Another upgrade whether you want it or not

The general message to Council from the Kings Cross community last night was: 'If Fitzroy Gardens ain't broke, don't fix it' and: 'no more grey paving'.

But residents attending the first public consultation on the proposed upgrade of the park around the iconic El Alamein Fountain were told a $6 million budget had already been allocated and we were introduced to consultants who had already been appointed to run the design process.

Yet we were repeatedly told that 'we were driving this'.

If that was true, the consultation would have occurred much earlier to ascertain whether Kings Cross even needed another upgrade. We might, for instance, have preferred that our defunded arts festival was resurrected and who knows what else community members might think up.

This goes to the heart of the problem with this council: THEY drive the agenda and always will until a more democratic structure is put in place – for instance precinct committees with the power to set agendas and even control some budget. It happens in other world cities and it is the only way that Clover Moore's slogan of 'city of villages' will ever mean anything, and the only way Sydney will ever become truly diverse and interesting.

Council had decided on the 'post-it note' process whereby people write on sticky notes and post them on the wall. Quickly the section for 'what we liked' about Fitzroy Gardens overflowed. The 'dislike' section was much less full but included some pretty funny notes such one complaining about the noise from the El Alamein Fountain and asking that it be turned off at night. (This would only make other noise seem louder once the 'white noise' masking from the fountain stopped but hey, such is democracy!)

This type of consultation also suppresses speakers from the public who might sway the meeting by speaking to the whole room or even, god forbid, put a motion from the floor. 

Yes, better public toilets are needed and the paving could be better maintained. Some want the carpark under nearby Lawrence Hargeaves Reserve to be upgraded (just as oil starts running out!). Still, $6 million could do so much spent otherwise.

But gee, Council's Upgrade Dept needs constant feeding or they'd all be out of a job. Next on the hit list is Forbes St Woolloomooloo, another place guilty of being paved with the heretical terracotta. God it's boring fighting this relentless top-down control.

Potts Point person tells it like it is

From today's Herald letters, concerning Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen's breakaway faction opposed to equal right for gays (or indeed women) in the church:

"Only time will tell if Peter Jensen and his followers become the VHS or Betamax of the Anglican world. But I feel I should warn him, where we early-adopting gays and lesbians lead, the rest usually follow.

Chris Aronsten Potts Point"

Pell's bells, what is it about Sydney that spawns these reactionary church leaders? Now we can be fined $5,500 if we annoy a Catholic. Queen Isabella of Spain would be pleased.

Peak drug body supports Injecting Centre

The Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) has revised its position on the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross. 

You can read its summary here.

Illegal, immoral and fattening

The media circus has run stories about 'studies' recently that 'may be linked' to the following 'truths':

Australians are the fattest people on earth. They are drinking more and contracting more sexually transmitted diseases, but they are also living longer. Sydneysiders are among the unhappiest people on earth but the city is also the world's most liveable. Two glasses of wine per day helps you live longer – yet no amount of alcohol is safe.

Meanwhile we are told smokers of the 'hard drug' cannabis are running around in a psychotic state with no teeth, shrunken brains and lung cancer. Makes you wonder why on earth they bother.  (But only if you ignore the studies that show psychosis has not in fact risen over the decades along with the rise in pot smoking, that cannabis seems in fact to reduce cancer, does not make teeth fall out and does not shrink your brain.)

I hadn't heard the saying for decades but a friend the other day joked: 'Everything I like is illegal, immoral or fattening.' It's enough to make Bronwyn Bishop roll in her casket.

Bad ice and hillbilly heroin make a joke of prohibition

A possible new kind of 'ice' and news stories about 'hillbilly heroin' underline the ineffectiveness of prohibition in controlling drug use or minimising harm from drugs.

A local retailer is most upset because both an employee and a relative appear to have been badly mentally affected after briefly smoking something sold to them as 'ice'. He claims there is a new chemical variety on the streets which has sent both people into acute psychosis, hearing voices and acting irrationally. The employee is now retrenched and the relation, a young mother, is in danger of losing her two children. 

Meanwhile ABC Radio's AM this morning reported on the abuse of pharmaceutical opioids such as MS Contin, quoting a Kings Cross drug dealer who dresses respectably and 'doctor-shops' for prescriptions. The painkillers are then onsold to addicts for injection. They may prefer heroin but tolerate this 'hillbilly heroin' because it lasts longer and costs a lot less.

Such drugs currently make up 46% of injections at the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, with heroin down to 36%, while 'ice' accounts for only 6%.

