The grim experience of being strip-searched or having a police dog sniff your privates at the gates of a music festival could be a thing of the past, if a new parliamentary report is actioned.
Published last week, the parliamentary Live Music Inquiry report, “Am I Ever Gonna See You Live Again?”, is the product of a task presented a year ago to the Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts.
The objective: explore “what’s going on in live music in Australia,” the challenges and “the path forward to ensure live music can enjoy a strong and sustainable future.”
Australia’s live music scene required “urgent action”, the inquiry found. “We’ve come up with a bunch of recommendations we think will help,” explains outgoing Committee chair and member of parliament Brian Mitchell — 20 in total.
Young festival-goers will take particular interest in “Recommendation 15”, in which state and territory governments are recommended to re-evaluate the need for large police presences at live music events and the use of sniffer dogs and strip-searches.
The thorny issue of strip searches blew up into a full-scale controversy when a 16-year-old female was told to strip naked and squat – without her parents’ consent — at 2018 Splendour in the Grass. That bleak situation led to an investigation, led by the state’s Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC), and a finding that the police acted unlawfully.
Pre-pandemic draft recommendations from a coronial inquest into the deaths of young people who took drugs at festivals called for sniffer dogs to be removed from festival sites and pill testing to be implemented. Pill testing facilities have since rolled out at fests in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, but the dogs are still on patrol.
Some studies have found sniffer dogs are wrong more than 60% of the time.
The Committee also recommended consumer law be tweaked to better regulate the selling of tickets by improving the transparency of fees and charges, and by limiting “extreme variability” when tickets are influenced by “dynamic pricing.”
Now that the Committee’s report is made available to the public, the government can choose whether to implement its recommendations.
