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Thousands of kids, and big kids (adults) attended the BrisBricks LEGO Fan Expo, recently held at the Morayfield Sport and Events Centre (MSEC).
Moreton Bay Regional Councillor, Adrian Raedel attended the event, and explained the benefits to the community this event creates – and the investment into MSEC.
Cr Raedel transcript:
Cr Adrian Raedel: On the weekend. We had this amazing expo here. It was mind blowing. The number of people that turned up, it was a BrisBricks Lego exhibition or expo and… Look, they had I think 40 something displays here of all sorts of things. You should see it. Cranes, they had Star Wars things, they had Hogwarts castle. You just wouldn’t be able to fathom it if you weren’t here and saw it. There was some 6,000 people came through this facility. And we’re up here at MSEC and we’ve got the new section of MSEC about to open. In fact it will be officially handed over in just a couple of weeks, but the actual official opening about the 20th of July and it’ll be a huge event, but it’s not even open yet and we’ve attracted an event like the BrisBricks Lego expo.
There was 6,000 people here over the two days. There were literally people everywhere. It was sold out. It actually sold out on Wednesday. They’ve never sold out that quickly, that early, ever before. The guys that ran it were just blown away, but even on the day, they said that they could’ve sold another 2,000 tickets without even blinking. There were people rocking up here who couldn’t get in because it was sold out. Hundreds and hundreds of people just wanting to come and have a look. Yeah, it’s got to be, as far as events that happen here in the north part of the Moreton Bay region. Yeah, certainly is one of the bigger ones.
One of the club members was sitting at McDonald’s at five o’clock on Saturday morning. Had people coming up to him asking if they could buy tickets. Because they had been online, saw it sold out, but figured out he was the secretary of the club and wanting to see if they could buy tickets at five o’clock in the morning at McDonald’s.
Given the size of the venue and how many people they got through this year, they could easily double it as far as numbers go. They do it in sessions, so they have a, I think it’s an hour and a half session. You book for the session, you rock up, they take 500 people per session at maximum, absolute maximum. So that would allow them either much longer sessions where people could wander through and work their way through, but also allow more people in each of those sessions. They could very easily, given the amount of extra space, double it. Given the logistics of it, they can even go a little bit higher than that again, if they needed to. It’s probably something they’d still need to grow into, but it would be just amazing to get them back here.
Events like this bring people from all over the region up to Caboolture. When they’re here, they want to get some food and there was food trucks here as well. There was The Scouts doing the sausage sizzle. So the spin offs from that, just being on site. But never forget when people are up here they need to buy food. When they’re out and about, they need to get petrol, there’s a whole heap of different economic spin offs for the area.
Can’t have 6,000 people here over a weekend that don’t spend money. So it’s so important that we keep these events going, we grow these events in the new event space and keep them coming through. So we’re going to showcase that very, very shortly at the opening where we’ll have a stage and some performers and we’ll also have all of the sports, but also the other people who hire the venue from time to time. So looking forward to seeing all those guys there and just… There’ll be food trucks. So just showcasing what the facility can actually do when it’s opened as a new facility.