Meanwhile the US reportedly has developed 'killer funguses' to spray all over the planet in order to wipe out the opium poppy and cannabis. The stupidity is that, all things being equal, the natural drugs being targeted are less dangerous than the artificial drugs described above, and even if the Yanks did poison the planet, people would just switch to other more harmful alternatives – the 'balloon effect'.

And the 600 kg of pseudo-ephedrine which disappeared from under the noses of several international police forces in the recent Mark Standen case demonstrates how the high profits of drug-trafficking under prohibition will always beat the police who can be either outsmarted, corrupted or both. That's a potential $21 million worth of ice out there wreaking havoc in one case alone.

Under a legal and regulated model only the safest drugs of any variety could be licensed, and possibly rationed, and priced low enough to make the black market unprofitable and irrelevant. 

Harm would be reduced and we wouldn't risk poisoning the planet with weapons of mass destruction. And another $21 million worth of ice would not even be in the pipeline.

Nanny state in untrammelled triumph

The nanny state is out of control. A BBC 'big cat' docco showing on ABC just carried the warning:

"The following program contains footage of animals hunting and eating prey in the wild"

I've seen this on TV all my life, without warnings, and I don't seem to be unduly traumatised. In fact if I see another lion chasing a zebra I'll die of boredom.

They didn't have wimpy Australian Story synthesiser washes in the background, or interview a friend of the prey in tears. But it's coming. Mark my words.

This is on the same day that NSW health minister Reba Meagher ordered an approved drug education pamphlet to be pulped because, after advising schoolchildren not to take drugs, it advised those who did to use moderation. (The cover is pictured.)

Unacceptable! No, the message cannot vary from the unrealistic 'just say no' mantra, to please the 'purse-lipped paragons of public virtue'.

"They will let people die to stay in government," says Bill Crewes.

So kids whose first-hand experience blows the moral panic propaganda out of the water, and who reject unrealistic rhetoric, end up with NO sensible advice. Great result. I see them as the prey and the self-righteous idealogues as the predators.

PS: the whispering presenters of the docco have named one of the lion cubs 'Toto'. (Excuse me while I regurgitate.) The episode finished on a cliff-hanger shot of Toto being stalked by a predatory baboon, no less. Oh no! 

At least it makes a change from lions and zebras.

Henson panic fizzles out

It seems no charges are to be laid against Bill Henson, and the Classifications Board has given his work a 'G' rating (ABC Radio this morning). 

Yet the 'purse-lipped paragons of public morality' said the case was 'clear' against Henson. Here's a little tip on interpreting spin: 80% of the time when a politician uses the word 'clearly' you can be sure the issue is not clear at all.

Thanks to 'anonymous' on a post below for the link, and the comment: "When will Rudd realize that when a PM's personal view is made public it becomes a public view ?

For a private view to remain private he should just SHUT UP. "

ABC joins uncritical panic over cannabis

"Psychiatrists have known for years that there is nothing soft about the drug cannabis," gushed the reporter headlining her story on the ABC's AM program this morning.

She was talking about a study of 15 men who had smoked at least five joints a day for ten years. The men showed a shrinkage of certain parts of their brains and, not surprisingly, had reduced memory performance. The results were compared to minor brain injury trauma (like boxers get, legally, all the time).

This seems typical of recent output from the prohibition industry – reductive research setting out to find harm (otherwise they don't get funded), using a tiny sample and guaranteeing headlines from uncritical media, resulting in professional kudos. It creates alarm in the uninformed public and is used by prohibitionists to justify their position, no-one apparently noticing that all this drug abuse demonstrates that prohibition is not working.

Five joints a day for ten years might be similar to drinking two bottles of vodka a day or perhaps eating ten carrots a day, both of which would probably cause harm to the abuser. This does not justify gushing headlines that carrots 'are not a soft drug'.

And where would they find 15 guys who consumed that much pot? They must be very unusual people, almost certainly among the 4.5% of the population who are unemployed. I'll bet they also smoke tobacco and drink, although the researchers say they matched the control group for other factors. I would guess they have other precursor problems, and I'll bet this minor study had not scanned their brains before the ten-year period, either. And how did they conclude, from this atypical sample, that 'any amount' of smoking put the person at risk?

As I write the researcher, Marat Yucel from Melbourne University, is on 702's Morning Show trotting out a lone 20-year-old ex-smoker, who was not even in the study but is part of a tiny minority who had a bad time on it. Standard tactics. But it will look good on Yucel's CV.

At least AM quoted Gino Vumbaca from ADCA who cautioned about the small sample used in the study.

