My generation’s War on Nightlife puts down a new generation

COMMENT
“People try to put us down/Just bec-c-c-cause we get around”, sang The Who in My Generation. Ironically that 1960s anthem celebrated a generation of baby boomers who themselves danced to the hard rock beat, but have since grown old and largely conservative. It includes most of our City Councillors who are especially outraged because the current generation “gets around”.

They even employ people to stand on street corners and count them.

Did you know the WHOLE CAPACITY of Town Hall (2,000 people) goes through the Bayswater Rd intersection in Kings Cross EVERY 20 MINUTES on a big night? That’s 6,000 people between 1am and 2am, while there are 5,500 footfalls on Darlinghurst Road. It’s a “major event”, says Clover Moore.

She’s right. These thronging young crowds comprise the most educated, healthy, well dressed and gorgeous generation in human history. Most people see their weekly gathering as a great party,  a movement, a celebration of the very wealth and freedom we fight wars for. Certainly the tens of thousands in the fun-filled crowds see it that way.

But our ageing Councillors see it as a “shocking problem” that has to be eliminated. Here we see two opposing mindsets across a generational divide, and mindsets are dangerous because they cause people to ignore facts or at least interpret them selectively.

The footfall figures probably come from Council’s new research which is intended to “progress the cumulative impact argument” in the words of Council’s CEO Monica Barone.

But facts can be a double-edged blade. The huge numbers are also proof that any violence is only a very small part of a very big scene. And given those numbers, Clover Moore’s alarmist figure of $3.2 million a year being spent by St Vincent’s Hospital dealing with alcohol related injuries doesn’t look so alarming. In times where billion is the new million, maybe that’s just the price society must pay to deal with its own damaged underbelly.

The knee-jerk response by Council and police to shut the scene down punishes the benign majority to target the thuggish few, ‘throwing the baby out with the Bayswater’.

Other responses which target the thuggish few, and benefit the vast majority, are being sidelined – such as the offer from Kings Cross businesses to pay for supplementary DIY policing. This would undoubtedly reduce crime, catch bad guys, protect the innocent, help keep errant bouncers in line and, by the way, reduce the spend at St Vincent’s.

But it is being ignored.

Economic impact

Then there is the economic impact. Doug Grand, Chairman of the Kings Cross Liquor Accord, estimates that 2am closing would kill 780 jobs in Kings Cross alone. These are jobs largely held by students, actors and the like, plus security staff, DJs and musicians.

Midnight closing would double this employment carnage. Multiply it across the city and it would be a major hit to Sydney’s turnover which is already suffering from a two-speed national economy, paying the price of rising interest rates and an overvalued dollar driven by the resources boom.

The rising dollar is also hitting our tourism industry. Shutting down our nightlife would savage it, Oprah Winfrey notwithstanding. There were 19.7 million visitors to Sydney in the year to March, down another 1.4% from the previous year. With every overnight visitor spending on average $228 per day, Council needs to take care with a city economy that makes up eight percent of national GDP.

This is why current calls for Sydney to adopt Newcastle’s early closing regime are dangerous. While the new temperance movement may ignore the economic damage and increased unemployment in Newcastle, Sydney is a much bigger kettle of fish, a global city and major tourist destination.

The City pleads its small bar policy as a defence. It wants to shut down what they typify as “beer barns”, frequented by the great suburban unwashed, in favour of ‘sophisticated’ small bars that try to emulate Melbourne’s laneways – subsidising some with a $30,000 startup grant.

Yet the same debate about alcohol and violence rages in Melbourne, where an early lockout regime ended after large street protests and an INCREASE in night-time violence. Crime statistics showed last year that most offenders came from that city’s working-class northern suburbs, and there was some talk of excluding these people from the city, talk that quickly disappeared as its elitist and unworkable nature sunk in.

Yet that, in effect, is what Sydney is attempting by engineering the venue mix to suit them, not the consumer demand.

It’s hard not to see the whole problem in terms of inner city snobbery towards suburbans, an over-riding theme of Sydney’s white history explored by such authors as Patrick White, and Dymphna Cusak in her raw and revealing 1940s book Come in Spinner.

Author Delia Falconer again takes up these issues in her new book Sydney (review next week) in which she explores Sydney’s denial of its own dark roots, typified by the relocation of public housing into unserviced, isolated wastelands at its fringe, marginalisation at the margins.

But pushing the partying class out of inner Sydney will have consequences closer to home. Doug Grand lives in Paddington.

“It’s increasingly becoming a young people’s suburb,” he said, “and more and more people are complaining about noisy house parties but the police don’t come.”

“If you push 6,000 people out of Kings Cross the fallout will just move to other suburbs where drinkers are not being managed like they are in venues.”

Indeed with early closing, sniffer dogs, expensive cocktails and RSA Marshalls looking over your shoulder in town, why wouldn’t you party at home? Residents of quieter suburbs beware – there is sense in concentrating night life in recognised precincts.

Come in Spinner graphically describes another symptom of repressive regulation – in the days of 6pm closing, the city was awash with sly grog and illegal gambling dens. There are already unauthorised venues springing up – the line between a good house party and a venue is blurred. Expect more of the same if Clover Moore and her calcifying councillors get their way.

But the real test of Council’s evidence, and the distorted picture being projected by its publicity machine, happens in the courts, where Council has lost every recent appeal by late-trading venues.

If  Town Hall is outnumbered every 20 minutes on Kings Cross streets, it shows what a small minority Councillors are representing with their anti-fun pogrom. Their own survey confirms it, showing that only 16 percent of local residents wanted fewer pubs and clubs in Kings Cross.

But this 16 percent of older locals bombard councillors with hyperbolic letters and emails bewailing the “alcohol-fuelled violence” they are “forced to suffer” because they choose to live in an entertainment precinct. They seriously believe that a resident of Kings Cross has the same right to quiet as a resident of outer Camden (although a tree-changer there complained about the noise of the cattle from the farm next door).

It’s clear any idea of democracy or representation is irrelevant here. We need a new generation of Councillors.

by Michael Gormly