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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2012-03-14 Daily Xml
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ADELAIDE CULTURAL VENUES

The Hon. T.A. FRANKS (15:48): Today I would like to talk about saving small cultural venues in Adelaide, or 'renewing Adelaide' as one organisation sees it. We have five days to go of the annual Adelaide Fringe and this mad March, as it has become known, is a fabulous time for enjoying the arts in all of their forms in Adelaide. It should and could be all year round, and I take this opportunity to highlight the tale of two small venues that serve the arts and music in this capital city of South Australia. They are both driven by the toil of younger South Australians with a passion for the arts.

They are linked not only by their names, with reference to animals, but also by the passion they have for renewing Adelaide: they are the Tuxedo Cat and the Jade Monkey. The Tuxedo Cat actually lost its Synagogue Lane premises in the 2010 Fringe. At the end of that Fringe it was unceremoniously dumped for a student housing development that went into Synagogue Lane where Tuxedo Cat had previously been for many festivals. After temporarily occupying the Electra space on King William Street for the last Fringe festival, it has now reopened just across the road from Parliament House, at 199 and 200 North Terrace. It has six theatres, two bars, an alleyway and much more, and I would encourage any members who have the dinner break this evening to go over and have a look, and see what Bryan and Cass and the Pigeon Island team have managed to do with that space that has lain vacant and dormant for some decade now.

They have put an enormous amount of work into the fit-out of it. I would also like to acknowledge the work of the Renew Adelaide team and people like Ianto Ware; also lawyers, Nick Gurner from Le Cordon Bleu, Steve Maras of the Maras Corporation and the Renew Adelaide Board, who have all pitched in and made something quite special happen in Adelaide that I hope will go well beyond the next five days of this Fringe.

The hope is that the Tuxedo Cat will thrive and reach a point where it can keep going all year round. The volume of charity and pro bono support that has been undertaken so far to get the Tuxedo Cat up and running on 199 and 200 North Terrace is really heartening. What is disconcerting, though, is that in eight days of the Fringe that venue has been raided at least four times by Liquor Licensing, which has also called in SafeWork SA to investigate what have been termed 'trip hazards' in the venue.

I would like to compare that to the approach to Barrio, just behind Parliament House here, which I would say is certainly a trip hazard in the making. I think the treatment by Liquor Licensing of that particular venue speaks volumes about the treatment of the fine arts compared to the mass arts, or the unpopular cultural arts. Small venues are treated very unfairly, I think, in this state, compared to what we see as the traditional and more exalted arts. On one hand we pride ourselves as a festival state, yet we punish people who try to make that festival available for more than the absolute mainstream, for a more accessible, broader, alternative audience

The other venue that has been in the news in recent weeks is, of course, the Jade Monkey, which is a small live music venue that has been going for 10 years in this state. That venue is in Twin Street in the city and is slated to close, again because it is to be developed for, I understand, housing and possible retail. That venue, as a small music venue, is indicative of the loss that we have seen in our music scene in Adelaide. The outpouring, with over 4,000 signatures to a petition in less than 48 hours, I understand, and the Premier and the Lord Mayor stepping in to try to save the Jade Monkey, just shows how important these small live music venues are not only to the music scene but in our broader cultural fabric.

The fact that there is such an outpouring I think is because that Jade Monkey is such an endangered species. I do hope that the Premier comes to the party in terms of helping the Jade Monkey continue. I certainly call on the Premier to have a look at that $0.5 million fund that was set aside to support live music back in 1992 and not only increase it to at least a CPI indexation that they should have been owed but make sure that that fund is used to ensure that we do have small live music venues in our capital city. If we are to have a real renewed Adelaide, that is what needs to happen.

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