Ah, Yucel just admitted that all the smokers in the sample were unemployed and the control group wasn't. So the study could equally have concluded that unemployment shrinks your brain. And now as I listen he's COMPLETELY lost it, comparing drug law reformers to people who say tobacco is harmless because a tiny number of smokers live for a hundred years, while 90% plus of cannabis smokers never experience significant problems, the complete reverse evidence base. Host Deborah Cameron missed that glaring fallacy, though.

Meanwhile the potentially $120 million worth of ice lost by police (see previous post) remains out there on the black market and the media are ignoring this massive failure of prohibition. Their news sense is definitely lost in the moral panic.

PS: A kind commenter posted this link from a New Scientist blog which largely reinforces the analysis above.

PPS: Here's a concise piece discrediting many of the prohibition myths peddled by the media.

Senior cop arrested: Alex Wodak vindicated

Today's arrest of top NSW policeman Mark Standen on charges relating to the import of 600kg of pseudoephedrine vindicates Dr Alex Wodak's recent comments that prohibition of drugs leads to police corruption.

His statements were hotly contested by senior police (previous post here).

Mr Standen's arrest jeopardises several major current investigations. Truly, the harms of prohibition far outweigh the harms of drugs (which prohibition fails to prevent in the first place). The import could have contributed to the manufacture of $120 million worth of ice, calculated on prohibition profit margins.

However don't wait up for our government to announce any serious research into the true costs of prohibition. Wrong agenda.

A little-reported aspect is that the drugs have disappeared, apparently 'stolen' from a ship en route to Australia. Oops. So much for the ability of prohibition to reduce supply.

Meanwhile The Sydney Morning Herald has declined to publish Dr Wodak's reply to Miranda Devine's most recent prohibitionist opinion piece, leaving her biased words unchallenged. A fellow blogger has published the long version of Dr Wodak's reply here.

Pictured is a genuine street sign adjacent to St Vincent's Hospital, where Dr Wodak heads the drugs and alcohol unit. I'm guessing there used to be an ice works under the south-east-facing escarpment. So turns the wheel of history.

PS: If anyone offers you 600kg of speed down the pub, just reflect on the efficacy of prohibition and say 'No'. 

PPS: It seems Mark Standen has been previously charged over drugs. Oh dear. Prohibition is just SOOOO good for Police integrity, isn't it! Meanwhile much reporting on this leaves the impression that the potential $120m worth of ice was recovered. But it still hasn't and the media seem to be ignoring this little crack in the edifice. Their wording is clever: just saying that Standen has been 'charged with importing the drugs' sounds as if they had been actually imported. Hmmmn. I would have thought it a much bigger story than Kevin Rudd having a 'butler'. Or has the stuff been siezed and the cops are just onselling it? Surely not. I can't imagine the prospect of $120 million profit being any threat to police integrity. I trust them.

Ban on Kava balloons into more violence, higher prices

Yes, zero tolerance fundamentalists have done it again. A ban on Kava, a mild narcotic intrinsic to Pacific Island societies, has broken up Australian 'kava clubs' which Tongans say reduced violence, underpinned their cultural roots and connected younger with older generations.

Tongans here say there has already been an increase in violence as a result of the ban.

The price of the stuff, in line with other prohibited substances, has rocketed from $30 per kg to $200, creating a great profit opportunity for smugglers and drug dealers.

Meanwhile the kava-clubbers will presumably turn back to alcohol with all its well-known consequences. Pure kava has no serious health risks. Only low-grade kava with impurities from the wrong parts of the plant contains toxins. Under the ban, though, the pure stuff will be harder to get and unscrupulous suppliers will be more tempted to flog the diluted product, exactly as now happens with other prohibited drugs.

Henson witch-hunt pursues websites commenting on the Henson witch-hunt

The 'Purse-lipped paragons of public morality' are dobbing in websites that report on the Henson witch-hunt and carry Henson images, reports the SMH today.

The fury of this farce is unparalleled, sucking up huge public resources.

They are going to look really stupid when they lose all the ensuing legal cases, which is the likely outcome according to all the legal opinion I have seen.

Surely it would be better to test the initial case in court before flying into a moral panic that penetrates every art gallery and website.

The futility of this pogrom is obvious. Henson's images are available internationally through a basic Google search, so persecuting Australian sites is pointless. These luddites don't seem to realise what 'www' stands for.

See http://www.artnet.com/artist/8135/bill-henson.html

Or here.

Or here

Or here (read the comments on this one -- the blogger is accused of being a 'homo' for showing them. Just goes to show sexual moralists are the true weirdos)

Or here (see picture 238!) Dunno about 'homos'.

etc etc. I wonder when the thought police might discover my posting of the Blind Faith cover in the post below. Or will the 'Hetty Johnston protection strip' provide immunity from these tiny-minded busybodies? Or can they block every website that has an overseas link?

