National Cabinet Called On To 'Guarantee' Borders Remain Open For Live Music's Recovery

Live Performance Australia (LPA) has called on all Australian states and territories to outline a timeframe to get live music venues back to 100% capacity and to guarantee borders will remain open as vaccinations roll out. 

Evelyn Richardson - Chief Executive of the arts and entertainment industry peak body - noted that Queensland were the first state to lift restrictions for live shows and events. 

“We’re now calling on all states and territories to follow the lead of Queensland and open all indoor theatre venues to 100% capacity," Richardson said.

"We also need to review the one person per two square metre rule. We know that small live performance venues are struggling to program events given the current restrictions and events of scale such as concerts and music festivals are a long way off returning to normal business operations.

"The challenges of eight different frameworks with anomalies in indoor and outdoor settings plus lack of consistency across industry sectors is severely impeding business recovery. We are concerned that sport and cultural events are being treated differently, despite the venue settings being broadly the same.

"We are also a huge touring industry and rely on borders being open and venue capacities being aligned nationally. For a producer putting a show into market, the current patchwork of restrictions severely hinders their ability to design a business model that works in terms of ticket sales and touring costs. At 75% capacity most of our shows are still not breaking even. We’ve also had the constant disruption of snap lockdowns and changing border and density restrictions. This has impacted both consumer and industry confidence."

In a The Music exclusive, Shadow Minister For The Arts Tony Burke last week slammed the lack of support for the arts sector, particularly with JobKeeper payments ending on 28 March, while NSW Shadow Minister for Music and the Night Time Economy John Graham also pressed Minister for Tourism Stuart Ayres about providing a financial package for the NSW live music scene. 

Ayres confirmed that an application for a package is "currently being assessed" by Treasury. 

Richardson continued, “We ask that the National Cabinet agree to keep the borders open, commit to increasing capacity to 100%  at all live entertainment venues and work with us to implement a framework for bringing in international artists and crew.

"This will get all of our people back to work and enable our companies to get back to business."