
Sydney's fun police have put out the light of the nightlife - nness
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/05/sydneys-fun-police-have-put-out-the-light-of-the-nightlife-the-citys-a-global-laughing-stock
======
cheerioty
Reads like a joke, but is actually the bloody truth. In the last 6 months,
ordering my favourite mix drink resulted in either:

\- Getting the drink, but had to drink it at the bar were they could
"supervise" me! (no joke!)

\- Getting the drink, only when ordered seperately and "promise" to not mix it
in the same glass

\- Get the first one, second one denied

\- Direct rejection, because "too late already/wrong day of the week"

\- Direct rejection, because "generally illegal"

When I arrived in 2014, Sydney already suffered from a nightlife scene that
was nowhere comparable with the ones in any other country I've visited so far.
They at least flew in DJs from all over the world to keep people attracted.
Now, "In late 2015, they banned parties on boats with more than one DJ."

I refused (read postponed) an offer to go to California last year. Maybe it's
time to reconsider.

~~~
vacri
You could come down to Melbourne, it's got a very healthy nightlife and music
scene. It has a little bit of wowserism happening at the moment (no new
licenses for bars open past 1am anymore, for example, and some more
restrictions on 'music pubs'), but as far as I'm aware, no legislation about
timing requirements on mixed drinks (which sounds truly crazy). The main
article reads like a horror story for nightlife.

It's a problem in Australian politics in general at the moment - there's a lot
of conservative christian politicians in power at the federal level, and at
some state levels, and they don't reflect modern australian values. One clear
example is around gay marriage, which poll after poll shows the people
overwhelmingly want (usually 70-80% support by respondents), but both major
parties have too many conservative christians for that argument to fly. Same
thing with late-night clubbing, methinks.

Still, it's better than it was 50 years ago when bars had to close at 6pm :)

~~~
varjag
> ..there's a lot of conservative christian politicians in power at the
> federal level, and at some state levels, and they don't reflect modern
> australian values.

How come they don't, if they consistently keep getting elected?

~~~
johnchristopher
A wild guess: The most influential backers are Christians. They have the money
to lend to the party so it can build effective marketing and political
campaign to go after the rest of the voters.

~~~
varjag
Given that the majority of Australians are Christian it would indeed make
sense that the most influential backers are Christians too. Probably been like
that for a long time?

Still there might be something in their campaigns that resonates with the
views of the majority. One wouldn't imagine them consistently winning fair
elections in predominantly Hindu or Muslim country, no matter the campaign
spending.

~~~
chris_wot
That's very much incorrect. Most Australians are agnostic.

~~~
varjag
Well according to this: [http://www.smh.com.au/national/is-australia-losing-
its-relig...](http://www.smh.com.au/national/is-australia-losing-its-
religion-20150827-gj94ts.html)

..while non-religious make up a fair portion of Aussies, most still identify
as Christians.

~~~
vacri
If you scroll down a single comment, you'll see one from me pointing out at
least one issue with the religion question on the census.

Your own link shows another - the option for 'no religion' has historically
been obfuscated or separated. Once upon a time, it didn't even exist. The
whole point of your linked article is about how that question can be played
with in order to fudge the results.

------
stevebmark
I'm an outsider to Sydney and Australia, and I'm a regular visitor.

This article rings of an insider perspective, full of "we" statements. It has
a vibe of personal anger and personal overreaction.

What I'm genuinely curious about is the events that lead to the formation of
these laws. Again, as an outsider, the main thing to do in Sydney is drink. A
lot. The main thing my friends want to do after work in Sydney is drink. This
isn't out of line for a city, and there's nothing inherently bad about
drinking. Sydney's youth just seems to be focused on it more than other cities
I've visited.

These laws were likely passed as reactionary safeguards. What are they
reacting against? This article only comments on the laws mockingly and with
satire, including linking to random blogs as sources. Can anyone comment on
possible events that lead to these laws? My only opinion is that Sydney enjoys
drinking more than the average city, and I'm curious if these "lockout" laws
are an overreaction, or justified in some way.

