Enough Talk of Smart Cities. We Need Some Smart People
Can we call on you?
Last Thursday night, I learned that our region’s biggest annual event, Katoomba’s Winter Magic Festival, has been cancelled this year. The news hits hard in a town which has continued to struggle with the impact of Covid-19 and the business crushing Council imposition of “smart” paid parking.
The reason is a $130,000 bill for traffic management, first-aid and related administrative costs. I am informed this is the sort of expenditure a modern community festival of this scale must have. Coming from a simpler time, these are matters of which I have little appreciation.
It may still happen in some way but my clear advice is that Winter Magic has been
”canned”. Compromise may result in a scaled down festival or none at all. Dropping of the parade has even been raised as an option. My information goes little beyond the headline number but it seems that number is right. Approximately $80,000 is the traffic management cost alone.
Volunteer committee members are expected to pay this sum. That is a lot of money for a ONE day event. The community deserves an explanation, especially those who have supported the Festival in a multitude of ways.
Despite the big crowd in the banner image, the 2023 event was not unusually large. Attendees at the Thursday Chamber of Commerce meeting learned smart phone tracking estimated attendance at 28,000 which may have understated the figure by as much as 10%.
These smart trackers are soon to be extended to additional parts of our town centre. We were assured they will only capture our anonymised mobile phone data.
In its biggest years, the Festival drew up to 50,000. Looking at that crowd you might reasonably wonder where you would fit another 20,000. So much takes place off the street. Every corner of town, every church hall, laneway, hotel, many cafes and restaurants become performance spaces and mini art galleries.
In 1995, former Premier Bob Carr anointed the Blue Mountains as NSW inaugural City of the Arts. This was recognition of events like Winter Magic and the Blue Mountains Music Festival which, coincidentally, is running this very weekend.
Why can’t we use last year’s traffic plan?
For years, rising insurance costs have presented problems but these now appear small against the traffic management demands. So why would a traffic plan and associated costs come to $130,000?
Wouldn’t you expect a plan to be developed one year and unless something changed simply use it again the next. Remove the front page, put this year’s date on the front, copy that page and reattach it at the cost of a 25 cent photocopy and a staple.
You might think so but our smart modern world is far too complex for simple solutions. Year by year the demands made of Festival organisers change and usually expand. Much of it sparked by apparent bureaucratic fear.
A few years ago, fear of drugs brought us the sort of joy that accompanies sniffer dogs. This ingenious spur to tourism came along with lockout laws that singed nightlife in Sydney under Mike Baird and Gladys between 2014-20.
There was even a year, at the height of this madness, when a tactical response group used the Festival to practise manoeuvres. and had helicopters flying over the Carrington Hotel.
Trucks, terrorists and PCR tests
Insurance wasn’t eased when 10 years ago a poor fellow fell off a wharf and drowned at Darling Harbour during the Vivid Festival. You’d have to travel 7 kilometres to Wentworth Falls Lake mid-festival to have any hope of emulating this feat but even so this misfortune placed a focus on festivals and the supposed dangers that lurk within them.
Then came the big one. In 2016, Anis Amri drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin killing 12 and injuring 56. This was done without the driver giving a moment’s thought to the impact this would have on Katoomba. It soon became clear Winter Magic was the next likely target despite Anis dying in the attack.
The situation wasn’t helped when one month later Saeed Noori performed a pale imitation injuring 19 people. Using a car, he terrorised a lunchtime crowd in Flinders and Elizabeth Streets in central Melbourne. He was stopped by a well-placed bollard.
All of this provoked a general fear and awareness of the obvious dangers presented by too many happy, smiling people gathering in one place. Now, we were urged, “If you see something, say something”. This was a practice run for dobbing in our neighbours during the plandemic.
It should be noted that in the Winter Magic’s 30 years it has experienced nothing more than a few very minor incidents. That is one of the advantages of a local festival. If a problem occurs, there are always plenty of responsible local people nearby to help address it.
We must admit that one festival morning a woman slipped on an icy paver coming out of a laneway and occasionally, after a day of revelry, some evenings could be a little boisterous.
By then families have had a a great day, watched the fireworks at the Carrington and were home safe leaving town to a younger, exuberant demographic. Most police reports have suggested this was not much different to the average Saturday night.
