Not so long ago Newcastle had a thriving night life.
Every weekend, around 30,000 residents, other Hunter Valley inhabitants and visitors arrived in this fair city to enjoy a diverse and vibrant night-time experience that was full to the brim of people in pubs, clubs, bars and coffee shops enjoying live music, DJ’s, great food and drink and a buzzing social life, often until 5am with relatively little trouble.
Now, things are very different.
Now, the city would be lucky to count 10,000 revellers on any given weekend. The once famous live music scene has been all but decimated and many of the venues have disappeared. The venues of today struggle to make the money they need to stay afloat and provide the amenity any modern city needs to offer its people.
[x_pullquote type=”left”]You know the ones. Full of booze, perhaps other substances and so full of themselves that they think of little else, certainly not the impact of their behaviour on the rest of the city.[/x_pullquote]While Newcastle’s much-heralded ‘revitalisation’ is underway, and there has been a proliferation of new restaurants and bars, the city’s night time economy is still suffering from a lack of people. Sure, there have been little signs of growth but the dark, stark reality is that, at night, much of the city remains just that – dark and stark – devoid of crowds and devoid of sustainable night-time economy dollars.
So, why is it like this?
It began with the influx of older people who moved from the suburbs into their shiny, new city dwellings and then proceeded to want peace and quiet. They began to complain about the noise of the live music, the noise of the patrons in the street and, believe it or not, the noise of ships in the harbour at night.
Newcastle City Council was inundated with noise complaints. In order to avoid having to manage these complaints, the NCC instead introduced a set of draconian noise restrictions that would be impossible for any venue to comply with. If a venue received a complaint, they had only 3 choices – stop the source of the noise (have no live music), fully soundproof the venue (hideously expensive) or close earlier (no late trading). This decision, made by some lazy, faceless and gutless bureaucrat with a lack of foresight, destroyed a world-renowned live music scene, countless hospitality jobs and began the process of trying to turn the State’s 2nd largest city into a de facto retirement village.
[x_pullquote type=”right”]This decision, made by some lazy, faceless and gutless bureaucrat with a lack of foresight, destroyed a world-renowned live music scene, countless hospitality jobs and began the process of trying to turn the State’s 2nd largest city into a de facto retirement village. [/x_pullquote]Like many former industrial cities around the world, Newcastle’s city centre became a wasteland of empty streets and dark, empty spaces. A new generation of revellers ventured into the city only to be disappointed by the decreasing range of night time activities on offer.
And that’s when the idiots started.
You know the ones. Full of booze, perhaps other substances and so full of themselves that they think of little else, certainly not the impact of their behaviour on the rest of the city. Any stimulant for anger was not addressed by rational, thinking behaviour but, sadly and increasingly, they resorted to violence.
Let’s call them the Cretins. In fact, the cretins – they don’t even deserve a capital letter.
[adrotate group=”18″]
For them, glassings and coward-punches became the new way to express their disapproval of someone or something else. No longer did these people consider other human beings – their own feelings and their selfish need to use violence to express them came first for these morons.
[x_pullquote type=”left”]If it wasn’t for those who attacked the World Trade Centre, we’d all probably still have less disruptive and intrusive experience at airports.[/x_pullquote]There were crowded hospital emergency wards dealing with the victims of these Cretins. There were weekly media stories of some poor person whose night out (and sometimes their life afterwards) was destroyed by some violent thug. And there was even death.
The problem is that the inability of these relatively few individuals to control themselves has had a massive impact on the rest of us.
Like those that annihilated parts of Sydney’s famous night life, a string of restrictive laws have been put into place in Newcastle to limit what you can drink, where you can go and when. Lock-outs, limits on shots, nips, spirits, cocktails, earlier closing times and myriad other licensing restrictions were all imposed on what was once a safe and comparatively care-free party zone.
Just imagine what it would have been like if each of those individual Cretins had made the simple decision NOT to punch someone.
It is likely that this city would have remained a vibrant and luminous beacon that set a benchmark in becoming a safe city, as it once did as a hotbed of live music talent.
But all that’s gone. It’s easy to blame the Council (and yes, one or more of their ignorant career bureaucrats were part of the problem). It’s easy, too, to blame the police and it’s easy to blame the government. It’s easy but not true.
