Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House notes that:

(1) 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the Byron Bay Bluesfest, Australia's premier Blues and Roots music festival;

(2) Bluesfest has been acclaimed as a premier contemporary music, tourist and business event, winning multiple awards from New South Wales Tourism, the Australia Event Awards, the Australia Helpmann Awards, and the North Coast Tourism Awards;

(3) Bluesfest has also been internationally recognised for its work on environmental sustainability and minimising the environmental impact of the festival on its surroundings, being awarded the international 'A Greener Festival Award' seven years in a row;

(4) in 2013, Bluesfest director Peter Noble and Bundjalung woman and festival director Rhoda Roberts founded the Boomerang festival, which celebrates the valuable contributions of our Indigenous people through music, art, dance, film and cultural exchanges; and

(5) Bluesfest director Peter Noble received on 4 February 2014 the prestigious Rolling Stone Award recognising his outstanding career-long contribution to popular culture.

Bluesfest at Byron Bay is an outstanding annual event held in my electorate of Richmond. This year the festival celebrated its 25th anniversary. The East Coast Blues Festival began in 1990 as a four-day indoor festival at the Arts Factory in Byron Bay, drawing a capacity crowd of about 6,000 in its first year. It quickly became known as the Byron Bay Bluesfest, then the Byron Bay Festival, and today it is simply known as the Bluesfest. In the Bluesfest, Australia had for the first time a genuine international multicultural music festival. In 1993, the event moved indoors to the Belongil Fields until relocating to Red Devil Park in 1997, where it stayed until 2007. The festival then moved back to Belongil Fields in 2008-09 and, in 2010, moved to its new permanent home at the Tyagarah Tea Tree Farm, about 15 minutes drive north of Byron Bay. The event is absolutely massive. It includes seven performance stages, five licensed bars and a number of huge undercover food halls. There are also daily children's activities, merchandise stalls, onsite camping and market stalls. This year saw the Silver Anniversary of the Bluesfest draw its highest attendance in the history of the festival, with more than 104,500 people attending over the five days. This is a real credit to the festival director, Peter Noble, and his team, who do such an outstanding job.

Economically, Bluesfest is a major contributor to the Byron Shire. Looking solely at the economic benefit of the 2013 Bluesfest, there was a total benefit of $64.1 million for the Byron Shire, including an estimated total income—that is wages and salaries—of $10.8 million for the Byron Shire. Bluesfest is also very supportive of charitable groups as diverse as kindergartens and hospices and also of some musicians who have fallen on hard times. Bluesfest fundraising alone raised $130,000 for the victims of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Major charity fundraising over the past 15 years has been for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and guitar raffles at the festival have raised over $374,000 to date. This year, charity stalls included things like Australian Seabird Rescue, Bay FM, Byron Youth Service, Cancer Council, Playing for Change, The Uncle Project and Westpac Lifesaver Rescue. So we can see that Bluesfest brings enormous economic benefits to Byron Bay and, indeed, to the Northern Rivers. And it is a great support for many organisations.

Bluesfest is also one of the most highly awarded festivals in Australia. In 2005 and 2006, Bluesfest won the Helpmann Award for Australia's Best Contemporary Music Festival. Between 1994 and 2010, Bluesfest has consistently been awarded Rhythms Magazine readers' poll for Australia's Best Music Festival. The awards Bluesfest has won are unprecedented for a regional event. Bluesfest has also been nominated by the international concert magazine Pollstar in 2005 and 2006 as one of the top five finalists in the International Venue of the Year category, alongside major festivals such as the Montreux Jazz Festival. Bluesfest is viewed as one of the world's great music festivals—something that we are very, very proud of.

Bluesfest is not just about the music. It is also important to note that it is a leader in low carbon pollution tourism. Each year since 2007, Bluesfest has been awarded the international A Greener Festival Award, recognizing its outstanding commitment to sustainability. Another very exciting initiative of the Bluesfest director, Peter Noble, was to team up with Bundjalung woman and leading cultural creator, Rhoda Roberts, to create the first Boomerang Festival, which was held in 2013 for the first time. More than 5,000 people attended over the three days to celebrate Indigenous culture through traditional and contemporary music. I am sure it will continue to grow.

