Townsville mayor calls on triple j to pull Groovin The Moo partnership

"The tyranny of distance kills us for events," mayor Jenny Hill said ahead of the 2023 festival, which will take place on the Sunshine Coast instead of Townsville

Townsville mayor Jenny Hill has supported a petition calling for triple j to withdraw its support for Groovin the Moo music festival.

Groovin the Moo annually tours throughout regional areas of Australia throughout April and early May. Since 2008, the festival has included Townsville as the regional stop for its Queensland edition, in addition to Bendigo in Victoria, Maitland in New South Wales and Bunbury in Western Australia, among others.

This year, however, Groovin the Moo’s Townsville edition was dropped and replaced with an outing in Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. A press release from the festival in January cited “logistical challenges and increased financial pressures” for the change.

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Ahead of the festival’s 2023 edition, which begins in April, Mayor Hill has questioned Groovin the Moo’s billing as a regional festival, since in her opinion “three of the stops – Wayville in Adelaide, Canberra and the Sunshine Coast – can hardly be considered regional”.

“Let’s face it, the Sunshine Coast is an outer suburb of Brisbane,” Hill said. According to the ABC, the mayor has supported a petition submitted to the House of Representatives, which was drafted by Townsville resident Karl Geiger, and questioned triple j’s “commitment” to supporting and promoting the regional areas of Queensland.

“As Groovin the Moo is sponsored by triple j, owned by the Australian government, one has to question the commitment of the national broadcaster to northern Australia,” Hill said. “The tyranny of distance kills us for events. You shouldn’t have to live in Brisbane for liveability. We can’t make it a liveable place if we don’t have some events.

“That’s why triple j supporting events in the outer suburbs of Brisbane [doesn’t] go down well for us in regional Queensland. If triple j really wanted to have a good presence in the north, it needs to actually sponsor events in the north.”

When contacted by NME, a representative for triple j said it had a “deep commitment” to music audiences outside of capital cities, citing its support of last year’s Day Trip Festival and concerts by Greta Stanley and WAAX that were hosted in Townsville. The broadcaster also pointed to its Unearthed competition, which gave emerging artists local to north Queensland a chance to appear at Day Trip Festival.

triple j also claims that 42 per cent of the tours it supported in the past year have included regional areas, either partly or entirely, while 21 per cent were entirely regional.

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Alt-J, Denzel Curry, Skepta, Omar Apollo, Amy Shark and The Chats are among the acts who will perform at this year’s Groovin the Moo, which kicks off with its Wayville edition on April 21. It will mark the festival’s first full-scale run since 2019.

Stay tuned to NME for more Australia music festival news

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