The practical monopoly Western cities have as hosts of the Commonwealth Games is hurting the event's popularity, one of the nation's leading sports academics has warned.
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But attractive sporting options in Africa and Asia are more to blame than the Games' governing body, Dr Richard Cashman said.
"The Asian Games are a lot sexier and have a lot [more] sports the Asians like," Dr Cashman said.
"Lawn bowls is a great sport, but they don’t play it in Africa or Asia.
"It's catch-22, they don't get many Asian people [nations] coming along, so they don't have Asian sports."
The Gold Coast games in 2018 will be Australia's fifth time as host, and including that event, 18 of the 21 Games have been hosted by a British, Australian, Canadian or New Zealand city.
The other games were hosted by Jamaica in 1966, Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and Delhi in 2010.
The result is 46 of the 53 members of the Commonwealth have never hosted the event, which began in 1930.
Dr Cashman, now an associate with the Australian Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, said the Commonwealth Games had seemed to drop down the world events pecking order, with the Commonwealth Games Federation often left with few if any non-Western bids.
"If a country in Africa and Asia are going to bid, it would be more for the African and Asian games," he said.
Both events run each four years, with the last Asian Games (which includes among other things ten-pin bowling) attracting 9700 athletes and the African Games about 5000. There were 4500 athletes at Glasgow.
Dr Cashman said he suspected the Commonwealth Games Federation would like to broaden the Games' base, and "all things being equal" would prefer to give the 2022 hosting rights to Durban rather than its only fellow bidder – Edmonton, Canada – when it makes its decision later this year.
"I suspect they would have loved it to go to Sri Lanka in 2018, but they had a lot of trouble in 2010 with Delhi, and the reputation of the Games can get lower if they’re poorly run," he said.
There was no response this week from the London-based federation.
A KPMG report six months after the 2006 Melbourne event found total games-related expenditure in Victoria was about $2.9 billion, while the impact was an expected increase in gross state product of about $1.6 billion over a 20-year period.
