LPA’s Evelyn Richardson on negotiating lifeline with Federal Gov’t: ‘We were clear on our top three priorities’

2020 was the worst. For years to come, youngsters will be instructed to never discuss religion, politics or 2020 during polite dinner conversation.

From the scorched earth that was the year of the pandemic, green shoots. Concerts are back, national tours are penciled in, awards season returned.

Life feels relatively normal heading into the southern winter.

For the live entertainment sector, life is anything but normal.

Capacities are still in place for music venues across the country, the vaccine rollout has been botched, Bluesfest was forced to shut at the last moment, and, if you looked carefully, the federal budget assumes that the international border would remain closed until mid-2022.

Were it not for a $135 million lifeline from Canberra, the result of intensive lobbying efforts from a raft of music industry advocates, 2021 would look a lot more like 2020. 

Things are looking up, but the live industry is not partying this year. Indeed, the peak body Live Performance Australia last month scrapped the 2021 edition of the Helpmann Awards.

“Our priority right now continues to be getting all of our industry across the country fully operational, back on stage and touring,” LPA CEO Evelyn Richardson explained at the time.

It’s the second successive year the ceremony has been cancelled. Planning for next year’s edition will begin soon.

If all goes well, the 2022 events calendar will be an embarrassment of riches. 

TIO caught up with Richardson for a look at the debris of 2020 and the industry’s lobbying efforts with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Canberra’s power brokers.

The industry meets with PM Scott Morrison

Few music industries have had an audience with their country’s leader, and got something out of it. Have you any advice for music industries in other countries on that path to the big players?

The most important thing is to be very clear about the message and what the key ask is. When we went to Canberra we were clear on what our top three priorities were and where we felt government support would have the most impact and we costed the proposals we put forward.

We had also done a lot of work in advance talking with Treasury, Office of the Arts and key government reps and providing the evidence base and data to support the arguments for support. Those meetings did not happen in a vacuum, there had been a lot of advocacy work done in advance both publicly and through private channels.

Federal government support for the live entertainment industry, through JobKeeper, RISE grants and Support Act funding, were critical in keeping the industry alive but we still face major barriers to reactivation.

We knew we had a small window to get bridging support so we could keep as many companies going as possible and sustain our cores skills base.

Music industry meets Treasurer Josh Frydenberg

The Canberra meeting seemed to get our leaders over the line. Looking back now, was that crunchtime? Is there a takeaway from making that extra step with an impressive team?

It was very much crunch time as the JobKeeper program was fast coming to an end and for our live music sector we knew our big challenge was the gap, getting through Q2 and Q3, to Q4 when we are preparing to fully reactivate.

Workforce retention and stimulus was critical. The team we took represented the broad section of the live music industry and we went with a shared set of priorities, that was absolutely critical.

There was genuine engagement from our leaders, they were listening to what we had to say, and looked for practical ways to work with us and support us.

Sometimes timing goes your way; we were fortunate the stars aligned and we managed to confirm meetings with the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Minister for the Arts.

The key takeaway is know your stuff, do the work and provide the decision makers with the facts and evidence to support the industry proposals you put to them.

The other takeaway is to listen to what they have to say. These meetings are an interactive dialogue, we hope an ongoing one.

What other lessons did you learn from this year-long experience of negotiating, open-letters, meetings and the rest?

Keep going! It’s been an incredibly challenging year for many industries, including ours. But you just have to keep getting up every day and push on, refocus where and when you need to, and realign depending on what external factors are in play at any given time.

Everything just keeps moving and changing so quickly so it’s a constant challenge to stay ahead of the curve.

And in the Australian context, the other big challenge has been having to work with eight state and territory governments as well as the commonwealth.

All those layers of government and complexity takes enormous time and resources so we had to use all our channels and networks across the country to get the outcomes industry needs to rebuild and reactivate.

Working closely with your alliance partners is so important. We were lucky we had those relationships in place and had worked together on other industry challenges so we had a framework in place that we could draw on.

Having said that, the scale of COVID was so huge we needed to pull together quickly to work on strategy and advocacy.

It’s been a mammoth effort by many, many people. At the end of the day, we had no choice but to work together. Luckily we all like and respect each other so that made it possible.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.