Who, or what, really wields the power round town?

A question I have asked myself many times over the years. Reading the comments on Steve’s blog and the Mercury online, as well as listening to many conversations over the past few weeks, I found a common thread linking the more recent front page coverage of Stuart Prosser’s opinions of our industry with past similar thoughts and commentaries over many years.

High profile, and possibly colourful, hospitality personalities have come and gone over the years. Names like George McHugh, Kip Muller, Gordon Dean, George Haddad, George Mure, Garry Dorrington and Ian Cox, to name a few. Family names like Casimaty, Haros, Alcorso, Stucki, Chung and Tucceri resound down the corridors of time.

In the old days, with the (relatively fewer) number of restaurants and cafes around, it was much easier to be considered a member of the reigning class in the hospitality industry in Hobart. All you needed was to ensure a few quotes in the Mercury every now and then about a hospitality-related topic (and, naturally, own a restaurant) and that was your “profile”. Your name was automatically added to the acknowledged heirachy. That way of ‘being’ was entirely appropriate for those times.

But - we have progressed in light years from then. No longer do today’s café and restaurant owners (and workers) kowtow to the older generation’s thoughts and opinions, and nor should they. If the one reason our forefathers fought in the wars was for us all to ultimately have freedom of speech, I saw graphic evidence of same demonstrated in the commentary following SP’s statements on the state of hospitality play in Hobart.

We are now the proud possessors of countless producers, and related tourism and hospitality operators in the state, all with a vested interest in the success, or failure, of our industry. They have all put their livelihoods on the line. They have targeted our island as being the ideal place for them to progress themselves and their skills. No different to past times but there are way more now than ever.

They mostly come with the brashness of relative youth, complete with very vocal opinions as to the way forward. I embrace them. It’s like adding fresh herbs to your bog-standard casserole!

The interesting thing for me is that with the additional numbers of our newer and younger operators, combined with today’s electronic age which enables anyone with an opinion to express it to the whole world, then you can find yourself, as Stuart Prosser has, rapidly shouted down by a community, where previously you may well have assumed that silence on any particular issue made public equated to assention, or agreement, with your opinion.

So – my opinion is that these days, the power is firmly in the possession of the populace. You can hold your Savour Tasmania events, or your Tastes of Tasmania, or your Regattas or whatever, but when push comes to shove, you’ll always need the participants and punters to turn up to them – and who is that? It’s your everyday, common or garden local populace.

You can have Mr Bartlett pontificating about our food bowl state; you can entice Tetsuya or Maggie or Kylie to cook here using local produce; you can produce fabulous cooking shows promoting us. But you need the local followers – the vocal minority – to populate and promote these events. And you need to pay due homage to these unsung heroes.