Sydney needs to take its rightful place as Australia’s events capital
Sydney is a great city, and we know it, but we have trouble selling ourselves to the rest of the world. This must change if we don’t want Melbourne to win the events game, writes Anna Caldwell.
Opinion
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It’s been a whole year since Sydney lost its mind when the city dared to do something differently and promote one of our great events, the Everest horse race, on the sails of the Opera House.
It became a battle for Sydney. Opinion was divided between opponents who asked how we could dare promote a horseracing event on such an iconic structure, and those who saw the event, beamed around the world, as a way to sell not just a race, but our city to a global audience.
There were guerrilla protests, death threats and a jumped-up torchlight army who tried but failed to derail the industrial-scale Opera House lightshow with their Bunnings-issue flash lights.
Just imagine how great Sydney would be if we could muster this kind of enthusiasm to promote our city and our events rather than railing against them.
A year later and the clear winner of the dramatic “Battle of the Sails” has been Racing NSW — the people who dared to step outside the box and in the process took The Everest to the world.
The hoopla around the light show — a valiant bid to drum up excitement and tourism led by sports supremo Peter V’landys — meant that the Everest has become an internationally recognised event. But what has Sydney done since then to drive tourism and sell its own events?
Honestly, not much.
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For one thing, the government knocked back a proposal for a desperately needed six star Ritz Carlton hotel, bowing to greenies who didn’t like how a tall tower looked in their backyard.
We also had an almighty fight over investing in upgrades for our sports stadiums.
It’s almost as if we don’t want Sydney to fill the space of the world events destination that it is capable of being, and instead wish to contract and shrink into Melbourne’s shadow.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian personally believes in driving the city as an events destination — that’s why she risked political capital on the stadiums plan. But the question is: How does she do it?
Because right now we are repeatedly trounced at every turn by Melbourne (who by the way are happy to beam lights promoting racing onto Flinders St Station without activating a civil war in the city).
Consider this time of year in Melbourne. AFL grand final week sees the city stop. Spring carnival does just the same. In January the buzz around the Australian Open will be similar.
It doesn’t matter if you follow football, racing or tennis — these events are Moments with a capital M.
Melbourne has public holidays for the footy and racing, drawing the whole city into the excitement.
Sydney does no such thing and has no such buzz. We just seem to expect people to show up no matter how we promote the event or what we serve up.
Maybe this is a side effect from knowing, rationally, that Sydney has the natural beauty, weather, bars and restaurants to rival any city the world — so why should we have to work for it?
We’ve become lazy at selling ourselves — too caught up in culture wars over what events we are willing to back — and as a result, Sydney loses.
Take for example the Sydney Marathon.
Most likely you don’t know too much about it, unless you’re a runner. The Sydney Marathon is, quite simply, one of the most breathtaking marathon courses in the world.
Racegoers run across the Harbour Bridge and finish the race outside the Opera House.
Did you even know it was on a few weekends ago?
The race attracts about 40,000 runners which is not bad in terms of registrations. But what it lacks is buzz.
Everyone wants to run the Boston marathon, the New York marathon — even the London marathon.
These are events that stop a city and get non-runners as excited as they get runners. They are capital M moments.
There is no reason that our Sydney Marathon should not be an iconic international event rivalling the rest of them.
The same goes for our NRL grand final this weekend. The buzz is largely limited to league fans.
That’s why it is so brilliant to see V’Landys really take it up to Melbourne in the promotion of Sydney’s own spring carnival.
The Opera House spectacle last year was an exercising in making the event bigger than itself.
Racing NSW didn’t deliberately court the drama — they were simply trying to promote an event in a way that got people excited.
It just so happened that the drama — when people all over the world were smacked in the face with a conversation about promoting a race on an icon — made the excitement even bigger.
So what’s next?
The government’s moves towards winding back Sydney’s lockout laws is a step in the right direction.
We can’t begin to seriously expect our city to host world class events that gain world class icon status when the bars are locking people out at night.
But we must do more. We need to rally behind Sydney.
Importantly, our tourism numbers are not bad. To the year ending March 2019, there were 4.1 million international visitors who stayed 82.3 million nights in Sydney, spending $10 billion.
The spend was up 7 per cent on the previous year, the visitor numbers up just 0.3 per cent. But the point is we can do better — and we should be aiming to do just that in an economic climate that is waning.
The state government is investing in the infrastructure to make this city capable of handling influxes of people for big events and the rewards are there for us to reap.
Right now, Sydney has all the power and none of the nous to take out our rightful place as the events capital of Australia.
Let’s get this city moving.