Summernats once again delivered four days of high-octane excitement earlier this month. Photo: Supplied.
It is difficult to explain to anyone outside the ACT just how absurd Canberra’s approach to economic stimulus and public safety has become – yet Summernats remains the clearest, loudest example.
Summernats is, by the ACT Government’s own admission, Canberra’s single biggest annual money maker. Once a year, for three days, the city fills its hotels, bars, short-stay accommodation and carparks.
Hospitality booms. Cash flows. Canberra briefly remembers what a functioning entertainment economy looks like.
And then we shut it down for another 12 months.
Even more extraordinary is that this festival – built around burnout competitions and high-powered vehicles – is routinely granted exemptions from Total Fire Bans, even when the broader region is on high alert and winds are pushing up to 30 knots.
In a Territory shaped by the trauma of catastrophic bushfires, the optics alone are staggering. The risk tolerance seems to expand in direct proportion to the revenue.
Money talks — loudly.
This contradiction becomes even harder to swallow when set against the ACT’s broader regulatory landscape.
Canberra has positioned itself as Australia’s most permissive jurisdiction on a range of issues, often without the enforcement frameworks seen elsewhere.
This includes laws around personal possession of illicit drugs, progressive and permissive laws regarding pornography and effectively allowing outlaw motorcycle gangs to openly congregate.
This is not about moral panic. It is about consistency. If the ACT Government is willing to tolerate risk, controversy and public concern, then why is that courage applied only once a year?
The predictable response to calls for a permanent entertainment precinct is that Canberra “isn’t big enough” to support one, that a Sydney-style model simply wouldn’t work here.
That argument collapses the moment reality intrudes.
At Spilt Milk just weeks ago, we ran into two people I knew from Canberra. Two. Everyone else we met had travelled here – from Goulburn, Temora, Wagga, Cooma, Wollongong, Newcastle, Nowra, Batemans Bay, Huskinson, Cowra …
They didn’t go to Sydney. They didn’t wait for Melbourne. They came to Canberra because that’s where the big act was.
That matters.
One artist. One night. Kendrick Lamar booked out every hotel room, Airbnb and alternative accommodation option across the city.
One night did that.
Now imagine a purpose-built entertainment precinct capable of delivering that outcome not once every 12 months, but seven nights a week.
Imagine touring artists, festivals, comedy, sport, conventions and nightlife creating constant demand. Imagine booking out every hotel, every Airbnb, every caravan park – not for three days, but permanently.
Canberra doesn’t just serve its own population. It is a regional capital for southern NSW. People will travel when there is something worth travelling for. Spilt Milk proved that beyond doubt.
Instead, we wait.
We wait 12 months for Summernats.
We grant fire-ban exemptions for burnouts and fireworks.
We accept disruption, risk and controversy – because it makes money.
And then we go back to being a city that shuts down early and wonders why young people leave, why the rest of the country point and laugh at us, why tourism spikes only in bursts and why the economy flatlines outside public service hours.
The Chief Minister’s legacy will not be measured by what Canberra begrudgingly tolerates once a year. It will be defined by readily available pornography, bikie gangs, Summernats, the token display of flowers rolled out annually and, most tellingly, by what he failed to build for the other 362 days of the year.
Canberra does not need another exemption or excuse.
It needs ambition.
It needs a genuine entertainment precinct.
And it needs a government that stops pretending one chaotic weekend a year is an economic strategy.
Louise Davies is a long-time Canberra local who moved to the Capital in her 20s and hasn’t looked back.
