Sydney’s Eastwood is set to become one of NSW’s newest Special Entertainment Precincts, with Ryde City Council landing a $250,000 NSW SEP Kickstart Grant to kick things off.
The funding covers strategic planning, community consultation and acoustic studies needed to establish the precinct across Eastwood’s Koreatown and Chinatown strips. The practical upside for venues and businesses is fewer costly development applications and more flexibility for live music and late-night trading.
Eastwood joins 23 councils working to establish new precincts across NSW, adding to nine already in operation. A 2025 review by the NSW Productivity and Equality Commissioner found that entertainment precincts deliver direct business cost savings of around $2.1 million per year, making the case for continued rollout hard to argue with.
NSW’s growing SEP network is a model worth watching for other states. Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia all have the regulatory levers available to develop similar precinct frameworks, and the evidence from NSW is clear: giving venues and councils a structured, locally tailored pathway to manage noise, trading hours and planning reduces red tape, supports live music and helps build night-time economies that actually work for local communities.
Minister for Music and the Night-time Economy John Graham summed it up well. “The old centralised nightlife model of pouring everyone into Kings Cross didn’t work. Eastwood is a great example of the new approach which is about building unique precincts right across NSW.”
For the broader Australian live music industry, the message is straightforward. More precincts, in more states, means more venues operating with greater certainty, clearer frameworks and less red tape standing between a good idea and a great night out.
