Alderman Wellis nails the War on Nightlife

COMMENT

“You can legislate to make something illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular,” said Alderman Con Wellis, a city councillor in the early 1960s.

He was interviewed, sitting on a Kings Cross roof garden, for a 1964 Channel Nine documentary The Glittering Mile. The alderman, who had interests in the Hasty Tasty, Sydney’s first 24-hour fast food joint, and a Kings Cross hotel, was commenting on the (even then) endless attempts by Council to “clean up the Cross”.

The essential divide, then as now, is between gentrified Councillors with one world view, and the often unsavoury reality of humanity that is sometimes luridly on show in Kings Cross while being politely concealed in the ‘naice’ suburbs.

As Alderman Wellis said, Kings Cross is a psychological safety valve, a place for people who cannot bear the hypocrisy of the suburbs. Most of us locals live here for that reason, others in their tens of thousands just visit for a big night out.

The War on Kings Cross (and other city entertainment precincts) is one of mindsets, and people with a mindset are notorious for ignoring anything that challenges their world view. It’s as if they wear blinkers.

So it is with today’s City Council. An email campaign organised by big nightclubs is  again flooding Councillors’ inboxes with thousands of messages protesting their War on Nightlife. Last time, Councillors simply dismissed these as spam, apparently blind to the fact that each one was an individual message separately sent.

On the other hand, the handful of people who live in late-night precincts but who serially complain about the horror they are ‘forced to endure’, are referred to by Councillors as “the community” which deserves protection against the ravages of young people and the evil giants of the alcohol industry.

Council got egg on its face when it paid for research intended to quantify this divide once and for all, and found that only 16 per cent of Kings Cross locals wanted fewer alcohol outlets or restricted hours. In Oxford street only 20 per cent agreed with Council’s policy.

But such is the power of a mindset that 16 per cent can be perceived as a majority, and was even described as such in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, the blinkers overpowering objective reality.

An easy way to keep one’s view inside the blinkers is to simply ignore things outside their tunnel vision, and to  keep repeating sound bites – throw enough muck and some of it will stick.

So, tired of having sound arguments ignored by Councillors, I sent each of them an invitation to respond to seven points that challenged their War on Nightlife.

In summary, these points included the abovementioned 16 percent minority; the DECREASE in violence after a swathe of new venues opened in Kings Cross in late 2008; the unemployment among students and the like should Council succeed in its early closing quest; Council’s continuing losses in court when venues appeal against cutbacks in trading hours; Police and Council sidelining positive suggestions to better manage problems; the minor extent of anti-social behaviour relative to the millions of people going out late; and the displacement effect whereby squeezing one part of the ‘balloon’ just inflates another part, the fatal flaw in all overly prohibitionist legislation.

I specifically asked for genuine responses from Councillors rather than the “meaningless sound-bite” that often issues from Council spin doctors.

The result was  a deafening silence except for a meaningless sound-bite from Clover Moore’s media people (Ms Moore was overseas at the time), a considered response from Cr Marcelle Hoff and some support from Cr Shayne Mallard on facebook.

Ms Moore’s sound-bite denied there was a War on Nightlife:

“The City of Sydney does not want to close bars at midnight – in fact the City of Sydney’s Late Night Trading Development Control Plan, introduced in 2007, permits licensed premises to trade up to 24 hours a day, providing they do so safely.”

So perhaps we are imagining Council’s consistent refusals when well managed venues apply to continue their existing late-night hours, and Hansard is wrong when it recorded on 2 June that Clover Moore plans to remove the existence of late-night entertainment precincts in law.

No other Councillors responded except Marcelle Hoff, who wrote: “The majority of complaints I receive relate to anti-social behaviour… vomiting, urinating, screaming, shouting… general ill-mannered behaviour that makes life unpleasant for everyone – including well-behaved visitors.”

This stuff does go on – the aftermath of a party is rarely pretty – but I suggested that ‘ever was it thus’ with guys having a leak behind a light pole and that a lot of this fallout was caused by street people who are barred from the venues and don’t have the access to toilets that clubbers do.

Cr Hoff wasn’t having any of this! While agreeing I had made some interesting points, she replied: “Ever it was thus is not an excuse for the way these people behave”.

“Each time I’ve been in the streets, parks and lanes around Oxford street after a weekend the stench is appalling. I don’t for one minute believe we can blame that on rough sleepers… too convenient. I am aware from speaking to rough sleepers that these ‘visitors’ regularly urinate on the homeless people when they are asleep in doorways and in parks.”

I pointed out that rough sleepers chose Kings Cross because it was in fact one of the safest places to sleep out, the eyes on the street making it a lot safer than a suburban park where thugs can kick a person to death anonymously.

But Cr Hoff does have a point, one shared by anti-nightlife warriors. The question is, will legislating against night life make it “unpopular”, in the words of Alderman Wellis, or will it just displace the problems to other suburbs [read: next door to your place] and illegal, unsupervised venues?

And what of other means of targeting the thugs, without punishing the vast, decent majority, such as more high-visibility policing as suggested by the Kings Cross business community which has also offered to pay for it?

Those of us who like Kings Cross, warts and all, realise that the place  is not for faint-hearted or highly delicate people. While we respect their sensitivity, we ask them to also respect the majority who live here because we like the buzz, the action and the nightlife. They have the choice of hundreds of other suburbs they can live in. We don’t.

And yes, let’s work together to minimise problems without killing the nightlife.

by Michael Gormly