Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) music fans are missing out on tickets because bots have bought up tickets in bulk and these tickets are being on-sold at inflated prices;

(b) music fans are also having to endure the disappointment and the loss of missing out on seeing live music through no fault of their own but because websites like Viagogo allow the selling of fake tickets and tickets that have been sold multiple times over;

(c) major search engines are profiting from advertising these websites and the tickets sold on these websites at the top of search results; and

(d) the loss felt by many people is not simply the loss of an experience but a substantial loss of money for what can be one of their biggest discretionary purchases of the year; and

(2) calls on the Government to explain the action being taken to ensure that if someone buys a ticket to live music, they know they can turn up and get entry to the music they love.

It is impossible to be serious about anything in arts or cultural policy without also defending the right of concertgoers, of people who want to enjoy and experience the arts, and, effectively, defending the audience as well. Without the audience being able to attend these events and without the audience being able to trust the pathway by which they get tickets to attend events, the whole system falls over.

What is happening now with concert tickets needs to be seen in this very particular context, which I have referred to in the motion, and it is this: for many Australians, buying a ticket to a major music event will be the biggest discretionary purchase they make in the course of an entire year, and to have confidence in buying that ticket and then being able to get in the door is essential. But what is happening now is not like the old days, where some people would wake up early, buy a heap of tickets at Ticketek at the local shopping centre and then be outside the door trying to onsell. At the very least, for all the problems that involved, you knew that you were buying from a scalper; you knew that was what was happening. But now people have absolutely no idea.

I was chatting only a few minutes ago to the member for Holt about it. He has heard me refer previously to the viagogo website. I said to him: 'Just check on your phone now. No-one starts at viagogo to buy tickets. Just type in "Midnight Oil tickets" and see what comes up.' Straight away on his phone, only a few minutes ago, up comes 'Midnight Oil viagogo tickets, official site'. People are being taken by the search engines directly to a site which is selling fake tickets, selling tickets at an extraordinary premium, and onselling the same ticket over and over again so that only the first person to the gate on the day will get in the door. At the event the barcode gets scanned, one person gets in, and all the other people who bought the same ticket on viagogo never get in the door, because they get told, 'Oh, no, that ticket has already been used.' For the fake tickets, even the first person does not get in the door.

I thought, after we had seen it come up on the phone, 'What happens for a concert that has not even been announced yet but that we have been told is on the way?' I typed in 'Paul McCartney tickets', because there have been rumours that a McCartney tour might be on the way. Well, up it comes. It takes me straight to viagogo. I click through and we get a photograph of Paul McCartney, we get the words 'Paul McCartney tickets' and we get told this is the first time we have ever seen Paul McCartney in Australia, which would be news to people who have previously seen him in Australia. Then we get the date that he is playing at the Perth Astor Theatre on 22 July, which is great. You go to the Astor Theatre website and you find out it is a tribute concert. At every stage what is happening on the viagogo website is deceiving people. StubHub is not much better.

The reason people are being consistently caught is that the search engines—and it is not just Google; you can go through Yahoo and a series of different search engines, such as Bing and DuckDuckGo—are all accepting advertising money from viagogo so that, when you type in the act and the word 'tickets', the first thing that will appear will be a link that takes you to a site designed to rip you off. It is designed to rip people off and to tell them that they have to move really quickly or they will miss out.

The search engines know about it, and they just keep taking the advertising revenue. Viagogo obviously know what they are doing, and they are making money overseas out of it. Until the government of Australia is willing to start making this a priority, to say that we will not stand for Australian consumers being systematically ripped off, and to take a stand on this, it is going to keep happening. It is not enough to simply put out the message, 'Be careful of viagogo,' because a whole lot of people will only buy a ticket once every five years or once every 10 years when a particular act arrives in this country. The government needs to be willing to take the lead on this. It is not good enough when thousands of people are turning up at the door, having paid more than the ticket was worth, and then not getting into the venue. (Time expired)

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