I was reading my copy of The Northern Daily Leader dated Thursday, September 11, 2014 this morning and came across the page 3 article “Council staffers’ jobs on the line”.

NDL readers will be well aware of my longstanding critique of a ratepayer-funded bureaucracy attempting to run an entrepreneurial music festival event – year in and year out with the same alarming level of dysfunction. 

My criticisms were never about the people. They were and are always about the fundamental impossibility of an entrepreneurial event being operated to its optimum by a ratepayer-funded bureaucracy, which by its very structure is incapable of being entrepreneurial. 

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with council will fully understand this key point.

In the article, I read with amazement that the main thrust of the proposed “sweeping structural reforms” and “service reviews” is within the business and events department that is tasked with, among other things, the development and operation of the annual Country Music Festival (CMF). 

It seems the newly installed business and events director John Sommerlad, when interviewed,“didn’t have anything to say to the public” but is obviously under duress to slash and burn internally wherever possible. 

Why? Well, because he is tasked with directing a bureaucratic department that, by its very nature, is held to account by higher-level bureaucrats and bean counters, and because this department spends a considerable sum (in the millions) of our ratepayers’ money each year on the CMF event. 

It’s an unfortunate reality that each year it is impossible for us to find out exactly how much of our money is spent on this event and the only return information we ever get from council is an approximate flow through the local economy.

 The reality, of course, is whatever that dollar amount quoted by council each year – that is purportedly injected into the local economy as a direct result of the CMF – could be anything, as it is impossible to actually quantify. 

It’s just dollar figures that make all of the other CMF expenditure dollar figures stack up on paper. 

We are now in mid-September and the next Tamworth CMF is only three months away, with Christmas in between. 

It would seem that we are now, yet again, losing our CMF depth of experience and all in the name of keeping it “as lean and mean as possible” according to mayor Col Murray.

I recall, it was only a year or two ago that we, the Tamworth rate payers, paid a reported $25,000 to send Paul Sullivan, Gavin Flanagan and Kate Baker to Nashville in the USA on a CMF fact-finding mission.

After 40-plus years of the CMF you might think we have had plenty of opportunity to figure out the basics! 

Surely three months before this major annual event is not the best timing for such a dramatic restructure! 

How much will the proffered redundancy packages cost the Tamworth ratepayers? 

Who is going, who is staying, and who is being moved sideways?

What effect will these major structural changes have on the operation of the CMF event?

 In fact, as a Tamworth ratepayer, I would be very keen to read through the business plan for the upcoming 2015 event. I would hope that it would be a substantial and comprehensive document commensurate with the size and scale of purportedly one of the “top 10 music festival events in the world”.

I travelled to the Gympie Music Muster last month.

 This is another substantial annual regional music event that, while it has several key differences to our CMF, it has also many similarities.

APEX has run this event since 1984 and I can tell all Tamworth people that, unlike our CMF, the Muster is run like a well-oiled military machine. 

It would seem that, year in and year out, the Muster not only generates millions of dollars for APEX – who distributes those funds throughout the community – but APEX also directly employs many local clubs, associations, organisations all of whom benefit directly from the Muster’s substantial income flow. 

Unlike our CMF, the Muster and all the other major Australian music festival events are run under an incorporated entity model and are all designed to actually make money and then distribute that money to the local community. Real money and real results and real returns – no smoke and mirrors and no bureaucratic double speak like we read in Thursday’s report. 

Year in and year out we endure more of the same – the struggles of a bureaucracy hard at work. 

Until there is a fundamental change in the base operating structure of our CMF event, all we can ever expect is more of the same as evidenced by these latest internal  “reforms”.