It's a bit like pushing goatshit up a steep hill with a pointy stick, as my dear old dad once said.

PS: an artist friend of mine (with a painting in the current Archibald exhibition) was sitting on Bondi Beach the other day painting the headland on a commission. He got out his camera for a reference shot and in no time was literally tapped on the shoulder by a life-saver and accused of photographing children. He was highly offended. Seriously, what is this mad country coming to?

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.

Alcopop debacle balloons

The recent tax on alcopops, like most attempts to regulate against human nature, seems to be doing little but creating a "balloon effect".

Sales of alcoholic candy have reportedly dropped 38% since the tax while sales of hard spirits have risen 21%. Squeeze the balloon in one place and it expands in another. But wait, there's more.

I regularly find empty Passion Pop bottles literally on my doorstep, left there by Kings Cross revellers tanking up in the back streets to avoid horrendous cocktail prices in the club scene.

So I checked with my local bottle shop. Their sales of Passion Pop have increased about TENFOLD, driven partly by backpackers. 

The joke is that Passion Pop has an alcohol content of 9.5% and costs $5 per 750ml bottle while many of the pre-mixed drinks have only a 5% content. Doh! 

The Temperance Union never thought of that, as they seem even further removed from reality than the drunkards they are trying to control.

Now Police Commissioner Scipione is calling for drinks to be taxed by alcohol content, on the face of it a bit more logical than the results of the previous moral panic. 

Trouble is, the table wines consumed most evenings in moderation by civilised middle class upright responsible citizens (like myself!) have an alcohol content of 11–13.5% and would become a lot more expensive. The chardonnay set will scream blue murder at yet another tax on top of crushing fuel prices and interest rates. Our wine industry would also suffer.

The policy would clearly target the wrong people.

More sensible might be a tax on sugar content in all drinks including the slabs of Coke I regularly see walking out of the supermarket. That might reduce rampant dental problems as well.

But then, what about artificial sweeteners? It's a maze.

Even if they did manage to tax us all into sobriety, the balloon effect would continue. I have fond memories from back in my hippie days of a bunch of friends back in the mountains distilling bottles of "rocket fuel" which they sold for a tax-free $10 to friends.

Then there is the "balloon effect" into drugs (which are entirely unregulated and untaxed), or as one TV commentator said, as a last resort people will just go out to their front lawn and spin around until dizzy, risking a skewering on the garden tap.

This is why prohibition – or even over-regulation – simply creates a balloon that just won't pop. You can take metaphors only so far.

Bill Henson witch-hunt continues

ABC Radio just reported that the Newcastle Art Gallery has been ordered to take its Bill Henson works off the walls and remove the images from its website. They have obeyed already. Meanwhile the Albury Art Gallery has reportedly also removed their Henson works from exhibition.

His work also appears in many books and the NSWAG exhibition catalogue. The inquisitors had better start a national house-to-house search and burn them all, too. Hint: books burn at Fahrenheit 451.

Then they can start on the 1969 Blind Faith album cover (pictured here with additions that make it Inquistion-proof). I bought it from a shop in Sydney just a couple of years ago. They'd better start a search of all the cd shops in Australia, not to mention everyone's cd collection. Then, to be consistent, they should prosecute the artist Bob Seidemann, Robert Stigwood and Polydor Records, and Eric Clapton who fought for the image and in fact named the band after its title.

Then they'd better go on a world-wide witch-hunt and demolish every site that carries the image, eg the site mentioned above which describes how the model, who was the same age as Shakespeare's Juliet, begged for the opportunity to pose and her Mayfair parents agreed. If the Inquisitors are thorough they should also censor every website that carries that link.

On the other hand they could just get on with protecting vulnerable kids from pedophiles instead of wasting their time persecuting artists.

And still, movies showing horrific torture, mutilation and violence are freely available at every video shop. I wonder if Hetty objects to the invasion of Iraq which has resulted in unimaginable suffering for hundreds of thousands of children. She is certainly not campaigning about that. What a sick society of dim, sex-obsessed hypocrites we live in.

PS 28/05/08 – Elizabeth Farrelly asks:  'Who is drawing the dirty pictures?' in today's SMH.

PPS 29/05/08 – an ex police superintendent who also owns an art gallery castigates "the purse-lipped paragons of public morality." Lovely phrase!

