General News
24 January, 2025
EDITORIAL: Creditors the big losers in ugly rodeo mess
While a pathway forward has been decided for the Mount Isa Rodeo, it still leaves a bitter taste.
While the Mount Isa Rodeo will go in 2025, there are no winners from this ugly mess.
Even though the event continues under a new committee, businesses and service groups that provided an essential service to last year's event will still only receive about half their money.
Administrator SV Partners, Mount Isa City Council, Traeger MP Robbie Katter and the Queensland government might have reached a "result" that sees the event remain viable, but try convincing the creditors that it's a positive outcome.
Perhaps the biggest bungle of the whole saga was when the state government announced it was handing back $2 million of allocated money from the Mount Isa Transition Fund to the council for the purposes of saving the Mount Isa Rodeo.
The council decided to allocate just half of that to the rodeo, which the government seemingly supports.
If the Crisafulli government announced $1 million for the rodeo and $1 million for the council, some of the uproar might have been avoided.
SV Partners also deserves a kick up the backside for its bungling of the situation.
Not only was the administrator hostile towards anyone who challenged it, but it regularly shifted the goal posts on its demands.
Remember, when North West Weekly broke the news that Isa Rodeo Ltd was in financial trouble, it was because CEO Natalie Flecker and chair Rowena McNally had asked the former Miles government for a $500,000 bailout.
When that was rejected, the board opted for voluntary administration.
North West Weekly has it on good authority that SV Partners pressured the council to help find $1 million for the creditors.
However, when it became clear to them that $2 million was potentially on the table, it changed its demands for the full amount.
The council will argue that its $1 million contribution was better than any other offer on the table, while the administrator and creditors will argue that the government gave them $2 million, so they should receive the full amount.
Meanwhile, the government managed to avoid getting its hands dirty.
It didn't help that the administrator was regularly butting heads with Mr Katter and mayor Peta MacRae, who appointed a "community committee" less than a week before Christmas with seemingly no community consultation.
Now that the council has wrested back control of the rodeo's name and intellectual property, it will be up to the new committee to ensure the Mount Isa Rodeo has the community's interests at heart.
How it treats those businesses and organisations that lost half of their money will be critical to shoring up its reputation.
At the very least, the local businesses owed money should be considered "priority suppliers" in the coming years.
One thing is for certain, Mount Isa can never let the rodeo be taken over again by private interests.
The Flecker-McNally era turned this city's most iconic event into a FIFO operation that virtually shut out the local community from having any say on how it was operated.
The Mount Isa Rodeo will go on, but it starts again with a black eye.
It has some healing to do.