[x_pullquote type=”right”]Perhaps any display of violence in a public place should be dealt with by harsher penalties imposed upon the Cretins who actually make the decision to be violent in the first place. [/x_pullquote]Just as they did in other places where violence replaced intelligence (Kings Cross in Sydney, Fortitude Valley in Brisbane), the establishment were forced by the Cretins to limit our freedom and create what amounts to a nanny state.
But, let’s think about this principle for a bit.
There are crimes where we all get punished for the actions of the perpetrator. For example, if it wasn’t for those who try to dupe insurance companies with fraudulent claims, we would all be enjoying lower premiums. If it wasn’t for those who attacked the World Trade Centre, we’d all probably still have less disruptive and intrusive experience at airports.
For most crimes, however, those who suffer the consequences are limited to the perpetrator and the victim(s). Think theft, drink-driving, speeding, parking too near a meter, assault and even murder.
Imagine if, as a consequence of a rise in drink-driving figures, the entire population was restricted from driving after 6pm at night, when most drink-driving offences occur. Extreme, no?
Or if, due to rise in the number of people being murdered by knives, there was a blanket ban on knives None of us could have one, even to eat. Or, if there was an increase in cases where petrol was used for the purposes of arson, petrol was banned.
[x_pullquote type=”right”]No longer can we go out for a drink after a show at the Civic Theatre because no sooner than you have had the first sip of your drink in your chosen stylish bar and you have to leave because it closes at midnight.[/x_pullquote]The point of this is not to diminish the tragic impacts of these crimes on the victims – they are horrendous in any context. The point is to highlight the fact that some crimes have universal consequences and some don’t, even when such crimes don’t have universal impact.
These propositions sound unrealistic; a step too far when it comes to transport, industry or even cutlery.
But, for some reason, it is deemed appropriate to put blanket restrictions over our cultural and social pursuits because of the dumb actions of the few.
Perhaps any display of violence in a public place should be dealt with by harsher penalties imposed upon the Cretins who actually make the decision to be violent in the first place. Perhaps the old ‘drunk and disorderly’ charge should be brought back to stop ignorant people from being out of their minds and hurting others. Except it should be ‘intoxicated and disorderly’ to account for the uptake in crimes committed by those Cretins who use ice and other drugs.
[x_pullquote type=”left”]Next time you’re out on the town and someone accidentally bumps you, spills your drink, walks in front of you/any other trivial cause and you are consumed by momentary anger, try in your blurred state to remember that your decision to use violence has consequences that aren’t just momentary.[/x_pullquote]But, instead of punishing just those who have committed the offences, the powers that be have decided to punish us all. No longer can we, who reside in a city so that we can participate in all of the things not offered by suburban centres and country towns, actually do that. No longer can we go out for a drink after a show at the Civic Theatre because no sooner than you have had the first sip of your drink in your chosen stylish bar and you have to leave because it closes at midnight.
The city has become a joke.
And who’s to blame.
It’s you. The cretin/moron/idiot who decides that violence is his/her preferred form of self expression. The one who doesn’t have the brains to formulate a verbal response to a conflict. Or those too stupid to just walk away.
Here’s a message for you. Next time you’re out on the town and someone accidentally bumps you, spills your drink, walks in front of you/any other trivial cause and you are consumed by momentary anger, try in your blurred state to remember that your decision to use violence has consequences that aren’t just momentary. They last. And they affect everyone else.
It is you who has caused our city night life to become barren. It is you who has turned a city of musical abundance into a void. And it is you that is responsible for the loss of hundreds of late night jobs that used to be a source of much needed income for university students and others.
YOU!
Violence is the resort of the dumb. It’s thuggery by people who make the decision to park their brains inside their inflated egos and it’s the tactic of the bitter nobody that feels compelled to obtain at least some sense of power by attacking the innocent or the defenceless.
And it’s time the rest of us, the majority who respect and want to preserve our freedom, to speak out.
Next time you see a Cretin deciding to use violence to settle something in public, call him/her out for the Cretin they are. Like the people in this video below, they need to be reminded that they aren’t the only people in the world and, if they can’t show respect, then just stay at home and keep the hell away from the rest of us.
And remind them that if we don’t respect our freedom, then we lose it. And that nobody, regardless of who they are or what they consider the provocation to be, has the right to allow their own personal shortcomings (lack of brains, a bad temper, etc.) to affect everybody else in this city.
Surely it’s wrong that the dumb rule the city.
It’s time to call these few individuals out and get our city’s night life back!
