 'unsubstantiated'. In truth, the actual number of people tuning in to the event across the globe is less than 10 per cent—that is, 20 to 40 million at best, not the 450 million who watch all grands prix over an entire year.

To make matters worse, only recently the supremo of the Grand Prix, who is on the front page of all European newspapers for charges of corruption in Germany and paying bribes to German bankers, came out and said he 'completely agrees' with Vladimir Putin's anti-gay legislation—hardly the type of character who deserves more than $30 million of taxpayers' money annually for his undisclosed fee to justify the false claim of 450 million people tuning in to the Grand Prix around the world.