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OLYMPIA WARD Volume 10, Issue 12 People. Don’t be mad. I tried to buy Justin Bieber tickets. Be cool ok I have practically morphed with Triple J and I regularly say “have you heard the new Nick Murphy” or other random Australian artists who play the drums with sporks. But sometimes. You NEED the Biebs and a song with a regular verse-chorus-bridge structure so that your brain doesn’t have to work hard to jam to spork playing. But alas. My pop dreams have been crushed. I missed out on the presale, then the general sale then the last minute general sale. So naturally I resorted to the dreaded *shudders* resale AND TO MY TOTAL SURPRISE (not) THE TICKETS WERE FIVE TIMES THE ORIGINAL PRICE Ticket scalpers are my nemesis, but the Ticketmaster facilitated ticket scalping is the Hans Gruber to my John McClane, the Joker to my Batman...the Heydon to my Kirby. A legitimate ticketing company, selling the original tickets and facilitating resales at double, triple, sometimes quadruple the original cost. If you’re new to Ticket injustice, here’s the deal. Ticketmaster resale is a platform for people to sell their unwanted tickets to all Ticketmaster ticketed events like concerts and sporting events. Ticketmaster guarantees all tickets and will replace or source any tickets that turn out to be fake or the seller is dodgy. This sounds dreamy except that they have no capped price. The vendor sets the price and Ticketmaster charges the buyer a ‘buyer’s fee’. How’s your outrage meter? Mine was at an 8/10 by this point in the research BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. Due to my new found litigious nature, a direct result of law school making me think there’s a law to sue everyone, I went looking. In Victoria, the laws relating to ticket scalpers are the Sports Event Ticketing (Fair Access) Act and more recently the Major Sporting Events Act 2009. In effect, these Acts prohibit the resale of tickets provided the ticket contract has a term printed on the ticket stating that the tickets must not be resold. At this point I’m having Obs flashbacks, MacRobertson Miller Airlines, is it a ticket, is it a receipt, who remembers how to form a contract?!? But before I can get my Burnside on, I realise this legislation only applies to sporting events. Outrage meter: Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.  Why should you care? Why does my inability to see Bieber and his ridiculous penchant for low hanging pants affect you? This is why. It’s coming up on Festival Season, summertime, gigs galore. There’s already Falls Festival Tickets being sold on Viagogo for $800, Beyond the Valley Tickets at $540 and Field Day tickets for $400. I found someone selling a 2006 Big Day Out ticket for $250…Some of these are two to three times the original price. And the real kicker is none of the profit goes back to the artists or the venue. The people behind the live music you love. See now you’re mad. Don’t worry I’ve got your back. I sent a very strongly worded email to the Department of Justice Consumer Affairs Office and expect to receive a politically correct placating reply any time soon. But if, like me, you’re still seeing red here is my solution. If someone expects you to pay $200-$300 extra they need to be providing $200-$300 worth of extra services. So I always ask if they plan on driving me to the gig or making me a home cooked meal or pitching my tent. Don’t go away this summer break thinking you’ve escaped frustrating legal loopholes. Get informed. Get angry. Olympia Ward is a first-year JD student and the Secretary-Treasurer-elect of De Minimis. This article is written in her personal capacity. The rest of this issue(!):
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