Increasing difficulties of red tape was an emerging theme in 2023.
As the Yakkerboo Festival dramatically cancelled its iconic parade earlier in the year, the Lakeside Residents Group (LRG) joined the trend in September as they announced the cancellation of their New Years and Australia Day events.
The reason behind the call was the increasing frustration and difficulty on LRG to deal with risk management and insurance, mandatory measures on community events that have grown to become expensive and cumbersome for volunteers to handle.
In recent years both events had been large and well-received by the community, yet behind-the-scenes it was becoming a nightmare of organising a long list of required services such as traffic management, affording insurance and dealing with endlessly minute issues to mitigate risk.
LRG president Wendy Andrews and secretary Tony O’Hara expressed their deep frustrations in the article, recounted the stressful and at times outlandish issues they were required to address and the seemingly paranoid mindset around risks.
“When you are trying to mitigate risk and you get told, ‘what are you going to do when you have to front the Coroners Court when someone dies?’, that really makes you feel like why am I bothering?” Wendy said at the time.
The prevailing feeling was that measures in the name of safety had lost touch with practicality.
“They are all legitimate, but risk management can only do so many things, there has to be some common sense of the reality of life,” Tony said.
“Everything is a risk, you walk out this door it’s a risk, a plank could fall off this building, it’s a risk, unlikely and that’s where the trouble is.”