Be afraid, be VERY afraid

What with the Ruddster siding with the witch-hunt against Bill Henson, folding to Brendan Nelson over fuel prices, backing the coal-burning ambitions of Morris Iemma and reducing funding for research even in sustainable technologies, his innate conservatism is becoming more and more obvious as reality replaces the feelgood spin that has marked his reign to date.

This collage (courtesy of a friend) raises the horrible possibility that John Howard and Kevin Rudd ARE THE SAME GUY. That would explain why we haven't seen much of Howard since the erection. Come to think of it, we never saw them in the same place at the same time during the campaign, did we? And those exchanges in Parliament would have been easy to fake with a little vision mixing...

What rhymes with 'Pope'?

Pictured is a bookmark for World Youth Day, being distributed throughout Catholic schools. Did they really think this through? No wonder they're having trouble getting the numbers.

It gets weirder though. Not only are they bringing a corpse out for the kiddies to worship, but The Pope appears to be collecting virgins. Seriously. Apparently sacrificing one's sexuality for a lifetime is a good thing.

For this sectarian promotional event, on top of more serious imposts on the public purse, they are also taking away the cycle lanes in Park St in favour of buses which will bring the sheep to their shepherd in Hyde park, downgrading the William St cycle route from laughable to ludicrous.

Maybe His Holiness will sort it by praying for cyclists -- but only after the Holy Spirit has come upon him.

Postscript: We locals are now informed that this arcane religious recruitment drive will cause the closure of College St in the city for 7 days, George St between King and Argyle 10am–midnight for 3 days, Macquarie St southbound between Hunter and St James for 5 days, ANZAC Pde between Moore Park and Alison for 3 days, Cleveland St between South Dowling and ANZAC for 3 days, South Dowling between Cleveland and Flinders for 3 days and Alison Rd for 4 days.

So much for the separation of church and state. Next, they'll be prosecuting artists and photographers.

The true costs of prohibition

On Tuesday Dr Alex Wodak made headlines with his suggestion that cannabis should be sold in Post offices.

Today, Miranda Devine berates Dr Wodak with the usual grab-bag of prohibitionist spin, even as another story in the same edition of the SMH describes yet another death that would not have occurred if illicit drugs were legal and regulated ('Jealousy over drug profit led to killing').

The rhetorical  'smoking gun' of Ms Devine's headline takes on a more sinister and realistic aspect in the light of the second story, which also gives us insight into the shady world of big-time drug dealing that can flourish only under prohibition.

Meanwhile, police have objected to Dr Wodak's statements linking prohibited drugs with police corruption.

I understand why the police are offended but there is a long and undeniable history of such corruption, more lately in Victoria.

But prohibition causes deeper failures in policing. For example, a vacant house in our street was recently broken into (probably by a drug addict) and the garage doors left open. This made our house and those of all our neighbours exposed as the breach provided easy access to otherwise well secured properties via the back yards.

We called police who did precisely nothing. We called again. Nothing. Finally about 24 hours later we tracked down the owner who came and repaired the broken locks.

The next day, however, I saw a virtual platoon of police walking up our street headed by a sniffer dog. These squads search sometimes hundreds of people in a week but achieve an arrest rate in the order of only a single-figure percentile, according to the NSW Ombudsman's report. This report also documented more than 2,000 searches on public transport over a year which netted no traffickable quantity of any drug.

What a waste of resources, and what a failure to protect the public from actual crime! If we had rung police and said there was marihuana growing in the garage, I bet they would have been there in force.

The true costs of prohibition need to be properly considered in the debate about regulated supply.

PS: I don't think Post offices would be suitable cannabis outlets and agree with the majority of pollers in the Herald yesterday who preferred licensed outlets. Only 24% said it should remain illegal.

The benefits of hindsight

They say hindsight is the greatest virtue. So it was revealing to look back at an old election commentary posted on this blog in October 2004, just after John Howard won his fourth term. Journalists, especially those in the crystal ball game, often have to hurriedly revise their position and hope that readers don't spend too much time trawling the archives. For instance, you don't see Miranda Devine or Paul Sheehan extolling the invasion of Iraq so much these days.

Click the headline to see how the KX Times read politics and the economy back then, including some (very well written material) in the comments that I suspect was cut-and-pasted from a paid journalist by one of the KX Times' anonymous critics.

Pictured is a great stencil spotted in Katoomba.

Please, some substance amid the power spin

The Sydney Morning Herald saw fit to publish another of my letters today. While an unprecedented storm of spin defends the privatisation of power generation in terms of 'union vs government' and 'securing the future of electricity supply' (as if there is only one way to do that), I tried to bring it back to essential issues:

"I can't believe so many intelligent people are still spruiking the privatisation of an essential utility while the Government is throwing millions of taxpayers dollars at a privatised rail operation to persuade it to carry export wheat to market.

