By Carol Altmann

I have been looking at visitor numbers for Flagstaff Hill and, I have to tell you, there are worrying signs.

Before I go any further, I need to say three things:

The figures are from Sept 2017 to Feb 2018. The media unit at the Warrnambool City Council will not give me more recent ones. I don’t know why. It also refuses to answer any questions about the figures that have been released.

In the past 15 years, at least $15 million of public money has been poured into Flagstaff Hill to keep it alive. Most recently, $3 million was spent on a new light/sound show and other improvements that opened in June last year. A year on, I think we need to know how things are travelling.

None of what follows is a reflection of the hard work done by the volunteers and many WCC staff who, in recent years, have busted their guts for Flagstaff Hill.

So how are things going?

The expectation was that once the $3 million upgrade was launched in June 2017, visitor numbers would boom.

As the council CEO Bruce Anson said himself, the colonial village needed at least 80,000 paying visitors a year to break even. This would stop the WCC having to spend $500,000, $600,000 or $700,000 a year to help it cover costs.

It was a big ask. Three years ago, paid visitor numbers were below 55,000.

The head of WCC’s tourism arm, David McMahon, who two years ago was handed the whip to flog Phar Lap, remained optimistic. In June last year he told The Standard:

A 30% jump by January was a lofty goal, but here is an awful, ugly, unadulterated fact: the overall visitor numbers at Flagstaff Hill are going backwards.

I have checked and re-checked the numbers and you can look at them yourself right here:

Let me take you through the red arrows:

• In December and January of 2018 – our peak summer holiday season – less people went to Flagstaff Hill than the summer before.
• The same applies to people who saw the new $2 million night show. After an initial spike in the months after the show opened, many more people actually went to the OLD show, in the summer of 2016-17, than they did in the summer just gone.
• In February, when the weather was still warm, less than 2000 people showed up for the whole month, about the same as last February.

This is a shock.

Maybe the person who drew this graph for the council got their colours mixed up, but I don’t think so, because you can see a clear ‘spike’ around November last year.

Why was there a spike? I suspect because Flagstaff Hill had a free open weekend to celebrate its $3 million upgrade.

Did you see the word FREE in that sentence? This brings me to another very important point: how many have people actually paid to get in or paid for tickets to the night show since last Sept?

I don’t know. It’s one of the questions that those who have access to these figures – David McMahon, Flagstaff Hill manager Paul Pinkerton and WCC media head Nick Higgins – won’t answer.

But this question is critical to whether these figures are being fudged. Are these numbers a true reflection of what is going on, or is it even worse?

Free entries do not help the bottom line and if free entries are being included in these numbers, then we are being duped and that, to me, is very serious.

We have been here before, with Fun4Kids.

After many successful years as an annual winter event, Fun4Kids started to bleed money. Then it started to haemorrhage.

Here is David McMahon again being quoted by the paper during last year’s Fun4Kids:

Seven months later, the WCC dumped Fun4Kids.

The cut came without warning, without any fallback plan, without any replacement and, it must be said, without giving the scaled-back F4K festival a chance to see if it could do better than the big-budget stuff of years before.

This is not how we should be planning our future as a prime tourist destination.

We need honest, transparent conversations about how we are tracking, what we can expect and what, if anything, we need to change.

I have written many times before that a fake colonial village that opened in the 70s and still flies the Union Jack high above its premises is no longer appropriate to where Warrnambool is going today.

What could replace it is a topic I will wade into later, but for now we deserve to be told the full story.

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[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]http://the-terrier.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/vault3.jpg[/author_image]Welcome to The Vault – this is where Bluestone will place all sorts of subscriber-access-only material. If you have something you would like to submit, please email us at editor@bluestonemagazine.com.au[author_info][/author_info] [/author]

By Carol Altmann

[box]Bluestone would like to acknowledge subscriber PT for funding the Freedom of Information application used for this piece.[/box]

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] B[/dropcap]luestone subscribers will know that we cop quite a lot of flak for continuing to ask questions about the sacred cows of Warrnambool including Flagstaff Hill, Fun4Kids and the increasing secrecy and lack of transparency around how the Warrnambool City Council runs its affairs – but as long as there are huge gaps in the information, we will keep asking.

Like why is there no formal report on the 2015 Fun4Kids Festival that cost ratepayers $450,000 to run?

Bluestone has just uncovered this fact and it is staggering, irrespective of your views on Fun4Kids or whether it has picked up tourism gongs.

Anyone who has ever dealt with public funds will know that full disclosure on how that public money was spent and the results of that spending is standard procedure.

It’s called accountability.

Indeed I remember when working for the might of News Ltd that we were expected to account for every dollar we claimed when working on a story, right down to producing a receipt for a $10.50 pizza – after all, Rupert might be a very wealthy man, but he was still the boss.

Yet the Warrnambool City Council has spent almost half a million dollars of public money on an event that, until now, has always produced a full report on its budget and the festival results.

When we asked the council media manager for a copy of the 2015 Fun4Kids report, he said the key results of the festival had already been released to the media.

So, what was told to the media via the council’s media unit should be enough.

Well some journalists in Warrnambool might be happy to swallow the pre-chewed lines delivered by the council, but Bluestone is compelled to dive deeper.

So when the council told us that “about 15,000” people attended the 2015 festival and that 24% of these were from Melbourne and that they surveyed 1000 of these patrons for their views, we wanted to know more.

Can we have the full report? We asked.

Nothing was forthcoming, so we lodged a Freedom of Information asking for two things:

i) the report and/or documents prepared for the council relating to the financial results of the 2015 Fun4Kids festival

ii) the report and/or documents prepared for the council relating to the patronage, including any breakdowns or analysis on these figures.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] A[/dropcap]fter the obligatory 45-day wait, the council’s Freedom of Information officer Wendy Clark, who is also chief executive officer Bruce Anson’s personal assistant, came back with this jaw-dropping response:

“I have found no documents that meet the terms of your request…”

This means, we must assume, that there were no reports prepared for the council.

Ms Clark then attached two documents that, we must also assume, amount to the full documentation available on the results of Fun4Kids 2015.

One was a single budget line reference and the other was five paragraphs that included not one single figure, but plenty of motherhood statements like:

“The Fun4Kids Festival achieved a positive percentage increase in the metropolitan market, while maintaining regional attendances. This outcome is a key growth strategy for the festival moving forward.”

I don’t know about you, but whenever I read those last two words – “moving forward” – I know we are deep in the river of public relations spin and far from the shores of plain speaking.

[dropcap style=”font-size: 60px; color: #A02F2F;”] I[/dropcap]n a similar vein, you may remember the uproar that followed the sudden removal of a row of old tea tree along Pertobe Rd just before Christmas.

The trees were removed, we were told, after an arborist inspected them and found them to be unsafe due to infestation by a certain worm and cracking.

A Bluestone reader dared to ask more. In early January, she asked for a copy of the arborist’s report (or at least more detail) and whether the trees would be replaced.

She is still waiting for a reply, let alone any more information.

Such queries could normally be thrashed out  by elected councillors in general council business, but that, as we know, has been abolished and now councillors are timed for how long they talk, even though meetings were usually over within a couple of hours.

All councillors, not just some, should be demanding more, not less, transparency on behalf of ratepayers.

The fact they aren’t, and that this sort of “trust us” mentality is gripping the council, is of serious concern to anyone who remembers that it is the ratepayers who, just like Rupert, are the boss.

Find more in The Vault here…

 

Trees, transparency and the truth

Wilma Wright, FOI and more

The big shed schemozzle: we follow the money

…and more