ICYMI, a 8,000-word essay by Freelancer CEO Matt Barrie – in which he totally annihilated Sydney‘s lockout laws for knocking the city’s culture and vibrancy flat on its ass – went viral-as-anything last week.
Coming shortly after a report detailing a nosedive in night-time foot traffic, ‘Would the last person in Sydney please turn the lights out?’ was the strongest rebuke to the wide-reaching policies anyone’s written / read so far.
“The complete and utter destruction of Sydney’s nightlife is almost complete…
Some bullshit statistics were concocted, cherry picked and distorted and you swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
Biased and misleading statistics and issues that were designed to alter the attitude of the population toward a political agenda in an effort to form a consensus to a standard set of belief patterns.
This is the very definition of propaganda.“
The piece touched on almost every major issue linked with lockouts, and the fucked-up effect it’s having on the city’s livelihood:
“All these ridiculous rules started as an annoyance, became an inconvenience but are now not just gross infringements on our civil liberties, but incredibly damaging to the economy.
When tourists used to visit Australia, they used to marvel at our easy go lucky attitude and laid back lifestyle. Now they go home and call us the “world’s dumbest nation”.
Not just anyone said that, those were the exact words that Tyler Brûlé, editor-in-chief of Monocle and columnist for the FT Weekend, used.
You’ve got to think of the damage being done to the tourism and entertainment industries when the editor of one of the world’s greatest culture & style publications says that.”
He posted an outraged tirade to his Instagram, along with an image of the offending chalkboard:
Since the harsh lock-out laws have crippled late-night industries and forcibly altered the very fabric of this city, nothing irks an adult Sydneysider like being told a glass of wine with dinner is fucking antisocial.
“There has been a growing hysteria this week about nightlife in Sydney.The main complaints seem to be that you can’t drink till dawn any more and you can’t impulse-buy a bottle of white after 10pm.
I understand that this presents an inconvenience. Some say this makes us an international embarrassment.Except, assaults are down by 42.2 per cent.
And there is nothing embarrassing about that.”
“Over the coming months a detailed review into the effects of the lock-out laws will be undertaken. I await this work with interest.But as I’ve said before, it is going to take a lot for me to change my mind on a policy that is so clearly improving this city.Now some, who wish to define our city by one street on Kings Cross, make the hysterical claim that Sydney is dead.
They couldn’t be more wrong.This is the greatest city in the world and it is now safer and more vibrant than ever.”
Let’s start with a statistic about Sydney’s nightlife that matters: alcohol related assaults have decreased by 42.2 per…
Posted by Mike Baird on Monday, February 8, 2016
Nobody wants to deal with drunken violence on the streets – seriously, nobody – but the suite of regulations brought in over the past five years have been Sydney’s death-knell: the streets are dead, businesses are shutting up shop on the daily and tourists are bitching about our city’s lack of vibrancy left, right and centre, which can’t be great for the future of tourism.
