Brisbane has a celebrity problem.
Not because we don’t have enough famous people, but because we have a strange habit of deciding somebody is important once, then apparently never reviewing the decision.
Read the news for long enough. Host a radio show. Become a familiar face on television. Congratulations.
You may now be invited to Brisbane events until the end of time.
The thought hit me at a recent major opening night. I looked around the room and saw plenty of familiar faces. The kind that appear at launches, premieres and photo walls over and over again.
And I had one question. Why are they still automatically considered the most important people in the room?
For years, Brisbane’s social hierarchy made sense. Television and radio were where influence lived. If you were on air every morning or in people’s lounge rooms every night, you had reach. That world has changed, but Brisbane’s guest lists, apparently, are still buffering.
Today, influence can come from anywhere. A food creator can fill a restaurant. A theatre account can sell tickets. A fashion or travel creator can put a local business in front of thousands of people.
That matters. And before anybody starts yelling about “influencers”, I get it. The word can make people picture bright phone lights, loud videos in public and someone taking 37 photos of their breakfast.
But influence is not new. We just used to give it different job titles.
The bigger problem is that Brisbane still seems obsessed with familiarity over relevance.
Some people are invited because they are influential. Others are invited because they have always been invited.
There is a difference. And PR agencies know it better than anyone.
They are expected to fill rooms, create buzz, secure coverage and somehow keep every longstanding Brisbane personality happy.
Leave someone off a list and suddenly you have a passive-aggressive email in your inbox questioning why they were not invited.
That is ridiculous. A complimentary ticket is not a right.
Neither is a seat in the front row.
Yet there are people in this city who behave as though both were written into their contracts years ago. They arrive expecting VIP treatment.
They pose for the photo. They collect the free drink. Sometimes they barely acknowledge the thing they were invited to support. Some even leave before it is finished, like a certain radio announcer did at Cirque du Soleil last week.
Of course, nobody is being held captive by a publicist.
But if a valuable ticket is going to someone who has no interest in supporting the event, while a creator with a passionate local audience is sitting at home, surely we are allowed to ask whether the system still makes sense.
Because this is not really about free tickets. It is about Brisbane’s confidence. We say we want to be taken seriously as a global city. We want the major tours, premieres, brands and cultural moments. And we certainly want fewer things automatically heading to Sydney or Melbourne first.
But you cannot ask the world to see Brisbane differently while presenting the same tired version of Brisbane back to it.
Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner has already acknowledged creators have an important role to play in selling Brisbane ahead of 2032. City Hall has recognised that the people shaping how Brisbane is seen are changing. Maybe the rest of us should catch up.
And yes, that includes the media.
We helped build this hierarchy. We photographed the same faces, wrote about them and kept calling them “Brisbane celebrities” until the title became self-perpetuating.
So we also have a responsibility to recognise when influence shifts.
That does not mean replacing every television personality with a tiktoker. It means being smarter.
Who actually supports the city? Who gets people talking? Who can sell a ticket, fill a restaurant or put Brisbane in front of an audience that was not paying attention before?
That should matter more than whether someone was photographed at a charity lunch in 2009.
Brisbane has plenty of passionate people doing brilliant things in specific corners of this city. Food. Fashion. Theatre. Music. Sport. Night-life. Business. Culture.
They may not all be household names. Good. Maybe household recognition is no longer the only measure that matters.
The old guard does not need to disappear. But the automatic invitations probably should. Because Brisbane’s social scene should reflect the city we are trying to become, not the city we were 20 years ago.
If we want Brisbane to stop being overlooked, we need to stop overlooking the people already making it interesting. Make room. The next generation is already here.