Page 2534 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 31 July 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
MS LE COUTEUR: Maybe I will stop at this point, Madam Deputy Speaker! Other places have demonstrated that residents and live entertainment can live together with the right rules. I refer to Fortitude Valley in Brisbane. One of the other highlights of my Assembly career was that, as part of the committee inquiry, I, along with former MLA Mary Porter, who was the committee chair, and Alistair Coe spent a very enjoyable evening touring the nightclubs of Fortitude Valley. In the interests of not oversharing, I will leave it at that point.
We need to have some designated entertainment precincts, to protect venues and to protect residents. New apartments and hotels need to include decent noise insulation, and residents need to know before they move in what is likely to happen in their area. Of course, it is not just noise from music; if you are in these sorts of areas, it might be that, at 4 am, the garbage is being picked up, because that is the time at which hotels and big apartment blocks may do that. Venues must have realistic noise limits that they have to meet.
The Greens have been trying to get action on this, as I said, for almost a decade. The motion that has been counted down by MusicACT was actually my first motion, in February 2009. As I mentioned, it was referred for inquiry by the planning committee, which involved me, Mary Porter and Alistair Coe. We did in fact create a very useful report. If the recommendations of that report had been worked on, we would be having quite a different discussion now. We might be doing a bit of fine-tuning; we would probably be choosing some different areas for entertainment precincts. I do not think at that stage that anyone would have thought that there was any issue with EPIC because there was plenty of space around EPIC; things have changed. EPIC is now in one of the areas that we have to look at.
In 2015, Mr Rattenbury moved a motion during executive members’ business on the subject. We put in a submission in 2018 on Geocon’s Garema Place hotel. I put in a submission this year, but it was rejected due to the timing; I missed out by about six hours. We have asked questions during estimates, and there were recommendations on that.
As Mr Parton outlined, we are not the only people who have been agitating about this. MusicACT has done a lot of work on this, in particular, the cool little capital action plan in 2015. Again the history would have been different if that action plan had actually been acted on. As Mr Parton said, we have had lots of talk about it; I have talked about the talk. We have had very little action.
If we look at Mr Rattenbury’s motion, only one of the four areas has been delivered on. There has been very little action on designating entertainment areas, acoustic insulation requirements or consideration of the need for order of occupancy laws. One area where I think we have gone in a positive direction is liquor licensing. It has been both positive and negative, but in general it has been positive. We have not had any summary of feedback publicly released on the government’s 2016 urban sounds discussion paper.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video