Head to Head moves into entertainment precincts

This week’s topic: That people who move into entertainment precincts have less right to ‘quiet and good order’ than those who move into residential areas

Andrew Woodhouse
There are no rights without responsibilities. People moving into entertainment areas don’t forego rights, unlike George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, where everyone is equal but others are more equal than others. This is a nonsense on stilts.
These party zones are urban myths foisted on us by high priests of planning who see life through their little planning policy prisms.They’re actually within residential areas, heritage streetscapes and mixed use zones, creating conflict and chaos.
Take Surry Hills, blitz-krieged by Oxford Street’s alcohol-pop culture and its ‘we-have-a-right-to-party’ hymn. No such right exists.
Residents buying there don’t have reduced rights: they have equal rights. Gays should know all about equal rights since they don’t have them. Get over it and get acquainted I say. Turn down the decibels or go home.
Residents are sucked into this DA-driven vortex by pubs/clubs razing others’ rights. Why is someone’s good time at everyone else’s expense’ I believe residents have a right to live in their chosen environment.
I blame council. Council blames state government. They blame the economy, while lusting after land tax. So no-one’s at fault. It’s all my fault. Really’ Silly me. Maddened me.
And no, Mr Editor of The City News, residents won’t go and repopulate Pymble. They’re shackled to mortgages like chain-ganged Guantanamo Bay captives and care about their areas.
This imbroglio is exploding like a fireball in a bushfire. Now Sydney Council is looking at approving 55,000 new dwellings by 2030. Why’ Where will they go’
Nobody knows, but suggestions include exploiting heritage buildings with unused FSR (a floor space ratio comparing overall site size to useable floor space, indicating site intensity and thus infrastructure impacts) Any unused or excess FSR can be ‘traded’ to other sites, apparently. A convenient untruth. If FSR is so elastic, then so is amenity: we’ll suffer from more, over-the-limit, high-rise buildings.
Town planning is an oxymoron; a contradiction in terms. Most planners should disappear up their own water coolers.
These public party patches or so-called entertainment precincts should be quarantined beyond the doof-doof range of residences. Visit Paris or Prague for proof.

Peter Whitehead

Other people are sooooo annoying, or, as that curmudgeonly existentialist Sartre muttered, ‘Hell’. Life in this city is certainly a prolonged torment at the whim of countless, thoughtless others who impinge on the pristine calm of my inner being.
My Sunday morning stagger to the corner store is often stymied by clustering church-goers. Knocking them to the ground in passing does not deter them: always back the next week, hobbling on crutches, moaning through their bandages. Weekday mornings from 8:00 until quarter past the road outside is a gridlock of imposing imported vehicles depositing pampered princesses at their school gate. And, on any given day, people, presuming on slight acquaintance or kinship, stop me in the street to exchange so-called pleasantries.
Can these cretinous invaders of my private space not let me be’ All I seek is quiet and good order. You may say I am searching in all the wrong places but several chaps have advised that if I look long enough and hard enough I will find whatever I desire in Darlinghurst.
The inconveniences of inner city living are legion. [As I write my stereo volume is maxed over the ambient noises of a Saturday afternoon ‘ children’s television, my wife’s stream of consciousness, the neighbours’ thumping on the walls.] There may well be too much fun to be had here 24/7. In the witching hours too many wannabe sybarites are drawn from the suburbs to our neon-lit precinct. Serious questions must be asked about why these lost tribes cannot be catered for at least twenty clicks closer to home.
Most residents of Kings Cross have chosen to live in a place with a proud history of notorious liveliness. But we do have a right to decry drive-by shootings, knife-fights and bare-knuckled brawling and that is why law enforcement officers punish such violations of public order. There is certainly an argument for stricter policing of the laws against drunken incontinence, offensive language and noise pollution.
Always remember, if Pymble is the answer it was better to be out of the neighbourhood when the question was asked.