~~~
sqldba
Innocent people kept getting murdered on King St (a popular bar and night life
destination, as well as prostitution or at least erotic joints, and possibly
some drug use.)

A few years back there was a spate of "King Hits" which is when one person
hits another person in the head and immediately knocks them unconscious,
usually through random chance rather than any kind of skill, but meaning that
person then bears the full force as their head hits the concrete and likely
dies in the process.

There were a whole bunch of unprovoked attacks on that street one after the
other on completely random innocent people at night time. It was a national
disgrace, one minute you're just Joe Blow walking with your fiancee down the
street and the next you're dead. This didn't happen just once, but week after
week after week and a bunch of people were dead, and the newspapers were
eating it up.

So the government put these laws in place to stop it, and to be fair it seems
to have worked as I haven't seen anyone talk about dying on that street in the
news lately. Overall though I have split feelings.

On the one hand we need to get together as a society and start putting an end
to people who are overly aggressive and posing a risk to the rest of us. Sorry
but that's the damned truth. If you're invading homes or punching absolutely
random people in the street then you're just not going to fit in with the rest
of us and it's time to go. It's us or them and I don't want to be a statistic.

On the other hand it's a shame that as we're all too shy to implement that
kind of thing, we get laws that put innocent people in the crossfire and suck
the joy out of life for the rest of us. But at least you get to feel
comfortable having all those dangerous people still on the street simmering
away waiting to have one drink too many and kill others... yay for liberty.

~~~
syllogism
It was in King's Cross, not King St.

And I believe the number of people who died is two.

~~~
chris_wot
That's Kings Cross, and the figures were quick high for assaults. Kings Cross
isn't even a gazetted area.

[http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/16/assaults-
in-k...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/16/assaults-in-kings-
cross-and-sydney-cbd-drop-after-year-of-liquor-law-reforms)

The sheer number of assaults being treated at St Vincent's Hospital caused the
head of the emergency department to describe it as a warzone. Someone of that
stature doesn't say this sort of thing lightly!

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-26/professor-gordian-
fuld...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-26/professor-gordian-fulde-wins-
senior-australian-of/7114540)

------
exodust
SOHO has closed! Didn't know. Last time I was there years ago, the whole club
was high on MDMA. Personal space dissolves into nothing, your dancing becomes
super smooth, your inner-calm is completely zen. Nobody is drunk. Nobody
fighting. Nobody dosing off. People are fresh and energized until sunrise.
Walking out into the sunrise is a good feeling.

The drunken trashy streets are just places to avoid and navigate your way to
other places or home.

It's a sad irony that MDMA would actually stop the violence. It's simply not
possible to descend into violent tendencies when your mind is expanded, as
opposed to clouded by alcohol.

"Sir, you've had enough to drink. Can I offer you an MDMA drink instead"..
would cause tumble-weeds to blow through the emergency department hallways.

~~~
kintamanimatt
As fun as MDMA is, it's horribly and cumulatively neurotoxic. Mass weekly
usage would be a short term gain at the expense of a lot of long term health
issues.

MDMA and alcohol intoxication don't seem to be best friends either IIRC.

~~~
twic
Half the UK was on E for most of the '80s and '90s. The only sign of an
epidemic of brain damage is that people have started buying Craig David
records again.

------
mceoin
I have just returned to Sydney after 5 years in SF. I grew up and worked in
the neighborhoods most affected by the lockout-laws, so have experienced the
before and after. I've seen the parties, I've seen the punch-ups, I've seen
the drug overdoses and the drag queens. The city I remembered had a vibrant
culture and a heady mixture of people that comes with any cosmopolitain city
around the world. It wasn't perfect, but it _was_ fun.

Coming back, I have found the mood here to be stifling, and am astonished by
how dead the city/inner-east has become - it's a total ghost-town after hours.
I complained from afar when I heard Hugo's had shut down (I remember when
Sneaky Sound System got their start there), and I always thought certain RSA
laws were over the top when I was a bartender myself, but things have gone
beyond a joke. These laws are sucking the life out of Sydney.

