STANDING COMMITTEE ON LEGISLATION TICKET SCALPING BILL 2018 TRANSCRIPT OF EVIDENCE TAKEN AT PERTH WEDNESDAY, 14 AUGUST 2019 SESSION ONE Members Hon Dr Sally Talbot (Chair) Hon Nick Goiran (Deputy Chair) Hon Colin de Grussa Hon Aaron Stonehouse Hon Pierre Yang __________ Legislation Wednesday, 14 August 2019 — Session One Page 1 Hearing commenced at 9.39 am MR JOSHUA GLADWIN President, Ticket Brokers Association of Australia Incorporated, sworn and examined: MR DAVID LUONG Director, Epic Tickets, sworn and examined: The CHAIR: On behalf of the committee, I would like to formally welcome you to the hearing. [Witnesses took the affirmation.] The CHAIR: You will have both signed a document entitled “Information for Witnesses.” Have you read and understood that document? The WITNESSES: We have. The CHAIR: I just draw your attention to the fact that we have Hansard with us today. They will be recording the proceedings. A transcript of your evidence will be provided to you. To assist the committee and Hansard, would you please quote the full title of any document you refer to during the course of this hearing for the record. Please be aware of the microphones. Try to talk into them and make sure you do not cover them with papers or make noises near them. I am sure you will be very orderly, but if you could try to speak in turn. I remind you that your transcript will be made public. If for some reason you wish to make a confidential statement during today’s proceedings, you should request that the evidence be taken in private session. If the committee grants your request, any public and media in attendance will be excluded from the hearing. Until such time as the transcript of your public evidence is finalised, it should not be made public. I advise you that publication or disclosure of the uncorrected transcript of evidence may constitute a contempt of Parliament and may mean that the material published or disclosed is not subject to parliamentary privilege. Would you like to start by making an opening statement to the committee? Mr GLADWIN: I would. I would first like to start by expressing our gratitude to the committee and to the committee clerk for allowing us to appear this morning. The TBA comprises seven Australian– based ticket brokers and resellers. We cater to WA and Perth–based families and small businesses; we cater to hotels, hotel concierges; and we cater to the slightly larger entities, being the ASX listed mining and energy companies. Our members provide superior value through the packaging of event tickets with ancillary benefits, such as food and beverage, accommodation and transport, in addition to providing the option to purchase single-ticket-only options. We strictly abide by our code of ethics, which is based on that of the National Association of Ticket Brokers in the USA. It mandates transparency in the secondary market; it mandates compliance with the Australian consumer law, especially those provisions pertaining to drip pricing; and, vitally, it prohibits any use of automated software or bots. You will no doubt have read TBA’s submission, which largely canvasses the notion of consumer benefit, competition and transparency—are our main focuses. You will note also that we have provided differing legislative approaches. The paramount approach, in our opinion, is that of the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015 and Ontario’s Ticket Sales Act 2017, which are largely transparency and disclosure obligation based. Failing that, our second preference is that of major events legislation, which was largely endorsed by the submission by Live Performance Australia, which is Legislation Wednesday, 14 August 2019 — Session One Page 2 the key body representing artists and performers. The third preference is retaining the existing legislation, but with an amendment to remove the contingent sales prohibition, which would otherwise enable our members to continue to service their clients. The submission also discusses the dynamics between the primary and secondary markets, and notes what will occur if there is a price cap placed on the secondary market; namely, that the primary market would step into our place. Finally, the submission canvasses some non-legislative options. Most notable is the involvement of Google in ensuring that Viagogo’s paid search advertising no longer occurs, which appears to have been pretty successful. I want to go on to the objectives of the bill. We applaud the intention of then minister for commerce Bill Johnston, when in his second reading speech he spoke of the unashamed commitment of the bill to put fans first and to promote openness, transparency and reasonable access to the market, and ensuring that WA families have the opportunity to enjoy major events at a fair price. We wholeheartedly agree with and support each of these objectives. However, we are concerned that the bill does not meet these objectives. Unfortunately, the focus of the current legislation is confined to the secondary market and resellers—it does not place any accountability on the part of the primary market to adopt the same objectives around transparency and access to tickets. Secondly, there are significant and important concerns regarding primary market transparency, which have been raised in our submission and echoed by the Law Society of WA in their respective submission. Another concern is that by removing genuine resellers like ourselves, competition in the market will be dramatically reduced, causing prices to increase. It affects fair access to tickets and ticket affordability for fans. Finally, it will be incredibly difficult to enforce on companies and individuals based overseas who are selling tickets into Australia. I want to very briefly discuss how it does not protect consumers. Rather than protect them, the bill does three things: it punishes the 68 per cent of consumers who, according to the submission by Consumer Protection, thought they were purchasing tickets from an official ticket seller and not a resale site. It punishes them by extinguishing these customers’ contractual rights and remedies under the Australian Consumer Law due to the deemed illegality of any tickets sold for greater than 10 per cent above face value. The cap will effectively end David’s business. It will drive his and many other customers to a black market for tickets beyond the jurisdiction of Consumer Protection. The bill was drafted without wider stakeholder consultation. We were disappointed we were unable to meet personally with Minister Quigley, and the discussion that we did have with Consumer Protection occurred once the bill had been drafted. We very much look forward to working with Parliament and with the department in order to improve the legislation, to achieve greater outcomes for consumers. Thank you. The CHAIR: Thanks. I am sure you are aware that last week we had a public hearing with the department. Mr GLADWIN: We watched it with interest. The CHAIR: Yes. Did you have some particular comments that you wanted to make about some of the evidence that you heard? Mr GLADWIN: We were proposing to table or to draft a rebuttal document, and submit that to the committee clerk. The CHAIR: Right. Is that what you are intending to do? Mr GLADWIN: Correct. The CHAIR: You need to be aware that we are on a very tight timeline. Legislation Wednesday, 14 August 2019 — Session One Page 3 Mr GLADWIN: So that will be done by tomorrow. The CHAIR: All right. Thank you for that opening statement; that is very good. Can you just explain the relationship between your two organisations? Mr GLADWIN: Sure. David comprises our sole Perth member. The rest of us are Melbourne-based. David has his own client base. I am more than happy for David to provide an introduction to his business. The CHAIR: Yes. That would probably be helpful, because my first question is: is it a membership organisation? Mr GLADWIN: It is indeed, yes. The CHAIR: So are your members subject to a business licensing regime? Mr GLADWIN: Yes. To the extent that we are based in Australia, we have to comply with the relevant business licensing regime. It is a commonwealth regime, so you have to have a business name, ABN. So, yes, in response to your question. The CHAIR: David, perhaps you’d like to — Mr LUONG: Yes. So, we are a small Western Australian family-owned business. We provide concierge-like services to individuals, as well as businesses, as well as visitors to WA. My relationship with the TBA is that the TBA provides us a code of ethics and representation. I can stick by those guidelines. My customers who buy from me have the confidence that I will adhere to them. That provides confidence when my customers purchase from me. My customers range from people that, you know, they are computer-illiterate or they are not as tech-savvy as the general population. They like to use the phone; they like to visit us in person. They are not so comfortable using a mobile device or a computer. Eleven per cent of people do not have a smartphone, so that shows potentially there are 300 000 people in WA that could be disenfranchised, so they will not have access to my services. We also cater to a lot of regional customers, whether they be FIFO or farmers or people who just live in the regions that do not know when they are coming to Perth, they do not have good internet access to be able to buy tickets at 9.00 am or whenever they go on sale, and people that just have unclear schedules. We also help a lot of small and large businesses in Australia with their business development in entertaining clients, whether they are entertaining current clients or future clients.