Covid-19 the Festival Killer
Enter the great festival killer: Covid-19. Suddenly, we were a threat to each other. We were all carrying hidden, viral explosives not close to our bodies but within them.
In the Blue Mountains, Labor controls all three tiers of government. Throughout Covid, our representatives at each tier competed to see who was the biggest Big Pharma tout as they embraced and enforced daffy and contradictory official health policies.
I expressed my dismay at this behaviour when asked, as a former Festival director, to speak on behalf of past organisers at last year’s official opening. I decided to place some of this in perspective and stated we must never fall prey to such fearmongering again.
It was not well received by our Federal member, Susan Templeman, who urged the Mistress of Ceremonies to nudge me off the stage. This delightful display of tolerance is described in this earlier article. Let her colleague, Michelle Rowland, bring in that Misinformation Bill. What could go wrong?
This is beyond sad. The Festival is very important to the town. It is something that local children look forward to all year. It makes things happen. For local groups and schools, performances and projects that require many hours in preparation are aimed at this one day. People come from interstate and even overseas to be part of it.
Meanwhile, our town is languishing, at best. Pre-Covid people used to complain there were too many cafes. I went looking for somewhere to have a coffee one morning a few weeks ago and found only three places open. Two were crowded.
Time to fix things
As stated above, last Thursday night plans were discussed for $7million in town improvements. These can’t come quickly enough. Of this, an insider advised me, $2 million to $2.5 million will go to management costs. I am sure this is a scurrilous overestimate.
Post-Covid we now have an estimated 30 empty shops. Some of them, owned by Council, are shown below in what is known locally as our Civic Centre.
civic - adjective
civ·ic ˈsi-vik
Synonyms of civic
: of or relating to a citizen, a city, citizenship, or community affairs
civic duty
civic pride
civic leaders
In 1998, in the shadow of the Olympics, Katoomba was the focus of a much grander revitalisation project (the obscurely named Charrette). These empty Council owned spaces in the Civic Centre were to be part of an enticing approach to a new Cultural Centre.
By the time the Cultural Centre was built, some 14 years later, I am sure many had forgotten this purpose. It seems Council had. Even so, had people been enticed, they would have had difficulty finding the Cultural Centre as to this day it remains largely hidden in an imposing complex whose bright red architectural approach screams Coles.
All of this makes plans to revitalise the Civic Centre most welcome. These plans include fixing the Centre’s roof (I recall a former Council property manager telling me about this problem 25 years ago).
Artists are to be set a task of enlivening the space but most importantly there are plans for an Information Centre. I have been pleading for this for over 30 years. To my discredit, I have been known to make the snarky observation that a visitor’s first experience on arrival in Katoomba is that of being lost.
An information centre was originally a key driver of the 1998 Cultural Centre design but was inexplicably dropped. Had it been placed there, you would have needed another information centre to tell you how to find it.
As Bob Carr noted, we have many creative people in the Mountains but the problem has always been finding out where they are and what they are doing. We trust the new information centre will help. There are also plans for a “WayFinding” project that will take place at a later stage. Great news.
Plans are for the art, roofing and information centre to be in place by July to August this year. The Council manager charged with overseeing this project appears to have a clear vision and a strong commitment to see it through. I wish him and his team nothing but continued success.
Longer term plans include paving, additional seating and regular street events. This includes the periodic blocking of vehicle access at the bottom of the shopping district as part of a town reactivation project. You know, to allow the sort of activity that might be inspired by a street market or a festival.
As part of these discussions, there are plans to introduce retractable bollards to make traffic management at these events a simple matter. Maybe, just maybe, some smart people in the Mayor’s office, in the offices of our State and Federal members, police and other traffic experts might discuss this with the Winter Magic committee.
I don’t know whether ESG has found our Festival yet. If it hasn’t, likely as not, it will soon. In the meantime, let’s hope future budgets might land somewhere closer to 25 cents than $130,000 and never again be a barrier to the future wonders our Festival is certain to bring.
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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE
If you are in the Blue Mountains this weekend and not at the Music Festival, you could spend your time much worse than by going to see:
The latest film about Julian Assange: The Trust Fall.
It is especially pleasing to watch his friend, Mark Davis, debunk the story about redaction and the lies about Julian’s supposed exposure of innocent people to danger.
Another reason why we need to stop the belligerent occupation 👍
So what is the reason given for last year's Traffic Management Plan not being able to be used this year?