Gobotech support Red Alert Day, 30 Sept, with 100s of free gobos

Wednesday the 30^th of September has been declared an international Red Alert Day to highlight the plight of the Live Events Industry due to COVID-19. Buildings across our country and around the world will be lit in red and many will carry the tagline #WeMakeEvents.

Gobotech is a Gold Coast based niche manufacturer and supplier of images (gobos) used in events and tradeshows around the world. We are a small cog in the supply chain for the Australasian Events Industry. On the 13^th of March this year production companies around our country stopped and all booked events were either cancelled or put on hold. Our phones rang hot with cancellations and 90% of our work disappeared overnight.

Production and event companies have had to let their crews go and, with skeleton staff, place equipment in storage. There are no jobs on the horizon, and even with costs cut, the bills don’t stop coming. This is the industry that is called on to supply equipment for free when we raise money for our bushfire emergencies or floods, and unfortunately this time it’s this industry that requires assistance. We are the first industry to go out and we will be the last industry to return. Many of us can’t see a meaningful return to business until late in the first quarter 2021 at best.

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JobKeeper has been a lifeline for us who can get it and we are thoroughly blessed and grateful to be in the country we are in. As relief is wound back our concern is that we can’t afford to lose our highly technical, specialised workforce. Gobotech is a specialist manufacturer with only a few of us around the world and the only one in Australia, it’s imperative for us to be able to retain our skilled workforce until the industry can return. If that industry has been decimated in the meantime then we will have no business to return to and we lose another world-class Australian manufacturer.

Gobotech stand shoulder to shoulder with the Australasian production and events industry and will light our building red in support. We have sent out hundreds of gobo images free of charge throughout Australia and New Zealand with the message #WeMakeEvents that will be projected on the declared Red Alert Day, 30^th Sept 2020. We’ve been told over and again to raise our voice if we’re not OK, this time there are many in this industry that are right on the edge. The call goes out to our leaders to please do what you can to save our industry and our people.