Alcohol debate polarises

Last week The City News ran a major piece which substantially discredited key aspects of the City’s new research into the impacts of alcohol on Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.

The research supported Council’s position: that “alcohol-fuelled violence” was increasing along with an increase in licensed premises and that a quantifiable “saturation point” had been reached as licensed venues “over-concentrate” in entertainment precincts.

However the reverse is true in Kings Cross, with crime steadily decreasing over the same period that new venues added a capacity of 3,300 drinkers to the “uncontrollable” late-night crowds.

Not to be deflected by inconvenient facts, Lord Mayor Clover Moore reinforced the untruth in her subsequent eNews, starting off with: “In response to growing violence and community concern…”

New information shows that, far from violence “growing” as Ms Moore states, extra high-visibility policing over the past few weeks has caused alcohol-related violence to “drop off the radar.”

So says Doug Grand, Manager of Club Swans in Kings Cross and President of the local Liquor Accord. His information comes through regular liaison with local Police.

The City News reported last week that, over the past month, up to 50 extra police have been drafted into the entertainment precincts on weekends. According to Mr Grand’s sources, this deployment is part of the recent crackdown on bikie gangs. The reduction in other crime appears to be a by-product.

Whatever the reason for the increased police presence, it is welcomed by locals who genuinely care about people’s welfare but also value the besieged remnants of vibrance, diversity and nightlife in our increasingly gentrified city.

The current facts contradict Council’s research which uses three-year-old data to support its campaign to slash the number and hours of licensed premises in Kings Cross and Oxford Street.

This is part of a wider pattern of “squelching” – a term used by Richard Florida in his book The Creative Class. Council already heavily restricts street busking and prohibits nearly all street activity such as portrait-painting or any commerce.

The City also charges people to distribute newspapers and has virtually eliminated pole-posters with draconian threats of $1,500 fines. Under the banner of graffiti removal it unilaterally destroys high quality art installed with owners’ permission on their street-facing walls.

Prominent architect Philip Cox was in the news last weekend criticising Sydney’s “non-event public spaces”. Council responded that it intended to demolish the Woolworths Building opposite Town Hall and create another public square. But what’s the point if everything is banned in that square? It will become just another unremarkable space that people hurry across on their way to somewhere else, minus the present busy retail activity that vitalises the city centre.

Council is running a gentrified tidy-towns agenda, and Sydney is increasingly lambasted as a boring and culturally arid also-ran to vibrant Melbourne, Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, even as the city suffers from shrinking tourism.

But Ms Moore habitually styles her anti-pub policies as addressing “the negative impacts of alcohol, while maintaining a vibrant city night life.”

This might make sense to ageing gentry sitting in Town Hall’s ivory tower and arrogantly assuming an imprimatur to “rescue” Kings Cross. But from street level Ms Moore’s words look like an oxymoronic mantra as her mild-mannered minor mandarins impose their middleclass mores on the last pockets of anti-suburban diversity remaining in Sydney.

Council works against Kings Cross in other ways, having de-funded its successful community-based arts festival and, last year, leaving the local business association virtually unfunded. This ‘War against Kings Cross’ belies the meaningless “City of Villages” slogan branded on every council document. The reality is a creeping blanket of sterile greyness, killing grassroots individuality as the city is homogenised into a mirror of the small bureaucratic minds that control it.