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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-02-21 Daily Xml
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Adelaide Fringe Festival

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (15:27): I rise to talk about the exciting time that we are having in Adelaide now that the Fringe Festival has officially kicked off. It is known globally as the second largest festival of its kind in the world. It is our pride and joy, and it really does bring our state alive in February and March. That is why we committed an extra $2 million annually to the Adelaide Fringe to enable it to market itself to interstate and overseas visitors. Last year we saw a huge dividend on our investment where history was made with more than one million tickets sold at the Adelaide Fringe. I hear that ticket sales are going really well and we are on track for another successful Fringe.

I was able to head along last week to the launch of the Garden and Gluttony and it was really exciting to see a bit of a sneak peek at some of the acts that are going to be here at this year's Fringe, including Prinnie Stevens, one of the Fringe ambassadors, who gave a beautiful rendition of an Etta James song; Isaac Humphries, a basketballer who is doing a show; and also one that I am looking forward to seeing called LIMBO—The Return.

What I love about the Fringe is that it is not just confined to metro Adelaide. On the weekend down in Naracoorte we had Fringe festivities—Naracoorte being my hometown. My two little ones, Audrey and Ned, were able to go down to the Naracoorte Town Square to see various Fringe acts. I am sure it would have been much more exciting than when I used to do line dancing in the Naracoorte Town Square. I am sure it was of a much higher calibre of performance. The Fringe was also at the Naracoorte Caves, it went down to Coonawarra, and really this is just an example of how the Fringe is expanding across our state so that more audiences, particularly regional audiences, can enjoy the arts and everything that it does create and the wonderful atmosphere it creates for our communities.

At this year's Fringe we are hosting 6,000 artists and it will be the biggest arts festival in Australia over 31 days. But we do want to see the maximum benefit from having so many visitors come to our CBD, and that is why we are extending shop trading hours in the city on Saturdays during the festival from 5pm to 6pm. I was able to join the Rundle Mall Authority last week to help promote the extended shop trading hours.

We saw those extended hours increase sales by 14 per cent up to $127 million during last year's festival season, and we saw foot traffic double, so we really want to get the most out of our Fringe Festival, out of February, out of Mad March, out of Awesome April, and make sure that our small businesses, our local retailers, can get the maximum benefit out of when we bring our city alive. We will be doing that as well in April when we have the Gather Round coming for its second year. It was such a huge success last year and so this year we will also be extending shop trading hours on that Saturday in the city from 5pm to 7pm.

I want to briefly finish by saying that last night I was very proud to be the host of the launch of the Adelaide Equestrian Festival. We had all the key players of the festival come into parliament, and we were able to celebrate the launch of this really exciting event. It is a three-day event. It is just one of a kind in Australia and it really showcases the incredible talent and athleticism of these riders. I was able to meet riders Shane and Shenae and I learnt so much about this particular form of sport.

The wonderful thing about the Adelaide Equestrian Festival is that it is going to be the lead-up qualifying event for Paris, which will be held at Versailles as part of the Paris Olympics, and that we have a very similar event to the Versailles event that is going to be held for the Paris Olympics. It is close to the city, in a parkland setting, and we cannot wait to see all of the very best riders from Australia and around the world coming to Adelaide, coming to our beautiful Parklands in Victoria Park for the absolute cream of the crop competition in this field. I want to congratulate the board of the festival and the organisers for what is going to be a really exciting event in our capital city—so looking forward to that from 18 to 21 April.

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