Please Support Our Recommendations to the Victorian Tourism and Events Inquiry

Yesterday morning Tiny Good, Howard Freeman and Simon Thewlis were the first witnesses at the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into Support for the Tourism and Event Sectors.  You can watch the video of it here: https://youtu.be/CqYOoU_85d4  It is worth watching.

Later in the day, Peter and Lawrie from Phaseshift and Rocky from Exponet also did an amazing job telling the Inquiry the very raw and moving story of our industry.

At the hearing, we presented Save Victorian Events’ recommendations for how to get our industry through this crisis, and also how to fundamentally change the way that the government views events and our Event Industry so that we are never in this situation again.

The full recommendations PDF can be downloaded here and we would encourage you to read it.

There are two very quick and simple things that you can do that would really help:

1.  Email a copy of the recommendations PDF to tourisminquiry@parliament.vic.gov.au with a simple note saying that you support Save Victorian Events’ recommendations. And feel free to add any other thoughts you have.

2.  Click on this link https://savevictorianevents.good.do/recommendations/EmailNow/ to send an email to your local member of parliament and the Acting Premier to say that you support these recommendations and they need to act on them NOW.

It would be great if you could do both of these things.  And please share this page with your friends and colleagues.

Our recommendations are very simple.  And it starts with fixing the underlying problems.

1.  We need the event industry to be recognised by the government as a real industry.  As an important industry to Victoria, and to Victoria’s future.

2.  We need the real contributions that our events make to Victoria to be finally to understood and valued by government.  And, we need the extraordinary skills, talents and resources of the event industry to be valued – as they should be getting used during this crisis.

3.  We need a dedicated government agency – Events Victoria – to be set up to support, develop and promote Victoria’s event industry.  Including, as an export industry.  An agency that has people who understand the event industry and are committed to working with us and supporting us. 

4.  We urgently need some real financial support for the event companies, event suppliers and the freelancers and contractors so they can survive until later in the year when events start picking up again properly.

5.  We need Covid cancel insurance to be underwritten by government so many events can start happening again.

The document we have submitted goes into vastly more detail.  Please do have a read.

Again, thank you for your help.  For the last nine months we have worked as hard as we possibly can to advocate for our industry.  We will keep pushing.

Many thanks for your continued help,

Carson White, Bea Tomlin, Steve Smith, Simon Thewlis, Sue Rynan-Kiernan, Liliana Sanelli, Ray German, Mike Hall, Mel Keenan and the rest of the Save Victorian Events Team