October 17, 2014
by Dafyd Martindale
The South Burnett’s economy benefits by millions of dollars every year from events staged by volunteer groups.
To pick this month, just as an example. At the start of October we saw the third outing of the South Burnett and Cherbourg On Show long weekend promotion.
This four-day festival offered visitors (and locals) a smorgasbord of 65 different events from Blackbutt to Cherbourg, ranging from intimate get-togethers at restaurants and art galleries through to bigger festival and sporting events that drew thousands.
SBCOnShow was put together by a volunteer committee and run by local businesses, big and small.
This weekend we’ll see the Wondai Race Club’s annual Caulfield Cup Meeting and the third outing of the Nanango Show Society’s Waterhole Rocks Festival, both staged by volunteer groups.
Next weekend it will be the turn of Motors In Motion at Kingaroy (more volunteers) and Moffatdale’s Dusty Day Out.
And the weekend after that, Murgon will be gearing up to host its 4th annual Murgon Music Muster and the dozens of caravanners who’ll pack out the Murgon Showgrounds to attend it, courtesy of the Murgon Rotary Club.
In the course of any year, our region stages about 60 agricultural shows, campdrafts, race meetings and town festivals.
We also host innumerable sports gatherings – anything from the South Burnett Soccer 7s through to this year’s Intrust Super Cup game, and many more in between, along with occasional business and agricultural conventions.
While some of these are admittedly of more interest to locals than visitors, many others bring hundreds – and a select handful, thousands – of visitors to our region who inject significant cash into our local economy.
But in an area blessed with so much to do for so much of the year, it’s easy to overlook that our situation is quite different to that which typically prevails elsewhere.
In fact, several coastal regions have so few public events that their local Councils have to run almost everything.
For whatever reason – historical, social, or accidental – we have developed an events culture.
And it’s a major asset.
Last year, the South Burnett Regional Council set up South Burnett Directions as the region’s peak economic advisory group to look at ways we can make our region grow over the longer term.
Last month, this group released the first draft of its five-year Economic Development Plan.
While this is necessarily a “big picture” document that’s full of broad visions and light on specifics, we think one glaring omission is that it makes no mention of our thriving event culture, or contemplates any plan to grow and strengthen it into the future.
Which seems – to us, anyway – to be overlooking a significant asset we already have.
One idea that’s been suggested by several of our larger public events committees several times over the last five years is that the South Burnett Regional Council engage a professional Events Officer.
This officer would provide (for a fee) a lot of the “bread and butter” legwork for the region’s volunteer events committees.
They might, for example, compile a database of stall-holders who’d be willing to supply events with many of the common stalls and amusements we’ve come to expect at our public events: things like coffee vans, food vans, jumping castles and so forth.
They might also prepare standard contracts for the hire of musicians or entertainers; arrange (at a great discount) public liability insurance coverage for regional events; and help prepare grant submissions.
A professional Events Officer could also strike deals for equipment hire and the production of signage, banners and advertising; make standard arrangements for things like WH&S checks, food vendor licensing and rubbish collection; negotiate central ticketing and/or online ticket sales systems; and generally smooth out and systematise the myriad other little details that most events need to attend to.
Many events committees would welcome being able to call on an officer like this to streamline their operations and reduce the workload on their volunteers, and many would be willing to pay for the services provided.
The benefit for the region would be that we would see much more uniformity in the quality of our region’s major events and (no doubt) a lift in their professionalism, too.
Ideally, a Council Events Officer would cover all their annual costs from the fees charged for these services.
But even if they didn’t, whatever cost wasn’t covered would be more than compensated by the millions these events generate for the local economy and the millions more they could generate in the future if they’re grown and marketed effectively.
The alternative – which is what we have now – is that our events will continue to be a curate’s egg ranging from smooth to slapdash; our regional brand will continue to be much less than it could be; and from time to time, as our volunteers age and run out of puff, some of our events will simply implode and wink out of existence.
Worst of all, though, we will be leaving one of our major and proven economic assets to the winds of chance rather than seizing it and genuinely developing it.
Given a choice between chasing after fairies at the bottom of the garden or biting into something that’s sitting on the dinner table in front of us, we know what we’d choose.
