The President and CEO of Tourism Victoria is defending a decision to cut ties with the operator of the Victoria International Buskers Festival.
Paul Nursey says Tourism Victoria choose to end the relationship with the event operator for sound business reasons. The first:
"That operator chose to move a good healthy percentage of the Buskers Festival to Uptown without consulting the sponsors whatsoever. So if you are a downtown hotelier putting tens of thousands of dollars into a festival for the specific purpose of downtown animation you know, that's a problem."
Nursey says the operator provided flawed reports to Tourism Victoria including grossly exagerated claims - despite being counselled to provide better.
And second, Nursey says the operator provided flawed reports to Tourism Victoria:
"This operator chose not to pay really any heed to report. And we found really deep methodological flaws in the reports -- grossly exagerated claims, deep survey methodology using leading questions. And we provided counsel and feedback over a number of years that that needed to improve. But very little interest was paid to that."
And finally Nursey says the financial demands kept getting higher until the requests became too unreasonable and there was no choice but to pull sponsorship, and the decision is final.
Meantime the Downtown Victoria Business Association announced they will stage a buskers festival July 11 to 16th next year, starting 3 days before the International Buskers’ Festival.
Nursey was speaking with CFAX 1970's Pamela McCall.