Following news this week that live music has been axed at historic Sydney pub, Harold Park Hotel, Labor Councillor Linda Scott has pointed the finger at Lord Mayor Clover Moore.
The beloved Forest Lodge venue announced this past week that a single complaint has resulted in live music being cut, however Scott says Moore's failure to act on a live music plan, established in March 2014, led to the result.
"The threat of fining because of a breach of some technical conditions has happened time and time again in the City Of Sydney and is responsible for shutting down many live venues," Scott said when speaking to The Music today.
"That's why Labor, in 2012, ran an enormous campaign to support live music and that resulted in the City Of Sydney doing a live music action plan to look at the policies and problems that need changing so that these kind of things are prevented from happening."
The City Of Sydney's Live Music and Performance Action Plan noted a 61% decline of music and performance listings between 2004-2013 and a review of the plan, conducted by City staff in April 2016, found that only nine of sixty recommendations had been fully implemented.
"… That's why places like the Harold Park Hotel, a live music venue of long-standing, is not protected as a live music venue," Scott continued.
"It still has conditions that ban it from playing live music and therefore they're the subject of this threat of a fine.
"If the recommendation of the City's live music action plan, now over three years old, had been implemented, then venues like the Harold Park Hotel and other live music and performance venues could have been protected from this kind of problem."
While it should be noted that Harold Park Hotel was found to have breached its license by playing live music in its outside courtyard, Scott says the issue could have been avoided if the action plan was in motion.
"The Lord Mayor can continue to blame each individual operator of each live music venue, but the reality is it is the overarching planning controls and policies of the council that is resulting in this problem.
"It's very expensive to continually seek acoustic reports, to lodge development applications, to enormous procedural steps in order to get compliance perfectly so that live music can occur.
"We made a policy recommendation that the City should change our development control plan, that we should change policies, that we should change procedures, so that live music venues didn't get fined and threatened out of existence because of one upset neighbour.
"That plan hasn’t been implemented, the policies haven't been changed. In fact, the plan hasn’t even been budgeted for in the city even though it is over three years since it was released.
"In 2015, I moved that the council prioritise completion of all the recommendations. Lord Mayor Clover Moore and her independent team voted that down and defeated my push."
Scott insists she will push the council on the topic again this year.
"I'm committed to moving that council implement the recommendations of the live music task force urgently because the city’s nightlife is at risk and the city’s live music scene is at risk.
"We know what the solution is, the Lord Mayor has just refused to do it."
The Music has contacted City Of Sydney for comment.
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