The problem here is one of culture. While our Prime Minister sets about
promoting an "Innovation Nation", the foundations for attracting talent are
further reaching than any capital gains tax reform or optimistic prose can
provide. If Australia is to have a vibrant tech sector, we need to recognize
that top talent comes from the fringe - as do entrepreneurs, empirically.
Regulation may drive a good media headline ("Government is doing something!")
but in this law of unintended consequences, it will only hasten the funnel of
free-thinkers leaving our shores.

~~~
aplummer
I feel I should point out FWIW this is a state law and Melbourne is still fun

------
lucaspiller
This is the first time I've heard of this, but as I understand the new laws
are:

\- No sales after 10pm for off-site consumption

\- No entrance after 1:30am

\- No alcohol sales in venues after 3am

In the UK this has effectively been the law for a long time. The actual law
allows 24hr licensing (for on-site consumption), but very few places have a
license to sell alcohol after 1am.

Why exactly have these laws so drastically caused problems in Sydney?

~~~
driverdan
As the article says, Sydney culture is different due to the previous laws.
People didn't used to go to bars until late, 10:30 or 11:30. That means you
have to either stay at one bar after 1:30 or just go home. Previously people
bar hopped into the early morning.

------
fphhotchips
I'm not sure that this is the _only_ cause here. People kept dying in Sydney
because of late night attacks. If that's not a disincentive to going out, I
don't know what is.

I don't agree with the lockout laws though, or the majority of alcohol-
limiting laws in Australia (I live in Melbourne). They just smell of
moralising.

------
atomicstack
It's also now illegal to sell kebabs past midnight:

[http://stoneyroads.com/2016/01/there-is-now-a-lockout-law-
fo...](http://stoneyroads.com/2016/01/there-is-now-a-lockout-law-for-kebab-
eating)

Native Sydney-sider, lived there for 25 years, not sure I'd enjoy living there
any more.

------
pakled_engineer
Vancouver, Canada when bars were forced to shut down at 2am, resulted in
thousands of drunks pouring into the streets all at once and mass brawling
with each other. Laws were changed to allow 4am last call and legal after
hours, and the gigantic street brawls disappeared. A barwatch association was
started to keep out chronic violent offenders and known gangsters from clubs
and bars too which helped.

There's also juiced up goofs here running around one punching random people
while their friends film their crime and yell "worldstar" (worldstar hiphop)
which is the site where all the recent knockout game idiocy originated.

------
reitanqild
Sounds like Norway. I'm not much into drinks but there is a long-running joke
(?) here that you cannot pour spirit into wine (spurit up/strengthening the
wine), but you can very well pour wine into spirit (watering out the spirit).
I think it goes back to the 70ties.

------
Shalle135
I'm personally from Stockholm but were in Sydney about a year ago and yeah I
must say that your alcohol laws are pretty insane. After 12 you can't order
this and after 1 you cant order that and so on. So silly that I couldn't buy
drinks for my friends and that they had to go to the bar themselves to order
it. Do they really believe that I would order 4 drinks for myself at each
order?

------
floppydisk
I was following the article for a while until it shifted and started blaming
the politicians' religion as the driving force in the changes to the law. It
sounds like the authors have an axe to grind.

For instance, they use this quote as an example of the Police Commissioner
being a teetotaler against drinking and justifying it according to religion:

“In another foray into the state’s social and moral landscape, Mr Scipione
says the rise in binge drinking among girls and young women is making them
vulnerable to sexual assault, liaisons they may regret, psychological trauma,
sexually transmitted infections and even a threat to their fertility.”

The Sun-Morning Herald article they link to [1] reports the police
commissioner pointing the journalists to a 2011 study coming out discussing
the impacts of binge drinking on young females and the PC is reiterating the
conclusions of the study and asking people to be aware of the risks of their
behavior and take commonsense measures to ward off potential negative
outcomes. I'm missing the part where he's a frothing totalitarian religious
zealot out to impose a strict religious interpretation on the population.

