Byron Bay will only be approved for a Special Entertainment Precinct if the community, represented by the Byron Shire Council, wants one, NSW Minister John Graham said last week.
The state’s minister for the night-time economy, also the minister for music and various other portfolios including transport, was in town for the Regional and Remote Music Summit.
Responding to concerns raised at a packed-out community meeting earlier in the week, Mr Graham said a SEP wasn’t ‘something in any way’ the government wanted ‘to impose on communities’.
‘This is a way of collaborating with communities but if the community is not driving it, then it just won’t work,’ the minister told Bay FM’s Community Newsroom on Friday, ‘that’s the starting principle here’.
Purple Flag Program cited in response to SEP safety concerns
Mr Graham said he had heard some of what Chris Hanley, one of the organisers of last Tuesday’s community meeting, said on air immediately before him and thought some of the comments were ‘absolutely common sense’.
Mr Hanley, a long-time Byron local, co-founder of the Byron Writers Festival and prominent real estate agent, had relayed concerns from health professionals and police about alcohol-related violence, as well as about a lack of lighting and transport options in Byron Bay.
‘We want to look at the lighting,’ the minister said, ‘we want to look at how safe these areas are, we want to look exactly at transport and how people are moving around’.
The minister said a proposed SEP trial in the Byron Shire, the state’s first outside Sydney, was a chance for people to see how the bespoke zoning would work.
Responding to questions around whether issues like lighting and transport would be addressed before any trial, the minister said there were programs ‘set up to work through that’.
One of the best, he said, was the Purple Flag Program.
‘It’s an international accreditation started out in the UK that’s now been picked up in cities around the world,’ Mr Graham said, ‘we’re running it here in NSW’.
The program would work with the council and the community to investigate whether an area proposed for a SEP was a safe centre at night, Mr Graham said.
‘It looks at transport, lighting, some of those additional supports, and says, “here are the gaps”’, he said.
‘There’s funding that goes with that, to be able to start to address those things.
‘They’re more available to communities going down this entertainment precinct path.’
The government would need to know ‘exactly what’s being asked’ for, he said.
Neither SEP trial nor actual SEP a done deal
Mr Hanley had spoken of concerns the SEP would be extremely difficult to have removed from Byron Shire’s Local Environment Plan after potential state planning department approval.
He also said the community wasn’t consulted prior to Byron Shire Council staff applying for funding associated with the SEP trial.
The minister said the funding wasn’t contingent on the trial going ahead.
Should the community decide it didn’t want to proceed with a trial, the government ‘wouldn’t want to press ahead,’ he said.
‘Secondly, if it did proceed, we’d go to a trial stage,’ Mr Graham said, ‘if we get to the end of that and it doesn’t work, we don’t want to make it permanent at that stage’.
‘If the council is not on board, if the community is not on board, it’s stopping there.’
More music instead of more pokies, says minister
The government’s introduction of SEP trials in certain communities across NSW was intended to help revitalise entertainment and cultural hubs, such as in Byron Bay, the minister said.
Existing regulations and approval time-frames for endeavors such as outdoor dining, live music, later operating hours, liquor licences and micro festivals made the process ‘too hard,’ he said.
‘It’s just so hard to do this for venues, for festivals, for communities,’ Mr Graham said, ‘and this is one of the ways we’re trying to make it easier’.
‘This is a way to really give some extra control, some extra ability to shape where this happens, the terms on which it happens,’ he said, ‘and there’s additional support for those communities that want to go down this path’.
The minister said venues presently relied heavily on alcohol sales and gaming machine revenue, with music or entertainment ‘not an economic way to run a venue’.
‘We want to change that,’ he said, ‘to give a third income stream to venues and reward them for doing something that the community does value’.
‘This will not be about more pokies coming into town, that’s exactly the opposite of the principles that underlie this,’ he said.
‘It’s very much about, what can we do to give the community more control, bring music and outdoor dining back?’
*Mia Armitage presents Bay FM’s Community Newsroom each Friday from 11am, Friday’s full program with guests Chris Hanley and NSW Minister John Graham may be heard here.
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