I would like to acknowledge all the volunteers who helped with the Bluesfest Festival; they make an outstanding difference. I would also like to note that festival director, Peter Noble, took out the Rolling Stone Award at the 5th Annual Rolling Stone Awards held in Sydney recently. Congratulations to him! The award acknowledges the contribution by Peter not only to Bluesfest but also to the wider music industry that he has been a part of, at a professional level, for 50 years. It was fitting that Peter was awarded this honour as Bluesfest celebrated its 25th Anniversary over the Easter long weekend.

Bluesfest 2014 saw industry heavyweights such as John Mayer, Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson take the stage, alongside wonderful Australian artists such as the John Butler Trio, The Black Sorrows and John Williamson—to name a few of the great artists. The event has now grown to a point where artists from every continent appear. People make the pilgrimage from all around the world to attend the Bluesfest each year. It has an incredible reputation. For those who have been to Bluesfest, you know exactly what I mean. You know how special it is and how important it is. If you have not been and are interested in going to Bluesfest, then please make the trip to it next year. It is a unique, iconic and very special festival. It is one that we are very proud of in the Northern Rivers. I am very proud to have it in my electorate. I would certainly welcome everyone from all sides of the house to come along to see what the beautiful north coast has to offer. When it comes to Bluesfest, we have an outstanding festival—one that we are all incredibly proud of.

In closing, I would again like to acknowledge the great work that Peter Noble does and has done as director over the years to put us on the world stage with Bluesfest.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to acknowledge the member for Richmond for moving this motion to honour not only Bluesfest but also the director, Peter Noble. The member for Richmond's electorate is just north of mine. The Byron Bay hinterland extends into the seat of Page. I commend the member for Richmond for getting out so much information in such a short space of time. I will certainly not even try to get close to getting out as much information as you have—I applaud it.

I want to repeat a couple of points that the member for Richmond made, which I think tell a big story about Bluesfest. I see the member for Watson is in the chamber. I saw you at the Boomerang Festival, and you obviously go to the Bluesfest Festival as well, which is wonderful. I think the economic benefit of the festival is something that we need to acknowledge. It has become not only a music festival but also a tourist destination for a lot of people. It was in 1990, as was mentioned, that this festival began, and 6,000 people went through the gates in 1990; as the member for Richmond said, that has now grown to 140,000 people over five days. Those are easy figures to say, but I think that we need to acknowledge the work and the vision that that has taken. This is obviously a wonderful, iconic event.

The event is held over the Easter long weekend. The Easter long weekend in our region has been renowned for bad weather occasionally, but that has certainly not deterred the people who keep going to the Bluesfest. And, as I said, there is a very wide spin-off of economic benefits. Obviously a lot of people fly into Ballina, in the federal electorate of Page, to go to this event, and they then stay all over the hinterland and in surrounding towns. As I have said to Peter, this is a great benefit of the festival—a wonderful thing that it does. Not everyone goes to the festival for four days, and the wider region has a lot to offer to visitors and tourists.

The award was mentioned. I had a look this morning to see what awards this event had won, and I could have spent my whole five minutes talking about the awards the Bluesfest has won. It has won many tourism awards and awards across a whole range of categories too numerous to mention. The most recent of those—and it is not an insignificant award—was the Rolling Stone award for the director Peter Noble.

This is not only an Australian event; it has become an international event. I have been a few times and not only the artists but many people who are there to appreciate the artists have travelled not only from every state of Australia but from countries all around the world. That is wonderful.

A few artists were mentioned. Madam Deputy Speaker Griggs, I encourage you to come; I think that not only would you love the area, and I am sure you have been before, but you would very much appreciate the artists as well: John Mayer, Elvis Costello, Boz Scaggs—you would remember Boz Scaggs, Madam Deputy Speaker—

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do remember Boz Scaggs.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

and the Doobie Brothers were there. I did not get to see the Doobie Brothers, but we did go and see Aaron Neville. Aaron Neville is a real favourite of my wife's. Aaron has aged, but I tell you what: he can still belt it out. There was Troy Cassar-Daley—

Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That's my husband's favourite.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, Madam Deputy Speaker, Troy Cassar-Daley, who is from the Grafton community in the electorate of Page, was there performing as well, and he is a great Australian artist.

