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 Strong risk management and community support for Mardi Gras’ 30th anniversary were the main factors contributing to the $483,650 profit announced in New Mardi Gras (NMG)’s annual report, released last Thursday.
“We have a Board that is actually quite experienced broadly in financial and arts and events management,” General Manager Anna McInerney told SX.
“We’ve been very, very careful about managing our risk and planning our budgets and then managing those budgets.”
One of the key strategies in making last year’s event a financial success was outsourcing of certain services, such as the bar at Fair Day, McInerney said
“Fair Day we get somewhere in the region of 50,000 to 60,000 people through the park, but it’s still pretty much a free event. Of course, with that comes the increases in infrastructure and the staging costs of the event, so we’re looking at ways of being more efficient and ... saying ‘let’s outsource that.’ And so that’s one of the ways this year we became more efficient and for the first year ever broke even on Fair Day.”
New Mardi Gras Chair David Imrie said the organisation’s long-term plan is to buy property in order to safeguard profits.
“We have now got substantial funds set aside and our intention is to continue to build those funds and ultimately to purchase property as a way of keeping those funds protected,” he told SX.
“The plan is to own our own office space, ideally in the inner east or inner west. It depends on the space and access to general amenities because we have a lot of people who come to our offices – around the calendar we have several hundred volunteers coming to meetings on a fairly regular basis.”
Meanwhile NMG is hoping the City of Sydney Council will offer up one of its own properties around Oxford St to house the organisation. The topic was first raised by McInerney at one of the council’s GLBT forums.
“Over the past three months we’ve been consulting with the property department and the CEO of City of Sydney as to what space might be available and what may be suitable,” Imrie said.
“It doesn’t appear there’s going to be suitable space for us right on Oxford Street but they are talking about a couple of other potential locations quite close by. It will be beneficial for us to make us even more accessible, particularly to pedestrian traffic, and especially in season when we have people from out of town who can pop into the office and get information on the Parade, parties and events.
"I think it’ll be beneficial to the street itself to have a large community organisation positioned there ... it would be a way of bringing back the strip to our community.”
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