ENTECH moves from Crown to MCEC this THURSDAY. Why?
We have today taken a hard and expensive decision to move our event from Crown Convention Centre to Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. Moving a trade show with less than 48 hours notice is difficult, and it is a tribute to the team at MCEC that they can pull this together for us.
We are in BAY 20. The PA and Lighting demo will be at the back of BAY 20 behind a drape line.
We apologise for any complications that arise from this, and assure you that we are working really hard to make this a smooth transition. Needless to say, we are now paying for two venues in Melbourne, and this is not a rash decision nor one taken without extensive consultation within our team and beyond.
If you have pre-registered you can park free underneath the exhibition centre, the car park link is HERE: http://mcec.com.au/visit/visit-information#parking
Park near DOOR 10.
Anyone arriving at Crown will be redirected. Anyone parking at Crown will have their parking costs refunded by us.
The show opens as scheduled at 11am, and Happy Hour runs from 4.30 until 6pm.
WHY WE ARE DOING THIS?
ENTECH Roadshow is a world class event now staged across Australia, NZ and the USA (commencing this Fall). We tour with a safety consultant (Roderick van Gelder), we are the principal supporters of the Australian Entertainment Safety Resource Guide (www.aesrg.com.au), and launch supporters of the LPA Safety Guidelines for the Live Entertainment and Events Industry. ENTECH has since 1994 been a forum for entertainment safety.
We embrace sensible safety.
Crown Convention Centre introduced a new safety regime last year that has no peer. It requires anyone working anywhere in Crown do an online induction that in our case, took an average of almost two hours per person to complete. Despite our varied and extensive credentials, every one of our team failed many of the modules due to poor structure. We endured lengthy training modules on how to clean an oven, and where to put used butter wrappers and chopsticks.
The Crown induction is on an insecure Flash platform, that requires browser intervention to commence.
Anyone working back of house at Crown also completes a probity check, which includes a Police check. This applies to performers, entertainers, crew, florists, cleaners, everyone. Presumably any kind of police record prevents access to Crown backstage or back of house.
You identity details are entered onto the insecure induction URL.
Once issued with a T-Number, you then submit Date of birth, Contact number, Contact email, and Driver’s licence number 48 hours prior to the event to get ‘loaded’, and the standard procedure has you present yourself to the staff entry for processing. Imagine a TV presenter or a famous artist’s management reaction to this.
For an idea of the difficulty of the induction, here is the five page instruction manual on how to start it up: http://crowninduction.ezylearn.net/Images/ContractorFAQ.pdf
Last Thursday Crown advised that all our exhibitors would be required to do this induction – we had less than a week’s notice.
After extensive dialogue with the Crown Sales Team a compromise of sorts was reached later on Friday to avoid the online induction provided inducted crew (hired by ENTECH) did any stand building. With over 100 professional entertainment technicians as exhibitors, this is plainly unacceptable. Further discussions with Crown outlined that there would be extensive compliance oversight of our event.
ENTECH is a friendly ‘no hassle’ roadshow with exhibitors who are obviously not contractors. Crown do not have an ‘Exhibitor’ induction category. The induction is called ‘CONTRACTOR INDUCTION’.
Our event was booked in to Crown early last year, and our Venue Manual has been with them for several months now. It’s a shame they didn’t read it until last week. A site meeting several months ago seemed quite positive, and we are perplexed at how this has panned out.
ENTECH crew difficult? Unsafe? We don’t think so.
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