It's one thing to write a policy critique, which, I think the article mostly
gets right and points out the impacts the laws are having on local
entertainment and the impacts that has on other industries notorious for
attracting and keeping you people, like technology. It's another thing to
divest into an axe grinding tangent that ascribes malicious intent to
politicians for religious reasons while providing spurious reasoning and
support in the article. It's disingenuous to mix in personal opinion and
interpretation of actions as verifiable fact without having links that show
because A therefore B.

[1] [http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/girls-drink-
pact-20111...](http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/girls-drink-
pact-20111008-1levo.html)

------
danieltillett
Sydney has never really had a good night life.

I wonder what has changed over the years to make people (both men and women)
so much more aggressive when they get drunk. My personal observation is young
men are much more muscular than my generation were − maybe all this violence
is being driven by testosterone and/or droids.

~~~
chris_wot
It has always been this violent. However, community attitudes _have_ changed,
we no longer accept that alcohol-fueled violence is acceptable. It used to be,
and isn't any more.

It used to be acceptable in Sydney to drive home drunk. If you admitted you
drove home drunk now, you'd be rightly pilloried.

~~~
fian
I agree there has always been an amount of violence. In the past 15-20 years,
at least in my opinion, there has been an escalation in the severity of the
violence.

As a 20 year old, going out to a pub or club, there was always the risk of
getting involved in a fight. At the time that probably would have meant a few
punches, probably to the body and a lot of pushing and shoving. We mostly
drank beer and maybe some spirits later in the evening (Bourbon and
Coke/Scotch and Dry etc). Only fit people and body builders went to the gym.

By my 30's glassing had become a thing in Australia, and quite often women
were the perpetrators. So many the pubs and clubs switched to plastic jugs and
"glasses". There were a lot more alco-pops (premixed soft drink with vodka)
being consumed. More people were going to a gym and boxercise/body combat
classes were becoming popular.

Sometime during my 30's Redbull and Vodka (or some other spirit) was the drink
of choice for the 20-something set. A lot of people started going to the gym,
with the guys training for bulk.

The two trends of increasing consumption of spirits in sugary and caffeinated
mixers plus boxing training and bulking up a the gym, to me seem to be
underlying causes of the increased severity of the violence.

Drinking beer most of the night makes you slower and sleepier. Drinking sugary
soft drinks instead makes you more energetic and less sleepy. Drinking Redbull
and other energy drinks means you are now wide awake, twitchy and drunk at the
same time.

Combine that with some boxing training/muscle building and the stupid fights
over spilled drinks/girls etc will get ugly.

I would prefer to see alco-pops and Redbull as a mixer banned from licensed
premises.

