Festival sector leader calls for radical transformation of ‘dehydrated’ industry
The outgoing CEO of Festival City ADL urged the state’s industry leaders to stop turning against one another and to strive for solutions in order to rebuild and transform a sector that’s letting grassroots festivals wither.
A culture of competitiveness for grants scraps and leadership that’s abdicating responsibility is holding back the South Australian festival sector, outgoing Festival City ADL Justyna Jochym told a crowd of industry leaders at the peak body’s Policy Summit this morning.
Jochym, who will soon join the History Trust of South Australia as chief executive, said decades-old grudges, under-resourcing generally and the outsourcing of responsibility for big decisions meant the sector was being held back.
In a powerful 20-minute speech delivered at the Adelaide Oval this morning – underscored by recent news that the 2025 Beer & BBQ Festival was the festival’s last and that Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival could soon join it – Jochym said she had “witnessed us failing each other”.
“My five-plus years in this role have taught me many things, but chief among them is this: we spend lots of time reframing problems we already understand more than we do facing the discomfort of doing something about them,” she said.
“This isn’t a change issue. This is a leadership issue. Your presence here today tells me you are ready to stop outsourcing responsibility, to stop calling it resistance when people raise valid concerns, to stop delegating change to people with no power.
“Our industry isn’t experiencing many green shoots right now, and we need to be honest about why.”
At the event – which also included high-profile speakers such as Senator Don Farrell, Federal Minister for Trade and Tourism, and Andrew Giles, Federal Minister for Skills and Training – Jochym said she had “witnessed several ways in which we collectively have been abdicating responsibility for this remarkable industry”.
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“We do it by burying our heads in the sand for fear of upsetting someone above; creating environments where people bury their heads in the sand; minimising our worst; ignoring the real and daily anxiety our teams feel about the precarity and seasonality; failing to properly value the labour, skill and sacrifice required to deliver festivals and events; under resourcing, underpaying, essentially dehydrating this industry and expecting over-delivery; acting like crabs in a bucket; holding onto decades-old grudges or institutional mistrust.
“Pretending like there’s no existential threat to this sector when I’ve cried too many times with people who feel like they’re drowning. Businesses on knife’s edge, contracts drying up and people walking away from careers they love because they can no longer afford to stay.
“We have abdicated our responsibility by turning against one another more often than we do towards one another.”
She asked the crowd how they might address these “uncomfortable truths” about festival business models, workforce pressures, and the “contracting and increasingly unrealistic business and policy environment”.
“We’re constantly bracing for the next blow as if our helmets and our protective gear have been taken away,” she said.
“That is not strategy. That is survival.”
“That constant state of reactivity didn’t make us stronger; it depleted our industry.”
It’s resulted in partial funding outcomes that “leaves everyone short, designed to spread the pot so that everyone gets something but no one gets what they need”, she said.
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“We see it in the contrast of celebrating the licenses and deals we pay for multi-million-dollar national and international events while cutting the $10,000 grant funding that keeps a community festival alive,” she said.
“Licenses. Grants. It’s just semantics; it’s all public money.
“These contradictions are about trust in the system. They push us into a scarcity mindset. They reduce our appetite for risk, experimentation and innovation; the qualities we need now the most.”
Jochym said the biggest problem for the industry was the “false dichotomy” that ‘events’ and ‘festivals’ were different.
“This split is among the most damaging policy legacies that we have inherited,” she said.
“In practice, festivals and events share approximately 85 per cent of the same infrastructure, workforce, compliance obligations and production DNA. The other 15 per cent? That’s just genre – it’s music, business, nature, food and wine, community, arts or sport.
“And yet, the consequences of this divide run deep and maintains the narrative that some formats are economic liabilities while others are economic engines.”
She told the events and festival leaders to reject the split and to build a policy environment “where all formats are understood, supported and positioned to succeed in their own terms”.
“What’s needed is a more sophisticated approach, one that evolves our policy and business settings to better navigate complexity,” she said.
One solution to the industry’s woes was in the skills and training piece, including the establishment of a National Education and Training Centre “that breaks down the artificial divides”.
She suggested this centre of excellence for festivals and events training could live in South Australia – something Festival City ADL was already pursuing with TAFE SA.
“Australia must also learn to work with the personality of the sector rather than forcing it into models that don’t fit,” she said.
“This is a sector built on trust, mobility and portfolio careers. It thrives on relationships. We should harness this by creating platforms that support job and employee sharing, supported by a back-end system that enables resource sharing and mobility across businesses, contracts and state jurisdictions.
“Whether someone works two days a week for six months or 10 events a year, we should make it seamless for them to connect from one job opportunity to another. The tools already exist, what’s missing is the infrastructure to make them work for the industry. We believe that innovation should start here in South Australia.”
