Eurovision 2016 went down over the weekend, marking the second time that Australia, a country, it bears noting, that is not in Europe, competed. What’s more, we almost won the bloody thing, coming in second to this year’s victors Ukraine.
Silver is not a bad result for our second swing at Eurovision. Australia, after all, has had a long history with watching Eurovision on the tele. Households around the country host annual Eurovision parties with various inventive drinking games.
However, actually competing and even voting is new to us. Yes, if you didn’t yet know, it’s too late, but Australians were actually able to vote in this year’s Eurovision, providing each contestant with 50 percent of their total votes.
The bookies must’ve been expecting our Dami Im to collect a fair share of those votes, because as News Corp reports, they slashed her odds to win from $19 to $5 in the lead up to the Grand Final, expecting her to at least match Guy Sebastian’s top five finish last year.
Of course, Ukraine eventually stole the win from us. But what would’ve happened if Australia had actually won Eurovision? Would Eurovision be coming Down Under for 2017, in accordance with the competition’s rules which state the winning country must host the next year?
No. In fact, had Australia won, we would’ve kinda sorta screwed over the country in second place. But before we get to that, let’s take a look at the Eurovision rule book, which clearly states the ceremony must always be held in Europe.
Granted, the competition’s rules and definitions are pretty flexible (after all, Australia has competed for the last two years running), but the fine print would prevent Australia from hosting the ceremony even if we did win.
Instead, the runner-up would be forced to host the ceremony, which as News Corp notes, is kind of a crappy situation for them, because it’s basically forcing them to foot the bill for next year’s competition even though they didn’t even win.
Eurovision costs a lot of money to put on and some countries can’t actually afford to do it, going so far as to send intentionally bad acts in to perform and sabotage their chances of being stuck with a horrible bill that would cripple their economy.
It’s the reason you always see those bizarre entries from obscure countries – they don’t want to win, it’s too expensive. And we don’t think a country that didn’t actually win would appreciate having to take on the burden of hosting.
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But let’s just imagine for a second that they bent the rules and allowed the ceremony to be hosted in Australia, well then we’d actually be screwing over more than one country, possibly even the entire Eurovision organisation as a whole.
Eurovision isn’t just expensive to host, it costs each participating country a lot of money to send their artist, entourage, media, and fans to the host country for a week. Now imagine sending them all the way to Australia.
If Eurovision ordered all competitor nations to fly over to Australia if they want to participate in Eurovision, you’d likely see more than one or two countries boycotting the thing altogether. So maybe it’s best we didn’t win.
