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Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

This is a bit over the top, completely playing into the media hysteria. A few people got killed because some drunken, uneducated cowards hit them. This wasn't night after night.

I'm also amused at the fact that the premier and all his buddies are devout christians, don't get me wrong,I have no issue with religion or the liberals, I'm long time lib voter, but I'm going to reconsider my vote in the future now though based on this new knowledge I have.

What this really reeks of is corruption. The two big casino's in town (the star, and the one at barrangaroo which hasn't been built yet) are allowed to stay open 24/7, I'm 99% sure there is some preferential treatment going on, money talks, bullsh*t walks.

`'One-punch'' assaults have cost 90 Australian lives since 2000, most in booze-fuelled bashings, a study has found.` ... `NSW had the highest number of king-hits (28), followed by Victoria and Queensland (24 cases each).`

So not night after night at all, but more than a couple (this article is from 2013.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/90-killed-in-singlepunch-assa...

That's one-punch deaths, but not one-punch assaults. There's even more of those. Tucked away further in the article is a quote that says it is an occurrence every club night:

"St Vincent Hospital's emergency department director, Gordian Fulde, treats four or five ''absolutely obvious'' king-hits while working at the hospital every Friday or Saturday night."

Instead of destroying small business and bringing in laws which detrimentally affect everyone, the state government should create examples of the offenders (the idiots that thing its cool to knock someone out), throw the book at them. strengthen the laws in a way that limits the potential for misuse, but sends a strong message to the drunken yobs, "if you do this, you're toast".

These lockout laws don't fix anything, they just move the problem elsewhere, Newtown and Enmore residents are seeing more and more violence at nights now. It's an example of shifty moral knee-jerk-reaction law making, 'lets pass these heavy handed laws that give us more power, but lets frame it in a way that if you oppose it, you can be painted as supporting murders on the streets'.

I completely agree with the author that NSW becoming more and more of a nanny state, i.e: not allowed to have a BBQ (which god forbid, might make a bit of smoke) if you are in a strata property, or that un-named council that has banned kites (probably because a kite could take down a plane), I know restaurant owners who follow the rules and are still terrorized by the prospect of the office of gaming and liquor deciding to shut them down.

Hopefully with Malcolm leading the federal libs now, he will exert some pressure on the NSW libs to wake up and stop sabotaging the NSW economy. Australian politics (and politics in general) are just pathetically depressing.

They did strengthen the laws. There's some pretty strong mandatory minimums in place now for a wide array of late night violence offences.

The media did. There's not much point in making an example out of drunk people, because violent drunk people aren't thinking of the consequences.

The only way of making this work would be a register of offenders who can't go to pubs because of their drunkenness. Given that we tried to have mandatory pre-commitment for gamblers (which allowed them to gamble, but put limits on it) and this utterly failed, I'm not surprised that the government realised that lockout laws were the only way forward.

Incidentally, do you have any facts to back up that lockout laws are "sabotaging" the NSW economy?

As for not BBQ'ing in a Strata property - that's ill-informed. There are currently a set of amendments that hopefully will be enacted by July 2016 that prevent people's smoke from drifting into adjoining properties. The amendments allow a ban order to be made if the tenant makes a nuisance or hazard through their actions. If the tenant doesn't comply, then they get taken to the tribunal, who can then fine them a lot of money.

Don't see what the issue is here. If your cigarette or BBQ smoke is interfering with another tenant, then you should be prevented from doing this.

P.S. Malcolm Turnbull knows better than to interfere with State matters, given he's a Federal politician.

My issue is that we even need laws to deal with this, people can have horrible neighbours (you must remember the fence wars saga), what's to stop your horrible neighbour from making your life painful because you grill up some food once in a while.

Please, cry me a river. Of course you need laws to deal with obnoxious people who live in close proximity to you. There are wars over fences, but the law handles that pretty well now.

