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

I rise to refer to what is happening to concertgoers at the moment in the ticket resale market. This is not only happening with respect to live music it is also happening with respect to a number of major sporting events.

If you get onto any search engine—not just Google; try Bing, try Yahoo! or try any of the major search engines—and type in the name of a band that you want to see and the word 'tickets', invariably the first entry that will come up is the viagogo website. Last week a whole lot of Australians were trying to get Ed Sheeran tickets. While they were trying to get Ed Sheeran tickets from the official Frontier Touring site and from the official seller it was already the case that the resale market had started. You could already go to viagogo, where people were purporting to sell tickets to the same show. Within a few minutes we found that the official sellers had completely sold out because there are bots being run by scammers that clean-up the official market and then the resale market kicks in.

For Ed Sheeran, within a few days tickets that were worth less than $200 were being resold for about 3½ thousand dollars. And in that resale market there is no guarantee that the people who buy them will ever even get in the door. I have found when I have been to events that people who we were meant to meet never even got in the door because when they turned up they discovered they had purchased fake tickets.

But we cannot blame the concertgoer for what is happening, because when they use search engines, which they put a level of trust in, the first entry continues to be the site that leads people to be scammed. Let me explain, because it was put to me that the following would happen so I went to my own office about an hour ago and typed in 'Ed Sheeran tickets' and looked to see exactly what would follow.

The search engine I chose was Google. The Google ad, top of the page when I typed in 'Ed Sheeran tickets' takes you to the viagogo website. But it says a few things that are not true. It says it is the official site—it is not. If you click through it says that it has the lowest prices—it does not. It says there is an instant download—there is not, because the tickets do not actually get issued until next January. There are no tickets in existence yet. It says the tickets are selling fast and that the prices are rising. If you then click through it tells you that the tickets on viagogo are the cheapest in Melbourne, the cheapest in Sydney and the cheapest in Brisbane. It also, once again, tells you that the tickets are selling fast.

I then clicked through and chose the Melbourne 9 March concert. Then it said, 'Warning: the site is experiencing heavy traffic. Secure your tickets as fast as you can,' to try to make people think that they need to engage with this quickly. Several other, 'We are busy, go quick,' messages then start to appear on the screen. You click through the number of tickets you want—I clicked on '2'—and a graphic came up showing tickets disappearing in front of my eyes, with other people and the alleged number of tickets they are wanting to buy appearing behind me. This gives you the impression that you must buy the tickets immediately and gives you the impression that you are on the official site.

The tickets are priced with a line through them, as though there is a discount. In my case, when I went through it said, 'Rear floor discount tickets.' They actually had those retailed at the official site at $103. These were claimed to have been discounted, marked down from $238 to $152. So the discount for a $103 ticket was selling for $152. That was the discount they were claiming as they defraud consumers.

I then chose to buy tickets and it showed people queuing up for the same tickets to drive urgency. I then got put into a countdown box and it told me that general admission at the rear is the most popular section, which of course it is not for any concert—of course it isn't! Eventually I clicked through—and I went all the way through until it actually asked me to pay—to where it claimed that I had to pay a VAT, which is interesting in the Australian taxation environment, and a booking fee of $42 per ticket. That is an additional $84 on the order. This is a site that does not sell tickets. And the search engines cannot continue to take advertising dollars when, effectively, these sites are selling stolen goods and defrauding Australians who just want to be able to go and attend a concert.