The dedicated and determined team that is Bike Fest Oz! 2023 would like it known that we have been experiencing some quite heavy resistance in certain areas around the Tweed Shire and Council since we first announced we were launching Australasia’s biggest-ever annual celebration of motorcycling earlier this year.
Apparently, there are some within Council, in particular, who feel that motorcycles are “unsustainable” and therefore not welcome in their Shire, which is kind of hard to understand since they, three times a year, welcome very large and disruptive groups of cyclists – and their large, hydro-carbon-belching four-wheel-drives – into the area. They take up big spaces in their paddock destroyers and some in Council even drive those same 4WDs, yet deem to lecture us mere mortals on the virtues of ‘caring for the environment’ and ‘sustainability’. Go figure.
And it’s also even harder to understand given that the vast majority of the locals are hugely supportive of Bike Fest Oz!, including all of the businesses, community and Indigenous groups, average residents and anyone else who doesn’t have a hidden agenda that involves stopping anything they don’t like the sound of.
One example of the sort of annoyance and resistance we’ve had to deal with is that it has taken Council’s own events people months and months to finally discover that there is an actual event called Bike Fest Oz! running next August! And this is despite the fact that their own events chief was invited to, and attended a BFO! 2023 Public Info Night way back in June! It even says on their own website that if they are made “aware of an event”, they will automatically list it on their site. Unless, of course, it happens to be an ‘unsustainable’ motorcycle event …
So we’ve been somewhat distracted of late dealing with all of the anonymous grey people who hide just below the horizon and creep out every now and then to throw a spanner in the works and then gloat about it all to their environmentally-aware ‘support networks’.
But that’s absolutely not how we work here at BFO!. We’re loud, proud and in your face when we need to be and rest assured our event is going to happen, despite the best efforts of certain groups who would rather we all wore Lycra rather than leather, and sipped lattes rather than beer and bourbon.
Stay tuned motor-cyclists of Australia and New Zealand as we’ve got a lot of fun stuff to announce over the coming weeks in the lead-up to Christmas and into the exciting new year. And you can be damn sure all of it will be ‘sustainable’!
In the meantime, we’ve finally cleared a few more annoyances and bureaucratic obstacles of late. And you should know that the Tweed Shire Council apparently values feedback from locals and visitors alike, so you can share your own views on the ‘sustainability’ of motorcycling and motorcycle events by going to: Feedback and compliments | Tweed Shire Council (nsw.gov.au)