In finishing—and I have mentioned this before—I will say that it takes great entrepreneurial spirit to do this. Peter had other partners at the start; he now owns the whole thing outright, having bought out the other partners. It takes great entrepreneurial spirit to do this—that whole have-a-go mentality that we love in this chamber and that we want to support. Peter has done a great job with this. He has epitomised that spirit and mentality. He has staff to manage and artists to coordinate. There is the whole logistics of it. It takes place at Tyagarah now, and the physicality of what he has built and manufactured there is wonderful.

As was raised before, the dollar value is in the tens of millions—over $64 million—just in direct input to the local economy from this event. So I congratulate Peter for that.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge that—while we are acknowledging Peter and his work on the blues festival—Peter has extended this, and now, at a different time of the year, in October, we have the Boomerang Festival, a wonderful festival which celebrates Indigenous artists. That festival was new last year, and I think it will continue to grow into our community and be another wonderful cultural event in the wider Northern Rivers community.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I became arts minister rather suddenly last year. It was a position that I had hoped to gain for a long time and then, all of a sudden, amidst a number of other movements that happened at the time, the position was vacant and I discovered that I was arts minister for Australia, only about a week before Bluesfest was to take place. I had been hearing about Bluesfest for a long time, from the member for Richmond and from my friends George Negus and Kirsty Cockburn who had been encouraging me to attend. Immediately, though, there was the issue that the arts minister prior to me, Simon Crean, had accepted an invitation and I was asked to take it up. So, having said for a long time that I was too busy and could not make it, I found myself at my first Bluesfest last year.

This is an extraordinary event—an absolutely extraordinary event. I think the story of its success is a story about the organisers and a story about the bands, but it is also a story about the crowd. It is a very special crowd at Bluesfest. There are not many music festivals where you will find people in such large numbers and—what has been for years—such an impeccably well-behaved crowd; this is not a crowd where you end up with problems, or bad media stories. It is an absolutely fantastic long weekend, and full credit has to go to the organisers for that. Peter Noble is an extraordinary Australian. What Peter has brought together in Bluesfest is through his own contacts, dating all the way back to his days as a bass player, as a band manager, and owning his own record label. And now, to be able to reach out—it would appear that there is no musical door that Peter Noble would be unable to open. Over the years, we have seen the most extraordinary mixture—from the greatest artists the world has known, to whoever might be extraordinarily popular on the day, to some of the new, up-and-coming artists who are just finding their way through. I did not expect that there would be a day in my life when I would find myself attending a concert of KC and The Sunshine Band! Notwithstanding that, that moment happened for me this year—and KC was still up there, dancing away. There was a sense of fun throughout this whole festival. That really needs to be valued. Since that time, I have had the privilege to be able to declare my continued support and my continued attendance at Bluesfest, and also at the Boomerang Festival; I will say a bit more about the Boomerang Festival in a moment.

Peter Noble is backed up by an extraordinary team; by his partner, Annika Oman, Brendan Meek, Russell Mills and Remy Tancred—and it is always a privilege to be met by people like that. I won't go through more names, because the more names you list, the deeper you go—you end up with an extraordinary list of people who come there to work because they believe in what happens there. And they believe passionately in the value of music itself. A lot is said, and quite rightly, about concerns for the future and about making sure we have enough Australian music. Increasingly, people are getting their music from offshore sources; people are listening to radio through means that do not of themselves have Australian content quotas. Part of making sure Australian music stays strong is to make sure that Australian music festivals remain strong. There will always be international headline artists—that is part of getting the crowd there. But this also helps provide the critical mass and critical audience for Australian bands—to make sure that cutting-edge Australian music continues to be part of the Australian story.

The move to the Boomerang Festival is very important. The work that Rhoda Roberts has done as the curator of this festival provides an Indigenous music festival that is easy for large numbers of Australians to get to. Whether people were watching Australian artists like Gurrumul, or international acts like the Wantok Sing Sing, we saw a beautiful feast of music at Boomerang. I certainly hope it receives the public support to be able to continue for a very long time. There is a good environmental story at the site; and great work that they have done with koalas, in looking after them in a precious environmental site; but most importantly this is about making sure that music is part of Australian culture. Bluesfest plays a critical role in that.

Debate adjourned.