Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from Australian Community Media, which has journalists in every state and territory. Sign up here to get it by email, or here to forward it to a friend. Today's newsletter is written by Mandurah Mail editor Gareth McKnight.
Greetings from the west,
We here in the blessed state of Western Australia may seem like we're a long way from where the majority of Aussies live - the best part of 4000 kilometres, in fact!
But we have some of modern life's digital challenges in common.
Like our frustrations with the middlemen of international online commerce platforms such as Viagogo.
Here in regional WA, one of Mandurah's biggest entertainment venues has urged punters to avoid booking tickets through Viagogo.
Mandurah Mail journalist Kaylee Meerton sat down with the brains trust at the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre, who have stressed concert-goers are paying well over the odds by using Viagogo to purchase tickets.
With the likes of Toni Childs, Leo Sayer and Tommy Emmanuel performing at the Mandurah venue in recent months, local demand has been high.
However, the arts centre's business manager Marc Missien says ticket buyers were being lured in by Viagogo's high Google ranking, rather than going straight to the venue itself, to assure a place in the front row.
He said tickets were being purchased by people using "credit cards with fake names in Ukraine".
These faceless digital bogeymen are then using Viagogo to resell the tickets at a significant mark-up value - leaving Mandurah residents out of pocket.
Despite this, a company spokesman said Viagogo was playing "an important role in giving fans a second chance to buy tickets to event".
From one menace you can't see to another you wished you hadn't.In Northam, Avon Valley Advocate journalist Eliza Wynn has been grappling with a 'pipe monster' - a new foe of our own creation.
Oops, maybe we should have warned you first that clicking on the link above would lead you straight to that photo. I know, right, ewwwww.
So no wonder the Water Corporation has been getting, let's be frank, pretty shitty at the amount of unorthodox things being flushed down our toilets, which has resulted in massive blockages in the local wastewater system.
Gareth McKnight,
Editor, Mandurah Mail
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