More local blogs

I found a new and different local blog, Vampires of Potts Point.

It presents "creative Goth" fiction using local settings. It's giving me ideas to extend my Gothic Sydney photoart series. I'd like to meet the mysterious author!

And yet another, Tracey Grace's blog, which features longish well-written pieces and local pics focusing on street people. Tracey is fairly new to the area and records her journey as she grapples with being confronted by the street people society has discarded.

Her latest piece asks how to respond to begging. It's good.

Drugs enter the Federal election; Clichés fuel Lingo Bingo

Oh oh! Today both major parties announced they would "Get tough on crime", singling out gangs and knife crime. There was talk of police using metal detectors to find knives. Fair enough I guess. Knife crime gives me the shudders, but banning the import of knives won't stop people using kitchen knives.

Of course the Liberals tied the crime to illicit drugs. True, but only because of prohibition and "getting tough on drugs" creates the huge profits that attract the criminals. The same old dog is chasing its tail.

Regulated legalisation would knock the stuffing out of the whole illicit industry and make the streets a lot safer for the rest of us. And it would make money through taxes instead of costing billions.

Meanwhile I've had a bit of fun publishing the ultimate political speech, in The City News, based on the political clichés submitted by listeners to the Lingo Bingo competition Richard Glover is running on ABC 702 -- plus a few the listeners missed.

I've offered the speech to aspiring candidates because if they delivered this speech somewhere verifiable, they might resolve the Lingo Bingo game in one swoop and get a free kick on air.

Enjoy!

War against Kings Cross rages on

If I have been neglecting Kings Cross news lately it's partly because I have been writing about it in The City News.

But there is plenty happening, with Council considering responses to its Late-night trading research.

Despite many comments including mine pointing out gaping holes in the research which fails to actually support Council's anti-pub agenda, Council is ignoring them and forging on regardless.

Clover Moore still wants to regulate into being a 'civilised' and 'sophisticated' late night culture, with bookshops and art galleries open till 3am, which is fine by me.  But you can't regulate civilisation and sophistication (putting aside that the latter word comes from 'sophistry' which I am sure Ms Moore did not intend).

No, regulation just bans things and I am more and more convinced that the very late-night monoculture Councillors complain about is the result of their own regulation plus the uncivilised nature of a minority of suburban yobs and thugs which, short of building a wall around the city, we will always have to put up with.

With almost all street life banned, and sniffer dogs everywhere, over-regulation has created a city where there is nothing else to do besides drink on a night out. The forced closure of the wonderful Quirkz venue in Marrickville is a case in point.

But Council wants even more power legislated by the state so they can really get stuck into the late-night economy.

Cr Chris Harris correctly thinks that Responsible Service of Alcohol rules are a joke, but wants a whole bunch of enforcers trained to patrol pubs and decide who can have a drink and who can't.

Give me a break, Chris. Half the current tension and violence is caused by endless security trolls ordering adults about. I for one go to a pub to relax and do not want to be supervised by some straight authority figure making arbitrary decisions about me. Their judgements will be no more objective than bar staff. The only way to do that is to breathalyse everyone who wants a drink. Is that the brave new world you want?

No, what should be policed is bad behaviour towards others, nothing more or less. I and my friends can consume any amount in a night and not become aggressive or troublesome. Get your moral panic off my back and off my town, Councillors.

Links to recent City News stories detailing all the new rules people want, and my comment on the alcohol research are here, here, and here for a very salient Graffito of the week. More being published tomorrow including an entertaining piece My Quiet Street and a comment piece in The Hub.

Oh, and Council continues to block Cowper Wharf Road in Woolloomooloo to protect the genteel citizens of Macleay St from the horrors of car hoons, despite one of the residents who spoke on the late-night-trading research saying that the blockades "hadn't really worked". But Councillors are simply ignoring that, along with anything else that doesn't fit their temperance mindset. If you read My Quiet Street, linked above, you'll see why we have little sympathy for the residents of Macleay St!

Picture: A KX nightclub ad from 1964. A swinging place to rendezvous indeed.

Are pushy web ads self-defeating?

Reading my news on The Sydney Morning Herald website, I get mildly annoyed by those ads that jump out and obscure the content. They are already highly animated to draw your attention, but at least they usually have an X button to close them. But today's ad for GIO's car insurance breaks new ground. Not only does it jump out but its 'close' button jumps around and is invisible most of the time, so you are drawn into a computer-game style shooting match instead of reading the news.

I don't even own a car. GET OUT OF MY FACE!

Result: I hate GIO. And the SMH.

I know it's problematic making money from web ads but I think this tactic damages everyone. If it keeps up I will simply turn elsewhere for my news.

