Venue lock down – a blunt instrument for a dire problem

The diminishing stock of city venues for live music performances under the onslaught of pokies and increasing concentrations of inner-city apartment dwellers has been a serious issue for contemporary music for decades. The legislation tightening controls on venues in response to alcohol-related violence is only the latest obstacle the music sector has to address.

City venues are crucial for a healthy live music scene and there have been concerted campaigns over many years to remove regulatory barriers and keep live music venues alive. Over the last 12 months the issue of venue lock down to deal with alcohol-fuelled assaults has become a major debate and it is overlapping with the live music issue.

Venue lockdown in Sydney city is a response to a dire problem using a very blunt instrument.

It has even spilled beyond Sydney to Brisbane and Canberra. It seems to be drawing a vast range of comment, much of it self-interested. We’ve heard that violence is not something unique to CBDs or to alcohol consumption, but a cultural issue, which is true, but doesn’t address the problem. To be effective, a solution doesn’t have to address every form or location in which a problem manifests itself – just enough of them.

Of course venue owners are concerned and their argument that the policy will affect the hospitality industry may well be valid – but that, by itself, is not enough. If the policy effectively addressed the problem of alcohol-fuelled violence and a side effect of it was that the hospitality industry was negatively impacted, it might still be worth implementing. It comes down to how effective it is at addressing the problem and how badly the hospitality industry is affected.

Horses for courses
Once we start analysing this more finely, there are issues that need to be considered which do not seem to be taken into account. As one of the Canberra players notes ‘smaller bars hosting live music had a long history in Canberra with very few incidents compared to other venues…Pubs that have the highest rate of violence and trouble from excessive drinking should be treated differently instead.’

Venue owners in Canberra have also pointed also to the success of the recent Multicultural Festival in Canberra, during which about a quarter of a million people visited Civic with alcohol freely available. Commenting on the event in early February, police said the ‘mood of the crowd was friendly and only a handful of people were dealt with by police’.

Drinking and drinking, venues and venues
There is drinking and drinking and venues and venues. The question is how finely different kinds of venues are distinguished from each other in a strategy to reduce alcohol-related violence. Previous comments by NSW government Ministers indicate they don’t seem to draw any distinction between small venues, sometimes with live music, and beer barns.

The reality is that Australia is a country of drunks – not everyone for sure, but far too many – and it seems to be getting worse. Whether it actually is so, only the research can show. It has always amused me the way Aboriginal Australians are stereotyped as a bunch of drunks when the reality is that the proportion of Aboriginal Australian who don’t drink at all is higher than the norm. Yep, us white folks are doing most of the heavy lifting in the inebriation stakes. It’s as if we never really stopped the drunken behaviour after the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove.

One size fits all
Dealing with it was never going to be simple or easy. However, like all government policy, it’s all too easy to go for the one size fits all approach – it doesn’t require much flexibility or subtlety or fine-grained research or monitoring and evaluation.

There’s also a long-established practice by government of using legislation in the hope of solving problems. It is cheap – in fact it’s free– and it looks decisive and firm. A smart politician can be draconian without actually doing or committing much at all. It doesn’t really matter if it is ineffective in practice as a result of no money being spent to back it up with education campaigns or enforcement. The news cycle moves on and other issues come to the fore. This is the same problem with increasing penalties to show how tough you are on law and order – if it's a high level crime where very few people ever get caught, it's doubtful whether higher penalties have much significance or effect. If it's more routine crime where those who do it tend to do it anyway, no more may get caught but more will be jailed – but who notices, until a decade down the track when the jails are full and the budget is in deficit. By that stage a wily politician has eaten all the free lunches and moved on, taking their pension with them. Perfect.

This article was originally published elsewhere in my blogosphere and has been revised for this blog.

See also

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Travelling together through the city
‘Public transport is such a central element in a modern city. It has fundamental implications for how productive a city is, how culturally active and just how personally pleasant it is to live and work in’, Travelling together through the city.

Sydney - Australia's most valuable location but public transport its greatest weakness
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The central importance of cities to the modern economy
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Creating cities by reinventing them – ‘Creating Cities’ reviewed
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