In Sydney, a Feud Over Night Life Intensifies

"Party boats", "party buses" . . . Just take a minute to think about these terms and the sheer stupidity and waste that they describe.

It should also be noted that the Cross has long been coveted by developers seeking to build up more neighbourhoods in to seas of apartment units. The lockouts operated as an ideal method of shutting down long-standing pubs and entertainment venues, while investors licked their chops on the sidelines. The Baird government didn't just limit this practice to the cross, either - they inexplicably sold off public land and museums, such as the Powerhouse, to developers, despite public outcry. Today, half of them are working for the banks, or, such as in the case of Baird's chief of staff, directly for a developer. It's a clear-cut case of conflict of interest - if not outright corruption - and sets a very ugly precedent.

I think the Cross was nothing more than a seedy dump, who's bohemian days had gone many years before. It was a violent place, ask the Doctors at St Vincent's Hospital of some of the catastrophic trauma injuries they had to deal with in the days before the lock out laws. But it wasn't just the Cross it was other parts of the Sydney CBD as well. Other night spot areas that have been affected by this is Oxford Street which is now a shadow of its former self. Another problem is that many prime themselves before they'd head to night spots in other words they were/are drunk before they get there. Why? The cost of drinks at the venues.

The one thing that I didn't like about Sydney was the heavy drinking by young people and the rude, crude behavior that the drinkers exhibited.

My office in Sydney was "up the hill" from King's Cross in Potts Point. Even leaving work before midnight on a week night could involve avoiding a punch up or knife fight. Melbourne was quite a bit more subdued. Even a 3Am you could walk around at 3AM and find nothing but highly drunk but very happy teens and 20-somethings standing around outside of clubs getting sober enough to go home.

The governments role is to protect their citizens, if not from themselves, than from each other. Open party neighborhoods just don't work. It's not smart to concentrate all the clubs and drinking establishments in one district. This was the idea with the open drug parks in Europe to try to manage drug abuse--containment--which was a failure. A society cannot allow heavy drinkers and partiers (or homeless people and drug users) to congregate on a large scale in a small area. It amplifies and enables bad behavior and creates an unsafe environment on any number of levels--in Sydney's case an issue somewhat unique to the Australian party scene, brawling. Sydney has it right, regulate so that the party scene becomes distributed across many neighborhoods, and the brunt of the toxicity is dispersed and less destructive.

My hometown had a 1:00 a.m. last call for bars in the entertainment district. By 1:15 about 8,000 college students and young people were dumped out onto the sidewalks, where a nightly "riot" ensued. People drove drunk across the city to private after-hours parties. The city changed course and allowed bars to stay open later. The result was a gradual exodus of patrons as people got tired or moved on to other things. The riots disappeared almost overnight. Drunk driving and complaints about party houses decreased significantly. Young people and alcohol are a dangerous mix, but overall I think it is safer to keep it in an entertainment district where people can be kept safe. Law enforcement can minimize fights, and drunk driving can be replaced by mass transit, business-supported free cab services, and ride sharing.

When did creativity get confused with drunkenness, assault and vomit?

I lived in kings cross - on the Potts point border -before the Olympic Games in 2000. The place was an absolute zoo that attracted the wrong sort of people for the wrong reasons. You could tell when a batch of bad heroin came into the cross because the ambulance sirens would go all night. You’d have to watch your step on the streets because of the needles - and that was during the period of maximum fear caused by HIV. It wasn’t pretty. On top of that you would almost always be woken every night between 3-4am by the sounds of drunken screaming, fighting, and rubbish bins or glass being smashed. The only good thing about the cross was that the druggies and the criminals generally left the “civilians” alone because they preferred not to attract attention. But the injecting clinics have largely fixed the problems of open drug use in that area. Everything that has been done in kings cross since 1999 has been an improvement. Problem areas like the George st cinema area and Newtown may still exist and that needs to be worked on but anything that happens there now could never come close to being as bad as the cross was.

