Sydney: Adelaide and Melbourne put your night-life to shame

SYDNEY’S lockout laws are internationally humiliating, writes Gary Nunn. When Melbourne and Adelaide are both better nights out, there’s a problem.

My adopted city, Sydney, is becoming an international embarrassment.

Now, every adopted child comes with expected hiccups. They’re usually overcome with the unique love and robust consideration that comes with any adoption. But my patience is waning, as the city’s night-life wilts and succumbs around me.

The biggest frustration? The draconian lockout laws directly counteract Turnbull’s ‘innovation agenda’. Ideas don’t boom in a city that locks out.

International embarrassment sounds like exaggeration. So don’t take my word for it: hear it from a successful start-up founder as well as the world’s most famous megastar.

Reports recently emerged that Madonna couldn’t join her dancers at her Rebel Heart tour after-party — because she arrived at Merivale’s Ivy after 1:30am. She’s famously mischievous, but when an almost-60-year-old exposes the city as sleepy and parental, it begins to look pathetic.

It looks worse when a German start-up giant founder gives a damning assessment on the uninviting appeal of the city as a hub of tech start-up talent. On a recent trip to advise Sydney how it could improve, founder and COO of Takeaway.com Jörg Gerbig said: “In Berlin, you can go out on Thursday night and not return until Monday morning. In Sydney, you have these bizarre lockout laws. I was in a bar with friends — we weren’t drunk — and when we ordered a second bottle to be sent over, we were told we’d had enough. At 10pm. An innovation culture won’t thrive like this. What is there to attract young talent?”

Pippa Walker and Ben Le Messurier at the Kings Cross Hotel. The pub copped a noise complaint for a Vivid show at 9.30pm. (Pic: News Corp)

Berlin’s night-life is exhilarating, as anyone will tell you who’s been to the hedonistic Berghain club, inside a derelict power-station. And what does Sydney have? Live sports on screens, pokies and no shots after midnight. Yawn.

It’s important to keep this in context. California — Silicon Valley’s home — forbids alcohol service after 2am, when many clubs close or dry up. But livelier places like Berlin and Tel Aviv are start-up hubs because they attract and retain young talent who want to work and play hard.

Even cities like London — where night-life is being decimated by the perfect storm of gentrification, dating apps and stay-at-home drugs like ice — are fighting for their right to party. The city has created a Night Tsar role for Amy Lamé, tasked with rescuing its famed buzzy night-life. Sydney is a nightmare in need of a Night Mayor: someone who can transform us into a truly global city.

The innovation agenda is in enough trouble. It’s hard to trust a government on tech innovations after all its ham-fisted tech mishaps: Census fail; Centrelink bots wrongfully demanding money; Ministers struggling to explain metadata; Medicare numbers for sale on the dark web; the glacial pace of the NBN. It reeks of a government of expensively educated stuffy boys piggybacking the latest buzzwords without any depth of understanding; they can quote Dante but not keep pace with the hoodies at Atlassian who offer them policy advice over Twitter.

We’re heading for boiling point as the lockout laws and the ideas boom front up. Tyson Koh’s Keep Sydney Open lobby continues to pressure the NSW government. But now the NSW Young Liberals are calling for abolition. By doing so, they’re sticking to core LNP values: against nanny statism; championing small/medium businesses (many of which have been forced to close); encouraging jobs and growth not just 9 to 5, but 24 hours a day. The LNP has no problem cutting penalty rates for the country’s lowest-paid workers to help business owners, but has turned its back on Sydney’s entire night-time economy.

Melbourne’s laneways, with their bars and restaurants, have become a major tourist attraction. (Pic: Tourism Victoria)

And this is how bad it’s got: a Vivid Festival concert at the Kings Cross Hotel was closed at 9:30pm after noise complaints. 9:30pm?! These mollycoddled snowflakes should be tossed a pair of ear plugs and a JD on the rocks to help them chill the eff out. But not after midnight. That contravenes the rules.

Uniformed police enter clubs to check nobody’s breaking these patronising rules. I know because I’ve been there, in ARQ, when all you’ll find are a bunch of loved-up gays like me, hugging each other and dancing around our man-bags to the latest Rihanna remix. We’re not the ones tanked up on beer punching out strangers. ARQ is one of seven CBD venues recently granted a 30 minute extension to keep doors open till 2am. An inch in the right direction. But Oxford Street suffers: the Midnight Shift, a gay institution, last week announced its closure.

It’s not just Sydney. Brisbane’s lockout laws came into effect a year ago. Fifteen venues were banned from serving alcohol post 3am. An initial 1am lockout was scrapped following reports showing no significant downturn in alcohol-related violence.

Meanwhile, Melbourne’s vibrant small bar scene thrives. At the Adelaide Festival this year, I bar-hopped well after 1:30am, sharing stories of the creativity I’d seen in a city that encourages, not stifles, play and fun.

The Austral Hotel on Adelaide’s Rundle Street. (Pic: Emma Brasier/AAP)

This debate’s counterarguments are important. Stats show lockouts have slashed assaults by 49 per cent in Kings Cross and 13 per cent in the CBD. Some stats indicate assaults have shifted to other areas; other stats debunk this. It seems both sides skew the data to their own agenda.

But it’s sobering to hear Nadine Ezerd, clinical director of St Vincent’s Hospital, say the “carnage” of the pre-lockout era is over: “There was once a conveyor belt of ambulances coming from the Cross; since the legislative changes, there’ve been no serious alcohol-related injuries.”

Any parent who saw the Kelly family on 60 Minutes this month will understand the utter devastation that family endured after their son, Thomas, died from an alcohol-fuelled coward punch. His brother, who was cruelly trolled over the perceived knee-jerk reaction of the lockout laws, later took his own life. Thomas Kelly’s incident happened before 1:30am — the lockout wouldn’t have saved him — but it wasn’t an isolated incident.

The real solutions of alcohol moderation and violence reduction are long term and rooted in better education.

Five years after the lockout kneejerk, there must be a better way than this: brain-drain, business closures, and heavy-handed police patrolling the nanny-state of a ghost town.

@garynunn1