I thought privatisation was supposed to shield the public from financial risk. This is a clear case of private profit holding the public good to ransom and it convinces me that fundamentals such as power generation should remain in public hands."

Michael Gormly Woolloomooloo


I still can't work out how, if the government can't afford new power stations, the private sector can stump up $10-15 billion to buy the system and THEN pay for a power station on top of that AND make a profit out of it. Especially as the government can borrow money more cheaply than the private sector. You can't regulate away that contradiction. Either way, we will be the ones paying!

Meanwhile The Herald leads today with the smiling faces of Morris Iemma and the world's ugliest politician, Michael Costa, under the strapline: "This is a time for healing and calm, not belligerence." This is laughable after Costa was filmed screaming abuse at his own party conference on the weekend.

While the smiling faces spread reassurance, all is not well in the Labor camp. MLC Penny Sharp, for one, is committed to oppose the sale.

And as for Paul Keating spruiking privatisation in a major Herald opinion piece... I am apalled. He coyly writes:

"Critics will say that I am writing in these terms because of my association with Lazard Carnegie Wylie, a company chosen to co-advise the State Government on its privatisation proposals."

Alex Mitchell on Crikey comments:

"This declaration – more like the admission of a howling conflict of interest – should have been made at the start of the article. And Keating is being uncommonly modest when he writes of his “association” with Lazard Carnegie Wylie – he’s the International Chairman for heaven’s sake!"

If I had any respect for Keating it's now gone.

And none of this even gets to carbon emissions and climate change.

Photos by Peter Rae.

Village Centre bites the dust

The Village Centre, between Springfield Plaza and Llankelly Place, is finally being demolished (pic below). During the '60s it was the epicentre of sophisticated al fresco living and the site of the Kings Cross Waxworks. More recently it was redeveloped and roofed to house, among other shops, a supermarket and a new TAB. But around the closure of the Waxworks in 1986 the precinct declined in parallel with the declining fortunes of Kings Cross -- which now seem to be on the rise again.

Check the Audrey Hepburn outfit on the chick in black, and the groovy Bermuda Shorts on her man.

Another block of units will be built on the site. I hope the windows will be double-glazed and the eventual residents understand they will be moving into a noisy entertainment precinct, not West Pymble, and set their tolerance levels accordingly.

Blogger Panthergirl shows a raunchy matchbox pack sold as a Waxworks souvenir (pic below), and reminisces about a childhood visit there, remembering the shark attack and rack torture exhibits. I wonder if they would be allowed today?

Retro a Go-Go goes off!

Thanks to all those who came along and partied till late at Retro a Go-Go on Friday night. Apologies to the neighbours for the after-party! We got a decent crowd which would have been bigger if Council didn't spend $millions tearing down posters in their obsession with turning Sydney into a lifeless grey zone for rich old NIMBYs, but hey, that's Sydney.

We'll be doing it again!

Pictured are our fabulous dancers Sheena & Vivi whose talent and professional attitude made the night so easy and so entertaining. Lighting, pix & music by moi.

Thanks to Mark, Steph & Josie who made the whole thing work, and to David at Network Printing for the posters.

Retro a go-go details

Here's the poster (below) for my latest venture into showbiz, Retro a go-go. Come along and shake your tushie to some of the greatest tracks ever recorded, including cool cheese, mod jazz, orgasmic pop, Hammond B-3, Acid Latin, TV themes, psychedelia and soul power (eg Carleen & The Groovers, pictured right). Be inspired by Sheena and Vivi who dance like mad kittens. And you've gotta come and see my new outfit which I actually BOUGHT for the night. Sheesh!




It seems blogger wants to reduce this image down a lot so here's the fine print:

Retro a Go-Go
Underground in the El Rocco
(at Bar Me, cnr Brougham & William Streets
Kings Cross) Bookings 9368 0894

Friday 4 April 08
8pm–midnight or something
$20.00

The venue is a restaurant too and does great food at reasonable prices. Drinks are relatively cheap as well. Not that we encourage 'binge drinking', you know.

See post below for some fashion and style reference, not to mention fun on YouTube!

New Mortal Sins to fill Hell?

This week the Catholic Church declared drug-taking to be a mortal sin -- even though I don't recall any of the ten commandments proscribing the practice.

They don't seem to include alcohol as a drug even though the edict was reportedly aimed at 'drugs which weaken the mind'.

