New South Wales today moved to bin a raft of controversial music festival licensing regulations, after a parliamentary committee acknowledged festival operators were not adequately consulted before the troubled scheme was introduced this year.
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The NSW Legislative Council this morning backed Shadow Minister for Music John Graham‘s motion to disallow the regulations by a margin of 21 to 18, marking the end of what festival organisers called an unworkable and opaque approval process.
The regulations, which were introduced in February after a spate of drug-related deaths among young festival attendees, required festival operators to apply for a new kind of license.
But operators criticised the new system for its unclear guidelines, and feared expensive new public health and security standards could price smaller operators out of the state.
The scheme was eventually scaled back to focus on festivals deemed “high risk”, but festival operators criticised the state government for alerting those 14 events to that status via late-night SMS.
A Regulation Committee report, released last month, found festival operators were faced with “significant and unsustainable cost increases” due to the laws, and recommended the government establish a regulatory roundtable to increase communication with festival operators.
Today’s move has been praised by the Live Performance Australia, whose chief executive Evelyn Richardson said “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.”
Party on, folks.
