'Bitterly disappointing': Cancelled Lantern Festival just one casualty of squeeze on sector

Tuesday, 7 February 2023

Auckland’s Lantern Festival was last held in February 2019.

The Lantern Festival in Auckland was supposed to go ahead last week for the first time since 2019.

First it was lockdown that stopped the event, then rising community Covid-19 cases, and now Auckland’s record rain has got in the way of the festival that celebrates the Lunar New Year.

Flooding and flash storms at the peak of summer were not something event organisers saw coming.

Auckland Lantern Festival organiser Chris Simpson, head of events at Auckland Unlimited, said axing the festival had been hard on organisers of what was typically considered to be New Zealand’s biggest cultural event of the year, drawing crowds of up to 150,000 people.

* Auckland Lantern Festival returns after two-year Covid hiatus

* Lantern Festival moved to Auckland Showgrounds after two years of cancellations

In previous years the Auckland Lantern Festival has drawn up to 150,000 visitors.

Simpson and his team made the decision to pull the plug on the Lantern Festival on Tuesday last week ahead of it scheduled to start on Thursday.

“You can’t help but be bitterly disappointed when you put all that effort and time and it gets cancelled … it was a bit like groundhog day,” Simpson said.

“It was a really tough decision because we’ve had a small events team working on the Lantern Festival for close to a year. You put your heart and soul into planning for these big major events – they require a lot of time, effort and energy – and the emotional impact on the team has been significant.”

This had been made worse by the fact the team had been excited for the festival to resume after previous years’ interruptions with Covid-19.

Auckland’s Lantern Festival is one of the country’s largest annual events.

The events industry had been significantly impacted by Covid-19. However, Simpson said, in the last six months, it had recovered and Auckland had been rolling out major events almost every weekend.

“I’ve been involved in running events for 30 years and [never seen anything like this]. You would never have thought that we’d have got half the year’s rain fall in the space of a few days in Auckland.”

Auckland is gearing up for a jam-packed few months of events. Ed Sheeran concerts are scheduled for this weekend, Te Matatini, the Olympics of Kapa Haka, later in the month, followed by Lorde and Harry Styles concerts, and the Pasifika festival in March.

The women’s Fifa World Cup is scheduled for mid-July.

Simpson said service providers such as marquee companies were so busy that it became hard for large-scale events such as the Lantern Festival to have back-up dates.

He said small event organisers found it easier to accommodate changes to scheduling.

Music festival Laneway and the Elton John concerts were also cancelled last week due to the wild wet weather in Auckland, and tennis event ASB Classic was severely affected by the cyclone in Auckland just a month before.

Being in the events sector was always risky business, but Simpson said there had become a greater element of risk due to unstable weather patterns.

Elaine Linnell, general manager of the New Zealand Events Association, said there were many businesses across the sector that were feeling the squeeze, but this was particularly true in Auckland.

“Off the back of Covid cancellations and then to have been dealt a wet summer has been pretty heartbreaking for event organisers.”

She said the sector that already felt it lacked sufficient funding.

“Summer is when we host so many outdoor events. There were a lot of postponed events from Covid that were going to be taking place this summer as well.”

Linnell said many small event organisers’ livelihoods were on the line.

When he needed help with the words to one of his songs, Ed Sheeran got Pippa Guerin up on stage.

“It impacts so many people; the promoters, the venues, all the third-party suppliers and contractors. A lot of event organisers and promoters do have event insurance in place, and therefore can get some of that money lost back, however, it is still a lot of work that goes into organising, which is the hardest part.”

It was a different story in the South Island, where there had been next to no rain, Simpson said.

He said event organisers needed more financial backing to thrive and help drive economic recovery.

“When we look at the level of investment in events in Australia cities [it is] huge, especially over the last year, they have put in significant amounts of money into their major events strategy. Australia has seen events as a critical piece to economic recovery for their cities, and we are behind.”

The events industry had become far more competitive in the last six months, and the cost of winning events in that time had increased and international rights-holders now asked for much higher hosting fees, said Simpson.

For every dollar invested in an event in Auckland last year, it generated $4.60 for the region, he said.

“Sometimes it’s not the money you should be worrying about spending, it’s actually what we’re going to miss if we don’t.”

Major events certainly brought new money to the region that hosted in, and investing in more events could be used as tool to help in New Zealand’s economic rebound, he said.