Of course the new rules must have come straight from God as The Pope apparently has a hotline to the Almighty (or else he is suffering from serious delusions). So it seems that God must be on the side of ultra-conservatives and prohibitionists, and the Yanks who want to prevent harm by spraying half of Afghanistan with poison to kill the opium crops. What could possibly go wrong?

It makes me wonder, then, if God doesn't want us taking these substances, why He created cannabis, the Coca tree and the opium poppy, and made their effects so medicinal and/or pleasurable and/or addictive. Perhaps they are a divine entrapment strategy, like Adam and Eve's apple, or perhaps the numbers are dropping in Hell so it needs a bit of a boost. However this is unlikely as each soul is sentenced for eternity.

In addition, pharmacists were told they shalt not sell contraceptives (because obviously this would be worse than reducing the 60% AIDS infection rate in parts of Africa), and pedophilia by clergy had apparently been blown out of proportion by the media.

But it seems the media's continuing moral panic about drugs must be not only in-proportion but also divinely sanctioned.

Or is it just that The Church just wants to induce more people to return to religion, 'the opiate of the masses'.

Gee I'm glad we are subsidising World Youth Day so generously. And I guess that's put the 'moral' firmly back into the drugs debate.

Pictured is the atrocious el-cheapo WYD ad structure obscuring the western entrance of St Mary's Cathedral.

Shootings in Kings Cross

Click the headline for a link to today's SMH analysis of Sunday night's gunplay.

And here's a link to yesterday's report on the incidents by The Australian.

I wonder if Clover Moore is still keen on turning The Cross into a 'mother-and-child-friendly retail precinct'?

No doubt the nimbys will be calling for all criminals to install silencers on their guns.

Go-Go reference

Most of you weren't there in the '60s (and the rest don't remember it) so here's some reference for 4th April -- retro a go-go at el rocco in Kings Cross. The shot of Peggy Moffit (right) comes from a great page of girl's mod fashion. Below are YouTube amusements.

Carnaby street smorgasbord (great pics, bad sound)

Op art fashion spectacular  (Great visuals. Who did this song? Who is 'Patti'?)

Another '60s visual feast (The Birdies: Hucklebuck)

Loving Spoonful

Haschich Party A deep and meaningful exposé of love and posing in the '60s. One of my fave tracks. It must have been good haschich.

George, Teddy & The Condors

Ananda Shankar

The Cool Ones

Freestyle go-go


Le Girls

Instamatic go go

Chubby Checker twists again

Go-Go lesson

Japan 1960-70 Pt 16

Blast Off Girls

Japanese bikinis

Miami go-go

'60s dance party

Teen-age Tramp

The Avengers

The Avengers

The Lords (German beat band)

Heritage letters at ten paces

Our own local heritage expert and activist, Andrew Woodhouse, is no slouch at getting published in the Herald either, with several 'First Words' and a Heckler to his recent credit.

His latest sally, about the Historic Houses Trust, drew a spirited reply from Jill Wran, Chairman of the trust.

It is thought-provoking reading.

The sober facts about booze

While the temperance union (now including Kevin Rudd) wallows in moral panic about binge drinking, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells a more sober story:









There's lies, damned lies, and then there's statistics. Beware tabloid hysteria. Meanwhile the Government, at the stroke of a pen, can appear to be 'doing something' without spending a dollar.

Our grog debate hits the SMH

My letter on the subject was given the 'First Word' pole position in the Herald Letters on Saturday.

One Lynette Robinson got a reply published today citing the usual 'ugly boring streets full of people being harassed' view but of course none of my arguments are actually addressed. My pic shows a typical Cross crowd. No-one is being 'harassed'.

I have sent off a reply but I doubt they'll keep flogging that horse. I'll copy it below:

"Lynette Robinson's defense of the 'more venues = more violence' argument (Letters, February 25) fails to address any of the points I raised previously (February 23). Melbourne statistics about youth seeking treatment for alcohol problems have little to do with Kings Cross and might have many causes other than the large number of venues in Melbourne. If the youth involved are under 18, I would suggest they are not getting much of their grog from licensed premises in any case.

"The argument suffers from the very common post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy which assumes causality simply because two sets of figures have similar trends. This is not necessarily so, and my suggestion that the police focus on illicit drugs and sniffer dog deployment is actually worsening the problem shows there may be causes other than the raw number of venues.

"The argument also assumes that the demand for alcohol is infinitely elastic. I personally am not drinking any more than I did even though there are more venues, and I suspect that 'over-saturation' of venues in any precinct will make itself evident when some of them start failing for lack of patrons.

