Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Remember the doom-and-gloom, Chicken-Little-The-Sky-Is-Falling predictions for local racing if the big trainers weren’t allowed to run horses at Levy’s Beach?

Well the Warrnambool Racing Club has just notched up a record profit – its equity has gone from $8.5 million last year to a cool $10.1 million this year.

That’s right, far from falling in a deep dark hole, things have never looked so good.

“This has truly been an exciting year for the Warrnambool Racing Club,” enthuses chairman Nick Rule in his 2018-19 report to members.

Mr Rule goes on to wax lyrical about a “remarkable financial year” and, in particular, this year’s hugely successful May Racing Carnival: “Extremely strong crowds, record betting turnover and highly competitive jumps racing were the highlights…”

Hold your horses!

Wasn’t the May Racing Carnival under threat of collapse if hundreds of racehorses a week weren’t allowed to pound up and down the dune at Levy’s?

That’s what the racing industry told us, the State Government, and also the Warrnambool City Council which, by the way, still manages to find the money to be listed as a major sponsor of the WRC.

The truth of the matter is that no racehorse training has been allowed at Levy’s beach since the end of 2016.

And the sky hasn’t fallen in. That seductive old fox, Jobson Growth, hasn’t packed up and left town.

Darren Weir kept on winning, until he was exposed in January for the cheat that he is, with more charges – enough to make your hair curl – laid yesterday.

Local trainer Jarrod McLean also kept winning – including taking out the $2 million Mackinnon Stakes last year – until he, too, has found himself facing a raft of animal cruelty and corruption charges.

WA trainer Lindsey Smith has moved in to Weir’s stables at Warrnambool and is already racking up winners.

And the Warrnambool May Race Carnival has sailed on as one of the biggest events of the year on the Victorian racing calendar.

So much success and yet not one racehorse – officially at least – has trained on Levy’s Beach in three years.

The lure and magic of the Levy’s beach and dunes has been exposed as pure spin.

 

Cr Michael Neoh has also been crunching the numbers.

He now personally believes that racehorse access to Lady Bay should be enough.

With the Weir juggernaut no longer in the picture, the number of racehorses using Lady Bay has plummeted: Cr Neoh says it is now averaging 22 a day on the beach, and 14 in the water (April to July). It was close to 100 at its peak.

Lady Bay is where we “share” our public beach and that should be enough.

As it stands, the end of November is the deadline for the racing industry to move into Levy’s, but permits still need to be issued and roads and carparks need to be graded.

Behind the scenes, the traditional owners are also keeping up their fight to be heard, as they always have to do, because their connection to the land can’t be measured in turnover and totes.

The council, having just declared a climate change emergency, could step up right now and show it really does care for the most vulnerable parts of our coast.

Which way will this go in November? I don’t know, but the arguments that propped up the need for Levy’s are collapsing as fast as Weir’s career.

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Analysis  – Carol Altmann

The figures for the 2015 Fun4Kids Festival are in, and it’s a case of good news and bad news for the Warrnambool City Council and, by default, its ratepayers.

The good news is that it didn’t blow the bank.

In other words, it kept within the $450,000 budget that was set aside last October and avoided anything like the $150,000 blow-out of last year. Phew.

The bad news, however, is that the festival is attracting less people and therefore, you can assume, generating less economic and tourism benefits to Warrnambool but still costing $450,000 to run.

While there is still no official report on the results, the council released some figures to Bluestone today which said about 15,000 tickets were sold for the seven day event.

Last year, when the event ran over eight days, it attracted 19,758 people.

Of the 15,000 tickets sold this year, 24% were from metropolitan Melbourne – the highest percentage ever – which sounds like great news, until you work out that equates to only 3600 people compared to 3965 in 2015 and 5590 in 2013.

When you are coming off a smaller base, the percentages start to get wobbly.

It is extremely difficult to run a critical eye over a children’s festival – after all, it is aimed at children for god’s sake – but someone also needs to be the kid in the crowd as the Emperor marches by and point out that he is wearing no clothes.

So Bluestone, at risk of being deemed “too negative”, is prepared to say that the Fun4Kids Festival is getting precariously close to being bare-butt naked.

The reason is that the festival is no longer what it was designed to be, which was a major tourism attraction for Warrnambool.

Indeed in its heyday, the festival was pulling crowds of more than 32,000 people: double what it now achieves.

It was also costing less – far less – and at one point it was thought the council may not need to subsidise it at all because it would cover all of its own expenses. Such a notion now seems fanciful.

Here is the critical stat: in 2005, not long after the festival first began, it cost the council $156,354 and attracted 32,112 people.

This year, it cost up to $450,000 and attracted 15,000 people.

These are the cold, hard facts and why council staff last October recommended that the festival be discontinued because it had seemingly had its day.

But the decision to kill Peppa Pig, as it were, proved too emotional for the majority of the councillors and they agreed to press on in 2015 – turning the festival into more of a grassroots, simple-kids-fun kind of event with an extra heavy reliance on volunteers.

According to council spokesman Nick Higgins, this formula is set to be repeated in 2016.

“Council will shortly call for expressions of interest from local people keen to be part of the festival’s community consultation panel,” he said via email.

“The panel worked well this year and generated plenty of ideas and enthusiasm for the festival.”

It is wonderful to see such ideas and enthusiasm and I am sure most of the 15,000 people who turned up this year had a terrific time, but is this the best use of $450,000 each year to generate more visitors to Warrnambool?

Cr Kylie Gaston asked a question this week of Cr Brian Kelson, when he successfully pushed for free CBD parking over December and January, as to where the $70,000 in lost car parking revenue could be cut from within the budget.

I can think of at least one area….

For my money, I think free off-street parking over the busy summer period will do more for local traders than seven days of Fun4Kids where most of the action is confined to a plastic palace on the Civic Green.

If we want to continue to run a kid’s festival for, mostly, local and regional kids to enjoy, then let’s embrace that idea and stop pretending that Fun4Kids is a major tourism magnet.

It was once, but it is no longer, and there still needs to be a full and frank conversation about its long-term future.