Talking heads

“Sydney needs more pubs and clubs in order to retain a vibrant culture and compete as a global city.”

MICHAEL GORMLY (333 words)
Sydney doesn’t need more pubs. But if the push to close them all at 2am succeeds, nobody will win.
Yet that is exactly what’s on the cards.
Right now there is a national moral panic about binge-drinking, a state government desperate to deflect attention from its abject failures, a teetotaller Police Commissioner and small groups of NIMBY ‘ not in my backyard ‘ residents, demanding “quiet and good order” outside their Kings Cross or Hyde Park apartments. It’s the new Temperance Union working for a 2am swill.
How stupid. Imagine all the pubs in Kings Cross closing at 2am, 30 minutes after the last train. Doh!
No doubt all the extra fights over ever-scarcer taxis would be logged as “alcohol-related violence” which the NIMBY brigade would no doubt use to justify other repressive measures.
Police say they can’t handle the late-night action, yet they have the resources to mount large dog squads sniffing out pot and pills ‘ the non-violent happy-luvvey alternatives to alcohol ‘ exacerbating the very problem they can’t solve. But the contradictions of bad regulation won’t be solved by more regulation ‘ it’s vertical thinking ad absurdum.
The NIMBYs want density controls on venues. They talk about “over-saturation” but ignore the many advantages of concentrated party precincts. Apart from properly drawing noisy revellers out of dormant suburbs, a wide choice of venues in a small area around a railway station reduces the distance patrons travel between venues, and reduces drink driving; police respond quickly because they have less distance to travel; CCTV becomes a viable monitoring tool; the streets are safer because there are more eyes on the street; and welfare services such as Missionbeat work well because their clients mostly gravitate to the nightlife precincts.
If the 2am swill happens, I guarantee the really bad guys ‘ muggers, house-breakers and rapists ‘ will have more opportunity on quieter streets.
But the New Temperance Union don’t like to think rationally because the “alcohol-fuelled violence” that they’re railing against is blind. Their real agenda is good old-fashioned gentrification.
 

ANDREW WOODHOUSE (342 words)
It’s my shout! I’m not buying the drinks, though, but I’m sure as hell shouting. “The bars are over there! This way! Up here!”
The issue is not really the quantity of alcohol outlets, but the quality of these beer halls and cocktail covens.
And I’m no wowser. My academic record at uni for the highest non-attendance/pass ratio is unchallenged.
I skipped first-year lectures and studied Party Animal Theorem 1A using exhausting fieldwork.
Our scarlet-enrobed college warden taught us to “look to the future” but mine was the next party ‘ whoa!
“When I was a child I spoke, thought and reasoned like a child. When I became a man I gave up childish ways,” say classical texts.
I now see we’re not forever young. Sure, let’s have a good time, but not at the expense of others and without revoking residents’ rights to live in their chosen environment.
Then there are the social costs: glassings, hospital, police, ambulance and clean-ups now total mega-millions. It’s not vibrant culture but mass crassness. Why am I forking out for this’ It’s not my shout.
History and maths prove money plus power equals influence. Sydney Council and the State Governments won’t reveal donations before elections, while our dual system of licensing approvals allows them both to collect cash and shift blame for too many pubs and clubs.
Liquor lords laugh. The ravaging effects are obvious after midnight, although The City of Sydney has loopholes wide enough to allow the Queen Mary 2 to squeeze through.
I don’t trust council: it is creating pillages not villages. Why even pretend to be a global city if we won’t walk the walk’ Paris, London, New York, LA and ancient Prague, where beer was invented and which retains rights to worship the amber liquid more than anywhere else. None of these places would allow such laissez-faire liquor laws.
Politicians love to blow a bubble and then prick it ‘ creating a problem and then ‘solving’ it at my expense. But whose bubble is it’ And who then, are the real pricks’