Kings Cross was always my favorite part of Sydney. Yes, I saw violence there, but I also had some of the best nights out ever there. Dancing and partying all night with people from all over the world. Great clubs, great backpaker hostels for travelers, and an anything-goes atmosphere that felt free and inspiring. And to think that they got rid of all that because of one tragedy that could have happened anywhere. There should have been other ways to curb violence than to destroy the whole Kings Cross area and the one-of-a-kind environment it had.

It would appear that Sydney, one of the world’s sophisticated cities, would help ensure that its past reputation as a place of extreme alcoholism, street fights, bad behavior, and sexual assault stays that way...in the past. Why does anyone have to drink past 1:30am in a public place? Why encourage this binge drinking in Sydney’s youth and it’s lasting repercussions? Why destroy beautiful neighborhoods with late night revelry and leave its residents without sleep? So a few bar owners have to implement a new business plan. So what? The monies saved in police protection, hospital bills, noise complaints, street cleaning, and a lifetime of alcohol rehabilitation for the legions of young people affected by an “ all night” party scene just may not be worth it to the society as a whole. Throwing up in the street and punching people to the point of death does not fit that “ sophisticated” image Sydney has worked so hard to obtain.

Free advice for Australia. Follow your colonial cousins in Canada and immediately legalize marijuana. First of all, despite widespread ignorance, alcohol IS a drug, and a very dangerous one. It has very strong "dis-inhibiting" effects on some people, making them violent and unpredictable, as this article clearly points out. Pot mellows people out, and makes them want eat good food instead of fight. Restaurants will love it. This is not rocket science - it is common sense. Pot is an infinitely safer drug than alcohol, and as an added benefit, the government will have a new revenue stream to help deal with immense cost of alcohol-caused health and work problems.

I was shocked by the loose drinking culture in Australia, they binge drink and have violent tendencies when drunk. Most bars serve drinks in plastic glasses because for fear of patrons ‘glassing’ one another - which is smashing a glass and using it to cut someone!

What your article fails to highlight is that neither Daniel nor Thomas' tragic deaths would have been prevented by the lock out laws which were subsequently put in place. Both attacks occurred fairly on in the evening and on the street, not in a licensed venue. In my view, the terrible deaths are attributable to a number of things, not least Australia's problem with toxic masculinity. The deaths were leveraged by NSW's right wing conservative Christian government to drive through these ill considered and draconian laws, which, hey presto, had the effect of absolutely devastating businesses in the central Kings Cross district, allowing their property developer cronies to move in and capitalise. Source: I grew up in Sydney, and lived in Kings Cross until 2015 when I moved to Hong Kong, disgusted at my state government and what it had done to my lovely city.

Do the people who stay out at these hours and drink so much have jobs? How do they pay for the alcohol? I would hate to think they have shift work, like working in medical professions at the hospitals, which they must do with a hangover! It is hard for me to grasp that there are so many people who need to drink so much at all hours. The emphasis shouldn’t be on what hours people should be getting drunk, but what other leisure activities can be cultivated for people who clearly have a lot of free time.

The concept of a "night life mayor" in NYC is a very, very bad joke, and the woman who is being paid a ton of money to fill that position has owned establishments that made plenty of her neighbors miserable and cost them a lot of sleepless nights. And now she's in charge of making sure we have MORE of the same. Which is why I see a "night life mayor" as a fox left in charge of the hen house, while being paid a premium for generating fresh flesh & dead chicken bodies.

Agree. The problem is the drinking culture in Australia. You look at someone as what they perceive to be the wrong way and you fear the inevitably of a fist coming towards your head. Wish I could say the situation in Melbourne is better but it is not!

The problem is Australia's drinking culture and the bashings and brawls that inevitably occur on the street at night. I'm Australian and live in a German wine region where visitors attend wine festivals and drink quietly all day long without incident. The same situation in Sydney or Melbourne would end up in a drunken free-for-all.

Of course the one place in Sydney that feels like home gets flooded with mainstream yuppies, drunk and desperate to forget their miserable lives in the rat race. Poor Newtown. Artists just never get a break anywhere. Lockout laws are pathetic. Stop being such a nanny state.