NIMBYS call for total blockade of Kings Cross

My comments in The City News on police blockades of Macleay Street on Friday and Saturday nights have drawn a number of angry emails from supporters of the scheme. In reply to my contention that blockading one area only shunts the noise to other residential areas, several of them have said the other areas should also be blockaded.

The comment below is a fair (and polite!) summary of their position:

My reply to Ms Westmeyer is also below.

On the City News site...

  1.   Rebecca Westmeyer said,

      I couldn’t agree more that Macleay St residents should not be enjoying noise-free nights “while others cop the overflow”. The fact of the matter is NO RESIDENTS should be made or expected to tolerate the level of noise, disruption and anti-social behaviour which we have for so long campaigned for individually and via various residents’ groups, ad nauseum. So the hoons and late night revelers will have to also be moved on from wherever their detour now takes them. And so it goes until they get the message that they are not wanted in anyone’s neighbourhood. Mr Gormly’s comment about “the city’s role as a destination for work and entertainment” is incomplete. Cities, and in particular this most densely populated area of Australia, is also for living which not unreasonably includes a decent night’s sleep. And ‘entertainment’ also means things other than too much alcohol, drugs and general sleaze which is about all Kings Cross offers can currently offer the local community. So the bottom line about traffic diversion is that it is merely a symptom of very much bigger, generic and pathologic issues to do with Kings Cross.

2. Michael Gormly said,

      Rebecca neatly sums up the NIMBY position, confirmed by other campaigners who have angrily emailed me — they want to effectively blockade Kings Cross (and maybe the whole city) from suburban visitors who come here for entertainment. They postulate a global city with no entertainment precinct, a dull, economically depressing prospect that horrifies the majority of us who intelligently moved here because we actually want to live in the entertainment precinct.

      The very definition of a city is “a destination for work and entertainment”. Just because a small minority of us choose to live in the city does not alter that. Sure, find ways to mitigate problems without killing the party, but to simply gate off the city is arrogant and absurd.

      The NIMBYs don’t agree with this, but that’s because their sense of self-entitlement knows no bounds. They seriously propose that taxpayers’ dollars be permanently sunk into a weekend blockade of the whole of Kings Cross (and wherever else the party goes) to exclude the very people who pay most of those tax dollars. I think the police have better things to do that serve privileged elites.

Ms Westmeyer faithfully uses the language this well organised minority have evolved to present its position.  Note the moral panic intrinsic to the portrayal of our party precinct  as "too much alcohol, drugs and general sleaze" -- it's even "pathologic". These people always protest the noise etc they are "expected" to tolerate. But no-one "expects" them to tolerate it -- they simply chose to move into an area that doesn't suit their tolerance levels. They could always have moved to Pymble, or even just a few streets away where it's not so noisy. It's a similar issue in Lane Cove where privileged waterfront landowners are trying to get fishing banned from the public wharves because of the noise.

Photo: The Macleay St blockade in place on the weekend of 22/11/09 at 12.36 am. Supporters advocate this for all roads into Kings Cross. What do you think?

PS (5 December) I have learned that Council is taking over the Macleay St closures for another three months, paying the same commercial operators they pay to protect the rich people in Walsh Bay at The Rocks. Aren't you glad your rates and taxes are being spent on behalf of privileged NIMBYs? I am disgusted -- it shows our over-wealthy society has lost all vestiges of egalitarianism and a fair go for all.

Ms Westmeyer will be pleased, though.

Wentworth Courier loses its grip

"THE Wentworth Courier has lost its 15-year hold on real estate advertising in the eastern suburbs after the competition watchdog upheld complaints lodged by Fairfax Media that the rival publication's deals were anti-competitive," writes the SMH today.

The Courier signed real estate agents into deals which locked up 75% of their total advertising, clearly an anti-competitive contract.

The fat, plastic-covered Murdoch publication has dominated the eastern suburbs for decades and it is well known by would-be competitors that their price-cutting and targeting of competitors' own advertisers is the biggest barrier to setting up a rival title.

That's partly why The Kings Cross Times stopped producing a newspaper in 2003 and exists now only as a blog. We simply did not have the financial backing to withstand a long price war.

Lawrence Gibbons, publisher of the City News, The Hub and The Bondi View, recently wrote about predatory pricing, referring to a small magazine The Village Voice that is occasionally bundled with the Courier.

Its advertising rates were a mere fraction of the Courier's and Gibbons saw this as a means to lock his and other publications out of the market by undercutting their low ad rates.

While I have issues with Lawrence's approach to local newspapers, I support his efforts and applaud his survival against his Goliath competition.