From the outside, Australia’s summer festival season looks like it’s booming. Punters are buying tickets, lineups look strong, and the post-COVID festival market seems to have found its feet. But behind the scenes? It’s barely held together with gaffer tape and goodwill.

I’ve been talking to production managers, lighting designers, sound engineers, and trucking companies over the past month, and the picture they’re painting of summer 2025-26 is sobering. The Australian live events industry has a supply-side crisis that nobody outside the business is paying attention to.

The Scale of the Problem

Consider what happens in a typical January-February period in Australia. You’ve got multiple festivals running simultaneously across multiple states — often on the same weekend. Let me list some of what was happening in a single week this January:

• A major multi-day festival in the Hunter Valley
• A boutique festival in rural Victoria
• A city festival in Melbourne
• A touring festival playing shows in Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth across the same week
• A regional folk/roots festival in Tasmania
• Various standalone concerts and events across every major city

Each of these events needs: staging, PA systems, lighting rigs, LED screens, generators, truck transport, fencing, temporary structures, audio engineers, lighting techs, riggers, stage managers, production managers, site crews, security, medical, catering, and a hundred other things.

There aren’t enough of any of these to go around.

Crew Shortages: Where Did Everyone Go?

The live events workforce was decimated during COVID. When the industry shut down in 2020, experienced crew — people with 10, 20, 30 years of expertise — left. They retrained as electricians, went into construction, became teachers, or found work in mining. Many of them aren’t coming back.

According to Live Performance Australia, the sector lost approximately 50,000 workers during the pandemic. By their estimates, we’ve recovered about 60-70% of that workforce. That 30-40% gap is the difference between events running smoothly and events barely running at all.

The people who left weren’t just warm bodies. They were your head rigger who could look at a roof structure and tell you in 30 seconds if it’d hold a line array. They were your monitor engineer who knew how to get a stage mix right on a windy outdoor site with zero soundcheck time. They were your production manager who’d done 200 festivals and could solve any problem before it became a disaster.

You can’t replace 20 years of experience with a six-week course. And yet that’s effectively what the industry has been trying to do.

The Equipment Bottleneck

It’s not just people. It’s gear.

Australia has a limited stock of festival-grade PA systems, lighting rigs, and staging. The major hire companies — JPJ Audio, Norwest Productions, NW Group, PRG — can only stretch so far. When five festivals want L-Acoustics K2 rigs on the same weekend, someone’s getting told no.

What’s happened this summer is that some festivals have been forced to accept equipment substitutions that compromise the production quality. A festival that contracted for a specific PA system might end up with an older or smaller rig because the preferred gear is already deployed elsewhere. The audience probably won’t notice, but the mixing engineers and artists certainly do.

LED screen stock is another pressure point. Every festival now wants massive LED walls, and the supply simply hasn’t kept up with demand. The lead time to book LED for a January festival is now 6-8 months — you’re essentially committing to your production spec before you’ve even announced your lineup.

Trucking is the silent crisis. Specialised event trucking — not just any truck, but semi-trailers with experienced drivers who know how to load and secure PA systems, staging, and lighting trusses — is in critically short supply. I’ve heard multiple stories this summer of gear arriving late because trucking couldn’t be arranged, leading to compressed bump-in schedules and stressed crews.

What It Looks Like on the Ground

Let me give you a real scenario from this summer. Names removed to protect the guilty.

A mid-size regional festival booked a full production package eight months in advance. Two weeks before the event, their lighting supplier informed them that the rig they’d contracted wasn’t available — it had been diverted to a larger festival that was willing to pay a premium. The replacement rig was smaller and didn’t support the design the lighting team had programmed.

The festival’s production manager spent 72 hours rebuilding the lighting design, calling in favours from every contact in their phone, and ultimately flew in supplementary fixtures from another state at enormous additional cost. The show went on. The audience had no idea. But the PM told me he’s seriously considering whether he’ll do festivals again next year.

That story, with slight variations, played out dozens of times across the summer. And it’s not because anyone is incompetent. It’s because the infrastructure is maxed out.

The Wages Question

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. One reason we can’t attract enough crew is that the pay isn’t competitive with other industries that want the same skill sets.

A qualified rigger can earn more in construction. An electrician can earn more on a mine site. A truck driver can earn more in logistics. And all of those jobs offer regular hours, predictable schedules, and sleeping in your own bed — things that festival work emphatically does not.

Festival rates have increased since COVID, but not enough to close the gap. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance has been pushing for award rate increases for live entertainment crew, and they’re right to. If the industry wants people, it needs to pay them properly.

Some festivals are trying to address this with bonuses, better on-site accommodation for crew, and longer bump-in schedules that reduce the extreme hours. But others are still running on the old model of “work 18-hour days for average money and be grateful for the experience.” That doesn’t fly anymore.

What Needs to Change

Long-term workforce development. The industry needs structured apprenticeship and training programs that create a pipeline of new technicians. TAFE programs in live production exist but are underfunded and don’t have enough placement opportunities. Industry bodies need to coordinate with education providers to build capacity.

Better scheduling coordination. This is heresy in a competitive market, but there’s an argument for major festivals coordinating their dates to reduce equipment and crew clashes. The current situation where multiple festivals deliberately programme the same weekend to compete for audiences is destroying the supply chain.

Investment in equipment stock. Hire companies need capital to expand their inventories, but the seasonal nature of the Australian market makes it hard to justify. Government support for equipment investment — similar to how film and television gets production incentive grants — could help.

Realistic budgeting for production. Promoters need to accept that production costs have increased permanently. The pre-COVID budget models are dead. If you want quality production, you need to budget for 2026 rates, not 2019 rates with a 10% increase.

The Silver Lining

For all the problems, Australian festivals are still happening, still drawing big crowds, and still delivering memorable experiences. The people working behind the scenes are pulling off minor miracles every weekend. The resilience and professionalism of this workforce — what’s left of it — is extraordinary.

But resilience has limits. If the industry doesn’t address the structural supply-side issues, we’re going to see festivals fail. Not because audiences aren’t there. Not because lineups aren’t strong. But because there literally aren’t enough people and equipment to make them happen.

That’s not a crisis anyone can see from the crowd. But it’s real, and it’s here.