Email campaign batters Councillors’ inboxes

by Michael Gormly
An email campaign opposing 2am lockouts and closures of late-night venues last week flooded councillors’ inboxes with 2,000 messages per day.

The thousands of people who sent the emails had themselves first received an email which linked to an online form. After each person filled out the form an email was automatically sent to councillors in the name of the sender. The original email was generated by Impact Data Ltd on behalf of One Day Events of Challis Street Potts Point.

The email claimed: ‘It appears that, on the strength of lobbying by a handful of resident action groups and lobbyists more concerned about property prices than Sydney’s reputation as a vibrant international city, Council intends to change its town-planning rules to effectively shut down all licensed premises at 2am.’

Lord Mayor Clover Moore denied this, commenting:

‘Any suggestion that the Council is planning to close down all late night premises in the City at 2am is blatantly false.

‘Council has no power or desire to close down every late night premises at 2am.

‘Council can only impose conditions on new Development Applications for licensed premises and has no ability to apply conditions on premises and trading hours once approved. Council, as part of its DCP review, is only considering further action in areas where there are serious problems, for the largest venues.

‘Council has not yet considered any changes to our Late Night Trading Premises DCP.

‘Council is currently working on a draft which will incorporate research the City has conducted into cumulative impacts and saturation of late night premises, and will recommend measures to reduce alcohol-related violence.’

However Liberal Councillor Shayne Mallard contradicted this, saying the 2am lockout idea was a well-known agenda of Cr Moore’s. He said staff had spoken to him about it, and cited Council’s imposition of a 2am clause on the Mandarin Club when it applied for changes to its conditions of consent.

The Mandarin is hardly one of the ’48 worst venues’ on the current 2am lockout list. According to Police incident data released by The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, the club had only nine associated incidents of alcohol-related violence between September 2007 and July 2008, ranking it the 1,652nd ‘worst’ in NSW.

Cr Mallard said licensing rules were a matter for Parliament to decide, not a small group of people who influenced the Lord Mayor.

‘There are five million people in Sydney and they are not owned by the Lord Mayor and a few anti-alcohol councillors,’ he said.

Cr Moore said ‘she had been told’ the email campaign had been orchestrated by the Australian Hotels Association. She and other councillors seem set to ignore the campaign. ‘I just deleted the lot of them,’ said Cr Chris Harris, while acknowledging that Sydney was a global city and people had a right to stay out late.

One Day Events is said by other promoters in the industry to be run by Mr Daniel Ibrahim. The City News made several calls and emails to the company. After initially being told that a ‘Daniel’ had run the campaign, no calls or emails were answered or returned.