Ticket agencies occupy shaky ground
A PERTH-based ticketing agency has agreed to remove “Occupied Palestinian territories” as an address option for overseas subscribers to its website, after being alerted to its presence by The AJN.
A PERTH-based ticketing agency has agreed to remove “Occupied Palestinian territories” as an address option for overseas subscribers to its website, after being alerted to its presence by The AJN.
BOCS Ticketing responded immediately to AJN queries, contacting its licensing company, which deleted the option immediately. However, leading international agency Ticketmaster said it had no plans to amend its similar listing.
The AJN was notified about the politically sensitive address option that exists on various portals by Collingwood Football Club supporter Kovi Rose, who discovered the listing on a drop-down menu while trying to sign up for the club’s newsletter on the Ticketmaster website.
“This shocked me,” he said. “Referring to it as an ‘occupied territory’ is a left-wing political statement which unfairly reflects detrimentally on Israel; and such statements have no place or involvement in the world of sports.”
Ginette Searle, executive director of the Zionist Federation of Australia said using the terminology “demonstrates at best, a lack of understanding of the situation in the Middle East, and at worst, a deliberate attempt to make a political statement in a most inappropriate context”.
“‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’ is not a country,” she added. “Should the administrators of the website have the need to separately identify people coming from the West Bank or Gaza, they could either provide that as a choice, or rather ‘Palestinian territories’ without the politically-loaded adjective.”
Chris Forbes, chief executive of Ticketmaster Australia and New Zealand, said reference to the “occupation” was aimed at clarity, rather than controversy.
“This is not in any way a political statement by Ticketmaster,” he told The AJN.
Forbes, whose company sold 120 million tickets to cultural, sporting and artistic events last year, said the list was simply used for the purposes of formatting address and phone number fields.
Enta Australasia, which supplies the software for both Ticketmaster and BOCS Ticketing, told The AJN the company uses a default country listing, which is derived from the International Organisation of Standardisation.
Managing director of Australian business John Godwin said ultimately the onus is on the final users of the software to choose the countries they wish to have listed on their sites.
“We provide a ticketing solution. Customers can add or delete countries from the list as per their requirement,” Godwin said.
TIMNA JACKS
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