The thing stopping your horrible neighbour from making your life painful is that they must have evidence of your wrongdoing. If you "grill up some food once in a while" and smoke from your grill goes into their property, then what's to stop them from deliberately doing the same to you?

> Incidentally, do you have any facts to back up that lockout laws are "sabotaging" the NSW economy?

Not the economy, but they're killing the nightlife and live music sector. You may not care about that, but I do.

That was killed by poker machines.

Though I'm not sure why you actually need to serve alcohol to enjoy live music. As for killing the nightlife sector, if the nightlife sector relies on people drinking copious quantities of alcohol, then it might not be a bad thing. Maybe they should evolve to be less dependent on alcohol.

I would argue that you need to sell alcohol to make the live music profitable.

In that case it's an unviable business model.

So you're looking at about 4 deaths a year. To put that in context, in 2012[1] 26 Australians died from falling off a chair and 58 died falling while getting out of bed. The gold standard for these kind of comparisons, lightning strikes, gets 5-10 Australians a year[2].

There is a problem with drinking and violence in Australia, but at the same time, 90 people over 13 years isn't all that many; by itself, it shouldn't be used to argue for new laws.

[1] http://www.news.com.au/national/the-weird-ways-australians-d...

[2] https://www.australiawidefirstaid.com.au/lightning-strikes/

Wow, talk about taking the data and misusing it!

There were zero deaths in Kings Cross from falling off a chair, and zero deaths whilst getting out of bed. Similarly, nobody was struck by lightning in Kings Cross either.

In 2012, there were about 20 deaths per 100,000 people attributable to alcohol in NSW. Source is here:

http://www.healthstats.nsw.gov.au/Indicator/beh_alcafdth

What the fuck are you talking about? The 90 deaths mentioned by the parent are Australia-wide, not merely bound to King's Cross. It's entirely appropriate to compare them to other Australia-wide measures. Unless Victoria and Queensland, mentioned in the parent's article, are now located in King's Cross, I guess. Or hey, I can reframe it your way if you like: There were zero deaths from alcohol-fueled king hits whilst getting out of bed.

Also, talking about misusing data, you're claiming that 20 deaths per 100k "attributable to alcohol" is due to violent assault. What a load of shit - the Australian homicide rate (from all sources) is only 1.1/100k. "Attributable to alcohol" basically means diseases - there aren't 4400 (22M/your rate) deaths across the country every year from violent assault, alcohol-related or otherwise. There's not even a tenth that number. Alcohol-deaths-by-violence are a rounding error compared to alcohol-deaths-by-disease.

Look at your own linked graphs sorted by age - do you honestly believe that 65-year-olds are dying from king hits at a rate five times greater than 20-year-olds? That 85-year-olds dying from such violence at nearly twice the rate as those 65-year-olds? Those are some pretty feisty nursing homes.

No fool, I'm not. I wasn't aware that the god of lightning was throwing down bolts from the sky to murder innocent civilians. And those dastardly killers committing murder by making people fall out of bed, someone should set up a taskforce, stat! It's diabolical.

Here's a small hint: those laws weren't just introduced due to homicides, but also for assaults.

I was putting the number of deaths into context, not the cause of it. Laws are sledgehammers, not scalpels, and keeping things in context is important. Cyclists die every year from being car-doored, yet we don't seem to be so passionate about fixing that, nor inconveniencing the whole demographic of car drivers because of a few idiots.

As for your last sentence, if you re-read what I said, you'll see "by itself". It was put there there along with "Australia has a problem with drinking and violence" to suggest that you need to argue with more than just what is actually a very few deaths. It's like you wilfully misread me.

As for "no you're not", do you mean you're not claiming that 20/100k are deaths from alcoholic assault? I can't see something else I said you were doing. Then why the hell did you bring it up? Who was talking about long-term effects of alcohol on health?

I probably shouldn't have called you a fool. You seem quite angry!

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

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

Possibly thinking of King St in Melbourne which has a number of adult theatres

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...

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...

