Victoria’s music industry wants $8.5 million a year, a fix for venue insurance and a change to how VCAT handles noise fights – the last of four commitments it’s put to every party before the 28 November election.
Victoria is very good at telling people it’s a live music capital.
It’s less good at keeping the rooms open. In 2019, 813 venues around the state put on live music every week. By 2023 it was 655, and if that keeps up we’re under 400 by 2030.
That’s the backdrop to the fourth and last ask in Vote Victorian Music, the platform Victoria’s music industry took to every party at the Victorian Music Assembly in August and has been chasing answers on since. The first three asks are about money: a 1% levy on stadium tickets feeding a permanent Victorian Music Trust, $9 million a year for artists, and $6 million for the way people get into the industry in the first place.
This one is about the buildings, and it’s essentially the only one the government has already half agreed to.
Vote Victorian Music: what ask four wants
- Identify and gazette priority Live Music Precincts across metropolitan and regional Victoria
- Finalise EPA noise guidance and enforce Agent of Change properly
- Inside gazetted precincts, shift the burden of proof in noise and planning disputes onto the objector
- Commission a formal investigation into the public liability insurance market
- A permanent Live Music Desk inside government, at about $500,000 a year
- A statewide Live Music Infrastructure Fund of about $8 million a year
- Fold planning, liquor licensing and event permits into one approval pathway
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
Yarra drew the map. It’s been on a desk since December
View this post on Instagram
Yarra City Council voted unanimously on 16 December to put five live music precincts into its planning scheme: Brunswick Street, Smith Street south, Johnston Street, Collingwood Yards and Richmond Station. Ten months on, the amendment is still at stage one, waiting for the Planning Minister to authorise it so it can go out for public comment.
The Bendigo Hotel stood at 125 Johnston Street for more than a century. It played its closing party on 29 August.
Port Phillip got in first, with precincts in St Kilda and South Melbourne. When Beat covered the Yarra vote in January, that one had been waiting nearly two years for a signature.
What a precinct actually does
View this post on Instagram
Agent of Change has been in the planning scheme since 4 September 2014. Build within 50 metres of a venue that’s already there and you pay for the soundproofing. It works one address at a time.
A precinct covers the whole area, maps every venue in it, and tells developers what they’re buying next to before they buy it. In December, mayor Stephen Jolly said an overlay would signal to buyers and developers that the land sits in a live music precinct.
Yarra is 19.5 square kilometres. It holds more than 130 live music spaces, 77 of them small to medium venues, and between them they put on roughly 20,000 gigs a year for an estimated 2.5 million people.
The Night Cat’s $100,000
View this post on Instagram
A developer next door complained about the noise. Not a resident, a developer. It cost the Fitzroy venue about $100,000 in one financial year: $30,000 in legal fees, $30,000 on soundproofing, $20,000 on acoustic assessment and $20,000 on monitoring gear. The Night Cat crowdfunded to stay open, then won at VCAT in 2025 when an acoustic report showed it had been inside its permit the whole time.
Ask four’s answer is procedural. Inside a gazetted precinct, make the objector prove the case, and close the cost gap that lets a developer with money push a complaint through VCAT whether or not it has merit. A room that’s been running for decades shouldn’t have to argue its right to exist in an area the state has set aside for live music.
Insurance is the bit everyone agrees on
View this post on Instagram
Music Victoria’s venue roundtables put public liability cover at the top of the pile: the single most acute structural barrier facing venues. Yarra’s own report logged premiums up by as much as 800%, and a 2024 parliamentary inquiry heard of cover going from $10,000 to more than $120,000. Old Bar stopped people dancing with a drink in their hand. The campaign Insure Good Times counted 18 of 19 insurers refusing to quote for Pride of Our Footscray, and a 2025 Creative Australia study found 88% of festival organisers call insurance an obstacle, with 48% changing their event to get covered.
Music Victoria is asking for an investigation. The Greens want it fixed outright. Gabrielle de Vietri, the member for Richmond and the party’s arts spokesperson, has spent two years arguing the state should underwrite venue cover through the Victorian Managed Insurance Authority, the government’s own insurer, which already does it for construction. No new legislation, just a ministerial decision. The precedent is 2021, when the government directed the VMIA to cover live music and community event cancellations through COVID. Her seat takes in Collingwood and Fitzroy, which is to say the Bendigo Hotel and the Night Cat.
The Greens’ 2026 arts platform carries it too, alongside planning protections for arts infrastructure and Percent-for-Art contributions from big new developments.
Insurance wasn’t in Labor’s package.
The money half
View this post on Instagram
The Live Music Infrastructure Fund is where most of the $8.5 million goes: about $8 million a year, $32 million across four. It would cover accessibility, safety, sound and compliance upgrades for small and medium venues, affordable rehearsal rooms, studios and space for community radio, infrastructure for festivals and connected regional touring routes, and energy efficiency and heatwave resilience for outdoor events.
What’s promised and what isn’t
View this post on Instagram
Labor’s 23 September announcement committed to Live Music Precincts, better protection for venues copping noise complaints, a permanent Live Music Desk, a new Live Gigs Fund and Victorian music in government ads. Music Victoria welcomed it and told every other party to match it.
Watch the noise one. The EPA’s review of noise rules inside live music precincts closed submissions on 17 April. Analysis runs through to November, and the people who made submissions get a report back somewhere between November and February 2027 – after the election.
Still missing from Labor: the Infrastructure Fund, the insurance investigation and the VCAT reform. The Coalition and One Nation haven’t said anything about music at all.
To see the full policy paper, head here. To add your voice, head here.