Of course, beyond this is the huge problem with Ice/Methamphetamine use in
Australia. The mining boom was something of a driver of this as ice is one of
the only drugs that will clear your system fast so you won't test positive if
you get randomly screened at work.

~~~
pdkl95
> sugary

Sugar and alcohol is a mixture that has always been popular. A lot of
traditional methods for making wine, mead, and beer favored residual sugar.
For example, harvesting grapes as late as possible or leaving them to dry in
the sun so the sugar was concentrated was a common winemaking technique in
ancient times.

> energy drinks

A cup of strong coffee contains much more caffeine than most "energy drinks",
and a lot of people add sugar to their coffee. Caffeine+sugar+EtOH isn't a new
thing either - before Jagerbombs and "alco-pops", drinking "Irish coffee" and
similar coffee+liquor recipes were common.

> I would prefer to see alco-pops and Redbull as a mixer banned from licensed
> premises.

Yet coffee is ok?

Banning something because of personal dislike is one of the larger problems of
modern society. The law should not be used to enforce opinion.

> one of the only drugs that will clear your system

Unless you are a habitual (i.e. ~daily) user, _most_ drugs will clear your
system by monday if you used them at a friday evening party. The major
exception is THC, which lingers for weeks because it is lipid soluble. Most
drugs are water soluble and are eliminated very quickly.

This does depends on a lot of factors. A big one is the testing method.
Chemical indicator tests are terribly inaccurate, while a full (and
_expensive_ ) GC-MS can probably detect almost everything (including
methamphetamine after a few days).

------
watmough
My two abiding memories of nightlife in Aberdeen, Scotland are

1) Almost getting mugged - when I was not in the best part of the city
admittedly,

2) Seeing a guy staggering about that had just been hit in the face with a
broken bottle.

A few episodes like that, add in sensationalist reporting and activist local
politicians and you could easily imagine a situation where local night-life
gets thrown out with the bathwater.

People get drunk. They fight and they do stupid shit. It's what they do.

------
skuunk1
I think the main issue is that Sydney is so spread out and there is very
little late night public transportation.

That means a night out for most people ends with a very expensive taxi bill
(Uber has helped somewhat though).

If one can only go out drinking very occasionally, the tendency is to overdo
it on those times you do.

------
daurnimator
It goes further: [http://stoneyroads.com/2016/01/there-is-now-a-lockout-law-
fo...](http://stoneyroads.com/2016/01/there-is-now-a-lockout-law-for-kebab-
eating)

------
exabrial
And people actually -want- overregulation in America. This time it's under the
guise of Sanders (who wants the government involved in every part of your
life), and Trump, (who seeks to alienate congress).

Here's the thing, large government just doesn't work. Learn from history.

------
brbsix
Let Sydney be emblematic of city planning and nanny statism gone awry (as it
always does).

------
cube00
At first I heard the falling crime stats and thought it's working but then you
start seeing all the businesses going to the wall and you realise it isn't.

------
Khaine
There are to many moralists in Australia. They abhor people having a fun night
out.

~~~
chris_wot
Moralising against the moralists, huh?

There are far too many assaults caused by alcohol, and the levels of
alcoholism and domestic violence caused by alcohol in Australia is a real
problem.

~~~
Khaine
Prove it.

Alcohol consumption in Australia has been steadily falling, and yet only now
is it a massive social problem.

~~~
chris_wot
Sure, I refer you to:

[https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/health-topics/alcohol-
guidelines/al...](https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/health-topics/alcohol-
guidelines/alcohol-and-health-australia)

Actually, alcohol consumption has _always_ been a problem. It is only now that
we are even beginning to try to tackle the problem.

~~~
Khaine
So consumption has decreased and yet violence has increased?

Alcohol consumption in and of itself is not a problem. What is a problem is
the behaviours a minority of people exhibit when they consume alcohol.

Why is it the majority of people have to suffer because of a minority of
arseholes? Because of wowsers.

~~~
chris_wot
How do you propose to prevent that minority from causing problems for the rest
of us? I quite enjoy a drink myself, so I'd be interested in your solution.

~~~
Khaine
Sadly I don't have one. I wish our media was less vapid, and "think of the
children"-ish.

I mean the fact that yesterday the police spoke to a restaurant[1] over there
wine list is absurd.

1 [https://www.broadsheet.com.au/sydney/food-and-
drink/article/...](https://www.broadsheet.com.au/sydney/food-and-
drink/article/nsw-police-questions-venue-over-wine-list)

~~~
chris_wot
Oh, I totally agree that that was ridiculous overreach. The police didn't do
themselves any favours whatsoever on that one. It's like some members of the
Constabulary have no idea how to judge what is a serious issue and what isn't.

------
basicplus2
sounds like its more like Perth now...

~~~
mking1024
Perth is actually doing an excellent job shaking off the 'dullsville' tag. A
lot of restrictions have eased and the city is flourishing as a result.
Hopefully even more so in the next few years with projects such as Elizabeth
Quay and the Northbridge City Link finishing up.

~~~
fit2rule
Hell, Perth is doing everything it can to booze itself up .. it is after all,
one of the first Australian cities to just let the Casino mafia take over.