U.S. liquor laws are weird and vary state by state. In my state bars require an expensive license to sell booze. Bars associated with crimes, DUI, assault and battery, manslaughter get fined and ultimately the license is revoked. When a license is revoked, alcohol can no longer be served at that location, ever. Servers themselves face hefty fines when they're found to be serving someone who's drunk. Get a DUI, your waitress can be in trouble.

This approach puts a lot of pressure on the seller. On the other hand, it gives the sellers a lot of leeway in deciding when enough is enough. Do people get overserved? yup. But "bad bars" tend to self destruct.

Getting a liquor license in France is no picnic either. On top of that you have Kafka-esque regulations on the actual running of the business. Countries, especially socialist ones seem to not understand the value of entrepreneurship and its discouraged at every stage.

In the US (where I have a bit of experience opening bars and restaurants,) the regulations can be somewhat intense in terms of health, building codes and alcohol licensing, but the process is typically standardized and generally fair. In France, much of your success depends on if the local mayor is on your side or not. I am leaving NYC out of my generalization because, from what I've heard, the A,B,C inspections can be highly corrupt: paying off someone to increase your rating; failing an inspection for seemingly innocuous stuff (a cracked floor tile in the kitchen, for example is considered a 'violation.')

The market liquidity in hospitality is rather low because of huge barriers to entry. To me the concept of an alcohol license is rather Byzantine.

It seems to have worked in the sense that not being out at night is a good way to not get punched while out at night. It's basically the most invasive form of keeping safe and one people could easily have implemented all on their own.

For those who don't know Sydney: Kings Cross is a 400m street packed with clubs. It does look shady with its erotic clubs, but short enough that you're out in a few minutes. Newspapers have a focus over night crime in Kings Cross, I've always wondered there was a political agenda or whether that was statistically abnormal. Alternatives are downtown (less dense in clubs), Oxford St (gay clubs) and farther neighbourhoods for more hipster people.

As a French citizen having lived over there 3 years, I was indeed impressed that in Australia alcohol = violence, which is a new concept to me. You often see people down on the pavement cuffed by the police for a few hours until they calm down. I have no idea whether they get fined or arrested after that. My NYC friend says police is still very reasonable, and not as overeager and totalitarian as in NYC, though. So subjects might actually actually drunk and violent.

They are. The lockout laws actually come from Newcastle, which had an even worse problem. Alcohol fueled violence has been and remains a massive problem in Australia. In fact, drinking in Australia remains a massive problem: we have some of the worst cases of binge-drinking and alcoholism rates in the world.

We have a list of dangerous pubs in NSW:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-27/north-coast-pub-tops-l...

Important correction: you mean Kings Cross, not King st.

This is truly horrible, but I have to say that I'd rather have the government use proportionate force on bad players instead of using it on business owners to have them enforce some reactionary laws and in the process limiting the freedoms of the majority.

The state has the monopoly on enforcing rules and it should not fear forcing citizens to comply.

If the state for some reason cannot uphold order anymore then we are back at having survival of the fittest and might makes right on the streets.

I'm not defending trigger happy police men, but in this particular case police should have been watching this area and arrest and later charge everyone that hit somebody random in the head for attempted manslaughter, even if the victim didn't suffer any enduring damage.

I believe this would have sent a message.

It's a shame they don't have laws against murder or assault that could address these issues.

So there is a problem with assaults/murders on a street. Why not put cameras there to capture attacker's clearly, create super-harsh punishment for unprovoked attacking, put a policeman on every corner, etc?

How imposing laws against mixing alcohol in a shaker can is possibly related?

When I first immigrated to Australia I was shocked at the tone that journalists used, even in mainstream publications. Turns out it's just an Aussie thing. People can argue about the merits of that tone but that article fits pretty well with Aussie journal style, especially for an editorial.

If you think that's bad, don't listen to what passes for debate in the House of Representatives! Although it's calmed down since Keating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEsN4-XLE2k

I lived there at the time the lockout was introduced.

