Published
Thu, Sep 26, 2019, 08:10
- The upper house of parliament has voted to drop the polarising measures seven months after they were introduced.
The New South Wales Government's suite of controversial festival licensing regulations has been dropped.
A month after a parliamentary inquiry concluded that the regulations were "inadequate" and should be abandoned, NSW parliament's upper house today voted to overturn the changes by a margin of 21 to 18, The Australian reports. While Labor and the Greens voted in favour of axing the measures, Premier Gladys Berejiklian responded by saying, "A measure designed to protect lives has fallen victim to politics—and nothing has been left in its place."
Labor's Minister For Music And The Night Time Economy John Graham explained, "The NSW Health guidelines should be applied more broadly than the government has currently done. They should apply to more than just 11 music festivals in NSW. Labor calls on the music festival industry and the government to work together to implement updated rules in time for the upcoming summer festival season."
"The government can now sit down with the industry for some constructive consultation on ways to improve patron safety at music festivals, including steps to reduce drug-related harm," Live Performance Australia's chief executive Evelyn Richardson said. "From the outset, we have repeatedly expressed our strong desire to work collaboratively with government on our shared commitment to safer festivals. Genuine collaboration with industry representatives who have decades of experience in running safe and successful festivals is the best way to promote the safety of festival patrons, while also ensuring NSW continues to enjoy the economic and cultural benefits from a dynamic and diverse music festival industry."
Introduced in February this year with less than a week's notice to the festival community, the regulation changes targeted a number of events deemed "high risk" by the government following a rise in drug-related festival deaths over the 2018-19 summer. Included in the suite of changes was a significant increase in the number of user-pays police—officers that organisers must pay for out of their own pocket—which in some cases increased more than threefold and ballooned policing bills by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The changes were criticised for being made without sufficient industry consultation and were dubbed by the media as a "war on festivals," with several events being forced to cancel.