Head to Head: ‘That alcohol free zones are an excuse for the city to add street clutter’

Andrew Woodhouse

In life you need inspiration or desperation. Sydney Council has the latter but not the former. It’s created alcohol problems of its own making engulfing the city and Councillors’ credibility. Now they’re desperate to do something – anything.
Having approved bars in a residential lane in Darlinghurst, gone against police advice for a bar actually within a residential apartment block, Potts Point, whisked through a mega beer garden in a public space, Springfield Plaza, Kings Cross, without any DA notification just meters from residents’ bedrooms, it now says we have a drinking problem.
Hello? Town Hall is closed for renovations and now it’s closed to reality as well.
Its answer? A sign. Saying what? ‘Alcohol Free Zone’.

A sign is just a four-letter word beginning with s. It’s no public panacea.
To be clear so all Councillors get it, even out-of-towner, East Killara resident, Councillor Robert Kok, a sign is just a sign. It’s an erection. But with an anti-climax.
My magisterial 10-volume Complete Oxford Dictionary (the big one) defines a sign as a ‘gesture, token, request or symbol’. We don’t need tokenism. We need solutions.
Any sign saying ‘Do not murder here’, or ‘Do not eat, drink or think here’, is about as useful as a chocolate teapot: its own heat melts away its very raison d’etre.
Hapless and helpless party-goers are not restrained by the sign above them.  So what’s next? A sign reading ‘Rednu on secantsmucmirc tsum sgod esu siht elop rof  noitaniru. eniF: evif syda ni a ngeirof lennek’, translated in reverse dog-speak: ‘Under no circumstances must dogs use this pole for urination. Fine: five days in a foreign kennel’. Dogs don’t read either.
Unsurprisingly, there’s not one study, university abstract, institute of criminology analysis or street survey tendered by police or council showing alcohol free zones signs work. Nothing.
When you live in desperate times you need desperate measures.

Peter Whitehead

Despite all the signs to the contrary, our City of Sydney councillors do not want to clutter the streets with signs. But they do want to keep our streets free of broken glass and impromptu parties for those refused service in licensed premises.
There is an element of narky nanny-state about these bossy signs littering our neighbourhood. Who does not feel the urge to pop champagne corks in their general direction? And surely one problem with these prohibitive markers must be that those streets without signs become de facto designated drinking places.
We would not need any of these officious signs if one of our levels of government banned drinking in public thoroughfares.
It is not like anyone needs to slake their thirst on the long hikes between billabongs in the inner-city. Once Clover’s hole-in-the-wall licensing laws kick in there will be precious few places where you will not be pestered to wet your whistle. So why not stop pedestrians drinking?
Next thing we know there could be less vomiting and urinating on our precious granite pavements. Call me old fashioned but I am against public incontinence.
“But what about the derros?” some may ask, “the homeless, where can they drink?”  In rehab, where it won’t be booze they drink to fuel their sickness.
There are victims of alcohol that deserve our sympathy: anybody whose sleep is disturbed by bottles shattering or the raucous discourse of the incoherently inebriated. And then there are the families of drunks…. The selfishness of our society will be writ larger and larger until we display the courage collectively and individually to intervene positively in others’ lives rather than self-righteously setting up prohibitions and leaving the Devil to take the hindmost.