You can sell just about anything with the right economic impact report. Just consider Sir Robert Jones’s presumably tongue-in-cheek proposal for a magnificent new statue on The Terrace.

In a letter to Mayor Celia Wade-Brown widely published this week, Sir Robert asked that Wellington City Council waive the height restrictions on his Solnet House property. Why? So he could demolish it and build a statue of Gareth Morgan, five kilometres tall. Cristo Redentor? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Leaving aside the less than veiled poke at Morgan’s public persona, let’s consider the economic impact assessment.

Jones pointed to estimates of 20,000 more hotel rooms being needed to accommodate Morganite pilgrims. As usual in these assessments, he ignored the costs of building the hotel rooms in the first place.

He noted an expected tenfold increase in cruise ship visits necessitating massive new port facilities, ignoring the costs of building them and the pedestrian congestion burden imposed on Lambton Quay and The Terrace with the new arrivals. If you have been annoyed by slow-moving tourists while making your way around Wellington, just wait until you experience the sorts of cruise ship denizens who would make their way here to see a statue of an economist.

Finally, he expected an economic boom from having to build four new runways to cope with demand at Wellington Airport.

If anything, Jones’s economic impact assessment was more structurally sound than many I have seen. His projections are clearly based on new tourist inflows that would not have come to New Zealand anyway at some other time, so they are one-up on some analyses of major sporting events.

And he ignores one substantial benefit: it would be much easier to fly regulation-compliant recreational drones within city limits, so long as they stayed within 100m of the statue.

His major problem, that if he builds it the Morganites may not come, is not a flaw unique to his proposal.

Sadly, even with such a magnificent economic impact assessment, the project may be impossible. Brazil’s Cristo Redentor stands only 30 metres tall and weighs 635 tons. A five kilometre high statue would be more than proportionately heavier and, in case of earthquake, would impose considerable risk on, well, the entire downtown. I suspect it would be ruled out under earthquake-prone statue regulations.

Bit of a shame, really.