There was a small number of alcohol-fuelled fights that resulted in the deaths of some young men by head trauma (punched or falling). They were very prominent. I'm not sure if there was really increasing trend in violence, but perception in the media was that of a crisis (as they do). The government reacted with little planning (as they do).

For example, the "one punch" law was introduced to discourage people from punching others in the head. It seems ridiculous we needed a specific law for that [1].

The people that like a drink to socialise but aren't inclined to punch others go to new venues outside the lockout zone now. That brings another set of implications.

[1] http://www.nsw.gov.au/onepunch

From your link, the law may be nicknamed 'one punch', but the details aren't actually specific to a single punch - instead they are simply more severe a penalty if the person dies as a result of the assault, with a bizarre minimum if the offender was intoxicated (apparently if you think clearly about it beforehand, you're not as bad...)

Over the past few years, there have been a number of deaths caused by unprovoked one-punch attacks ("king-hits", or now "coward punches"), possibly the highest profile being the death of Daniel Christie[0] after being attacked in Kings Cross, a hotspot for nightlife.

In the wake of these attacks, a number of new regulations and laws have been passed, with the stated aim of reducing alcohol-related violence. These regulations had been tested previously in Newcastle, the aforementioned deaths being an opportunity to pass them swiftly in Sydney.

Despite the supposed good intentions, there are a number of things that people question about the new laws, such as that the new regime is overcomplicated and often just silly (see anecdotes in this thread), or the rather suspect exemption of the local casinos from the laws, despite suffering the same problems[1].

Additionally, some people would argue that the response has been disproportionate to the actual problem - this infographic[2] from a violence support group[3] claims that there were only 20 deaths attributable to this kind of attack between 2007 and 2012.

Personally, I'm somewhat of a homebody and haven't been directly affected by the changes in the law, but I do consider them an overreaction and lament the effect they've had on Sydney's nightlife in general.

Having read the article in it's original location[4], where the author provides more figures to support their allegations, I was left feeling rather bitter about the whole situation, though I do agree that it was written extremely emotively and was intended to elicit that response.

On behalf of the other side, though, I would offer this[5] video clip - it's from this week, showing the Senior Australian of the Year Gordian Fulde responding to a question about the lockout laws, for which he was a strong advocate.

[0]: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/daniel-christie-dies-following-kin...

[1]: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/star-casino-may-be-the-most-violen...

[2]: http://opck.qhvsg.org.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/38/2014/09...

[3]: http://opck.qhvsg.org.au/

[4]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/would-last-person-sydney-plea...

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDwoqkmZULI&t=40m55s

> showing the Senior Australian of the Year Gordian Fulde responding to a question about the lockout laws, for which he was a strong advocate.

I have no idea who the guy is, he might be great in other respects, but his answer to the question he was asked was absolute bollocks. "Of course you can still have a drink at 2AM, go home with your friends and open a bottle of champagne", I mean, what kind of shitty answer is that? Does this guy really believe that's what young people should do? Sit at home and thanking God that nothing bad happens?

I've never been to Australia but this video has really infuriated me, because in 2-3 years' time these sort of people's shitty rationalizations will certainly make their way half of the world to my Eastern European country as reasons to "make young people behave". "If the civilized Australians are doing it, why shouldn't we?", that's what local politicians would say (you can replace the Australians with the British, Swedish or the Germans, there's always more civilized people than us who have answers to all the life's problems).

He's the guy who makes sure that you don't die when you get assaulted in Kings Cross. He runs the Emergency Department at St Vincent's Hospital, which is right across from that area.

HTH.

Is it telling that there's an actual name for a specific type of assault popularized by drunken people in Australia? It's almost as if this idea has become part of the culture. I'm not aware of any other types of assaults that have become so mainstream that they're given their own name (which doesn't mean they don't exist). Is it actually a part of the culture, meaning these laws are justified? I could also see the danger of naming something, when someone is drunk it just comes into their head as an action to do (which would also justify the laws).

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