EDITORIAL: Oops! Clover about-faces on pubs

Last October Lord Mayor Clover Moore, in full flight of hyperbolic moral panic, ‘welcomed State Government action to immediately tackle out-of-control alcohol-fuelled violence in some licensed premises’

Now, as the predictions of some who criticised the selective lockouts are coming true, Ms Moore has done an about-face, asking the Minister for Gaming and Racing to ‘assess disproportionate impacts on gay/lesbian venues’ and to ‘evaluate the impact of key measures such as the 2am lockout and 10-minute ‘no sale’ rules’.

It seems Ms Moore’s Oxford Street supporters have wised her up about the effects of including venues like Arq and Stonewalls on the lockout list.

‘Gay and lesbian community members have asked whether gay venues affected by homophobic violence have been unfairly caught up by this legislation. In Parliament, I asked the Government to prevent disproportionate impacts on lesbian and gay venues in Surry Hills and Darlinghurst,’ said Ms Moore.

The 10-minute rule that bans the sale of alcohol in selected venues for ten minutes each hour after midnight has also been widely criticised.

Ms Moore now agrees: ‘Recent media reports have stated that licensed premises employees enforcing the 10 minute ‘no sale’ rule have been subject to violence and aggression, with claims that the rule does not prevent binge drinking as patrons behave similarly to the former ‘six o’clock swill’ days. This rule should be evaluated to ensure that it is effective and that employees are not at risk.’

And, just as the affected pubs claimed at the time (City News 11/12/08), Ms Moore now also agrees the data used to select the pariah pubs was flawed:

‘Using information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 13 January that the data used to identify the 48 declared venues did not include only on-site incidents as initially reported by the State Government, but also incidents outside and near the premises.’

This might explain claims by the Vegas Hotel in Kings Cross that the official data had them down for 28 violent incidents in a month while their diaries showed only six.

It looks as if Sydney’s lock-out experiment is failing, just as it did in Melbourne where violence actually increased.

No-one condones violence, whether alcohol-related or not, but solutions to manage it need to be realistic, across-the-board rather than selective, and based on solid data.

While Ms Moore and a small temperance-style movement repeat mantras of ‘protecting residents from out-of-control alcohol-fuelled violence’, the reality is that most of the violence is minor, most of it occurs among suburban yobs who clout each other while residents are safely tucked up in bed, and police in both Kings Cross and Surry Hills reported a DECREASE in assaults in the period before the lockout was introduced. Yet in October Ms Moore gushed: ‘The situation has spiralled out of control over recent years.’

The truth is that both Ms Moore and temperance-style residents are using the violence issue to cloak their real agenda ‘ out and out gentrification. This handful of residents, especially in areas around Kings Cross and Oxford Street, simply cannot tolerate the noise of thousands of young people partying and so they inflict on Councillors an endless barrage of complaints. And our Councillors, being of the same mindset, support them, ignoring the simple mathematics of democracy. On one hand we have tens of thousands of revellers, nearly all of whom are not violent; on the other we have a handful of complaining older residents with a stress problem who live in the wrong area.

Councillors were elected to represent all of us, not just a few disaffected NIMBYs.

In the middle are the police who apparently cannot put enough bobbys on the beat late at night. Well, Council has just appointed two more compliance officers to check on late-night venues. Perhaps the police could follow suit and redeploy a few officers away from the unpopular and ineffective sniffer dog patrols and instead have them patrol the well-known hotspots at night, nipping violence in the bud.

But that opens another can of political worms, doesn’t it.