It's a great chance for a local act to get exposure nationally to a large audience which is good payment enough in some respects. I hear your concerns though about a bad precendent being set. We just can't afford to fly and accomodate another band around NZ. They are toying with the idea of doing a tour for next to nothing, which means a small budget tour and ticket prices would be low as part of the deal. However if we secure decent sponsorship then things may change but at this stage I guess we are asking for volunteers. We may end up getting local support from each centre instead. Just ideas at this stage, keep your shirt on!

No I don't know grassroots.
Here's the guts. The band want to play for bugger all, but there are costs involved of course to get them here, international & domestic travel etc. so of course there is some initial outlay from our end for which ticket sales are vital to make this at least break even. They can either perform alone, or as they requested, it would be cool to perfom with some unknown local talent.
The offer to a local support act is this: if the band like your sound, they would ask you along on the whole tour... if the band can finance their own way around as there's little or no money to fly them around and accomodate them. The tour would be four shows in four days at this stage, so it's a bit of a whirlwind schedule. The budget is extremely tight as we are intending on selling cheap tickets. Otherwise we'll give them demos of bands from each centre to consider instead. Going by the reaction I'm getting so far, maybe thats a better idea - part of the reason for the original post. We have had some bigger NZ acts interested in doing the tour with the support of their record company, but thats not the initial idea of this tour.
They don't want to go with a big promoter, these guys are friends of ours and just want to have a working holiday. It would be great fun for any local band to be involved with this tour, they're a great bunch of guys. They do have a new guitarist which they are blooding at the mo, which is part of the reason for the guys wanting to come here I think.
Noone is trying to rip anyone off here, and it's still just an idea. They do respect NZ bands, which is why they want to come and do some shows with some up-and-coming NZ bands. It's not about money, and we do obviously realise that it costs for bands to travel around NZ! Bands could look at approaching sponsors to help them (sensible idea), or just save hard for ther next few months to take advantage of possibly a great opportunity.

Ill agree with everyone else and suggest that you go with 4 local bands as oposed to one band to tour.

The only possible way a local band could even think about doing 4 shows in 4 days would be if they utilised AAF's backline - the cost of a band transporting themselves from one end of the country to the other in 4 days is high enough but if they are having to both organise, and pay for the shipping of gear it sounds like more hassel then it would be worth.

Im going to take the bait here and put Snubnoise forward for consideration for a Wellington show - tell me what to do.

Cheers

That's great news! AAF are great, although they tend to get slagged off by most everyone due to the whole Smooth Criminal thing, which was more the record companies fault rather than there own (as seems to happen a lot, with bands who do covers getting forced to release them as singles).
Whatever, I'm excited about this.
Although what size venues are they looking at playing? Like, Indigo? or Town Hall? Love to see them somewhere smaller.... and Truant doesn't seem to have been particularly popular.

are applications for these support slots still being accepted? and were any decisions made on where bands would be doing the whole tour or local dates?