You are working as a Senior Risk Manager for one of Australia's top Risk Management Firms. You

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Question:

You are working as a Senior Risk Manager for one of Australia's top Risk Management Firms. You have been contacted by the organisers of the Falls Music and Arts Festival (Falls Festival) to provide risk management for the December 2022/January 2023 event. Using your expertise in risk assessment and management, you must plan, organise and provide recommendations to ensure a successful event.

The event organisers have provided the following background information as part of the briefing document for your consideration:

The Falls Festival is an outdoor contemporary music, dance, comedy and street theatre event.
It has run at Lorne, in country Victoria, Australia since 1993.
Over time, other states including NSW, WA and Tasmania have joined and run their own simultaneous Falls Festivals. However, Tasmania will no longer host a Falls Festival event from 2022 due to low revenue.
The Falls Festival usually runs late Dec-early Jan each year and is usually a 3-day event. It attracts a usual crowd of 13,000 attendees who mostly camp on-site.
This event is now moving to a new location. The Falls Festival will now be staged at the Pennyroyal Plains in Murroon, located south of Birregurra in Victoria, Australia - approximately 150km from Melbourne.

Unfortunately, the Falls Festival has been plagued by many problems over recent years:

At the 2016/17 Falls Festival 80 people were crushed during a crowd stampede, with 20 taken to hospital with more serious injuries. A class legal action involving 77 victims was launched in 2017 and festival organisers were sued and ordered to pay out a total pool of $7 million to the 77 victims for negligence.
At the 2019/20 Falls Festival, after only one day, the entire event was cancelled due to extreme and hazardous hot weather and potential bushfire threat. The 9,000 attendees already camping on-site and all performers, vendors and support staff were ordered to leave immediately.
Both 2020/21 and 2021/22 Falls Festivals were cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.

With all of these recent incidences and the change of venue, you are under a lot of pressure to get everything right regarding risk management. The event organisers have made it clear that under no circumstances do they want any major negative incidents, disasters, accidents, legal actions or bad publicity. They need your help to ensure the event runs smoothly and successfully.

Your risk management response will need to include the following:

Identify 3 main risks and provide an overview of the risk responses for each
Provide a risk strategy, including 5 high level strategies
Justify the importance of good governance and strong ethical conduct during the running of the Falls Festival.

Step 1

Use the 8 R's model (Hopkins, 2018) to help you formulate a plan to help the organisers of the festival to understand key aspects of the various Falls Festival risks. Using this model, choose 3 separate main risks and use each one of the 8 R's to provide an overview of the risk responses for each of the 3 risks.