Events teams thrown into chaos
One of Southland’s premier destination events is unlikely to go ahead on the back of restrictions imposed by the Government regarding public gatherings.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on Monday that all gatherings with 500 or more people should be cancelled in a move to limit the spread of coronavirus.
At this stage, there is no end date set for the restrictions.
The annual Bluff Oyster and Food Festival, which attracts 4500 people, is scheduled to take place on May 23. Festival committee member Kylie Fowler said the committee would meet today to discuss the situation and hoped to have a clearer direction at that point.
She agreed the outlook was bleak for the 2020 event. ‘‘Under the current regulations we would not be able to go ahead,’’ she said.
Although there were still two months until the festival, Fowler said she was apprehensive about boxing on with the planning given they were at a point where they needed to spend a significant amount of money on set-up costs.
On top of the public gathering restrictions, the Government has also said every person entering
the country must go into self-isolation for 14 days.
While Fowler was unaware of the exact number of people who travelled from overseas for the event in Bluff, she believed it was a significant number.
‘‘I’ve sold an Asian group 100 tickets, so that will be 100 people not coming,’’ she said.
The festival is just one of the many Southland events that are now in limbo or have been cancelled. The New Zealand Super
Truck meeting at Teretonga Park in Invercargill this weekend was one of the cancelled events.
Tussock Country 2020 was cancelled yesterday, with organisers saying the hard-working team behind the event was gutted to have to cancel this ‘‘fantastic new festival event’’.
New Zealand Country Music Festival Trust chairman Jeff Rea said: ‘‘We’ve had enormous support for all of the 32 events we had planned . . . [But] we need to do the responsible and right thing.’’
Meanwhile, ILT Stadium Southland general manager Nigel Skelt held a meeting with tenants of the stadium yesterday to talk through the situation.
‘‘Our immediate impact as we speak today is not massive, in the sense we haven’t got a massive range of events happening in the next three or four weeks.’’
Skelt said community basketball and volleyball competitions at the stadium would go ahead this week, but the sports themselves would try to restrict the number of people in the stadium at any one time.
This weekend’s Relay for Life at the stadium has already been postponed, as has the Hop ’n’ Vine Beer Fest, which was set down for April 4.
Invercargill Licensing Trust president Alan Dennis and marketing manager Angee Shand, both members of the stadium’s board, also attended the tenants meeting. The pair gave comfort to concerned organisations by indicating that the trust would honour its funding if events had to be postponed to a later date.
If events were cancelled altogether, and some of that funding had been spent, Dennis said they wouldn’t ask for that money back. ‘‘We’ve got your back,’’ he said.