"I agree there is an ugly element in the crowds that visit our city on weekends and I can remember it always being so. But they are only a noisy minority and I think our younger generation, on the whole, are pretty impressive. Meanwhile young people will make mistakes and most learn from them, just like my generation did. Nannying them into silence is an error. And if I find a bit of vomit on the street on a Sunday morning I don't get into a tizz – I just walk around it."

Alternative headline dept

The Council press release was joyously headed 'Residents win court battle against Darlinghurst night club'.

A different spinner could have written 'The last nail in the coffin of Oxford Street'. This episode is another example of Council's doublespeak. On the one hand they want to revitalise Oxford Street as an entertainment precinct. On the other hand they appear to have closed down the T2 night- and day-club at Taylor Square because residents don't like the fallout.

A recent letters thread in the Sydney Star Observer neatly summarised the issue. One guy living in the art deco apartment block directly opposite T2 and Kinselas had written in complaining about the Saturday morning noise, complete with a photo of a police car attending an incident or complaint. 'See what I have to put up with' was the indignant message. The next week another guy replied, saying simply, 'You wanted to move close to the action, you deal with it'.

All councillors however pander exclusively to the NIMBYs on this one and killing the action is their solution. Tough luck for the late-shift workers who used to have a club to go to and tough luck for Oxford Street. The gentrifiers continue to turn Sydney into a dead boring city. But, you know, quiet evenings sitting separately in little boxes consuming mass media and going to bed after The Bill is the only right and proper cultural norm. Pip pip, tally ho!

The extent of Council's ignorance of inner city culture was highlighted by a recent pathetic attempt at 'revitalising' Taylor Square. The first draft of the oppressive busking policy banned buskers from selling their cds everywhere except the Square which is not known for its busking anyway. That idiocy was killed off but it's still illegal for an artist to sell paintings, and even silent performers must stop by midnight. Not to mention having to pay to get a license in the first place.

Their next assault on counter-cultures will be the new street poster policy. More on that later.

Pic: A late-night partygoer recovers on a Saturday morning in Taylor Square. Tut tut. I mean, you just can't HAVE this sort of thing, can you?

The ugly Australian

It's Australia Day and unfortunately I can't celebrate. The Australian flag-over-the-shoulder look has come to represent jingoism, racism and ignorance.

A few minutes ago a female friend was in Kings Cross waiting to cross the road where she saw an Aboriginal friend of hers, who greeted her. A young Aussie suburban guy, drunk, flag draped over his shoulders, cut in with: 'What did that black bastard say to you?"

My friend gave him what for, pointing out that the 'black bastard's' ancestors had been in the country a lot longer than his. The young guy made as if to punch the black, but was warned off by my friend.

Nearby a five-year-old asked his mother: 'What is that lady saying to that man?'

'She's giving him what he deserves,' was the reply.

I fear tonight's going to be an ugly one up the Cross. How did this nation become so deeply ignorant?

Farrelly takes aim at Oxford Street

The credibility gap between Council and on-the-street reality got a good workout from Elizabeth Farrelly in the SMH today.

Even as Kings Cross is hinting at a partial retail resurgence, Oxford Street remains bleak.

Several blocks on the north side of the street are owned by Council, and there has been friction with many of their tenants -- the small, independent unique ones on the whole, whose turnover was slashed while the uniform granite and Smartpoles 'upgrade' was installed at public expense.

But Council has a vision for the street. Unfortunately it is controlled by their property department who differ from the white shoe brigade only in that they are not risking any of their own money. They love the expensive places and the franchises, seeing it all in terms of dollars per square metre. Words like unique, local, creative and affordable are absent from their vocabulary.

As Elizabeth Farrelly put it, they are 'still seeing revitalisation as a means of precluding rent reduction, rather than a response to it.'

This cultural dissonance exists within some other Council departments as well, and no Councillor seems to comprehend it (except, I suspect, John McInerney). Placing the issue into public dialogue is not easy. Congratulations to EF for doing so.

Prohibition takes four more lives

People always have and always will take drugs, it seems. But only under prohibition does it cause wholesale death and destruction.

On Thursday morning I couldn't get out of my street into William Street because the police were there taping off a crime scene around a body on the pavement.

The young man's body was lying flat on its back, toes spread outwards, hands placed neatly on its abdomen.

While police remained tight-lipped, word on the street is that the man is one of four who died locally after injecting a new batch of drug available on the illicit and unregulated street market. The drugs are probably either unusually strong or cut with a deadly substance, and alarm has spread quickly amongst users.*

Heartless people will say 'serve them right,' but others will understand that each of these victims has family and friends who will now be grieving. Each had made mistakes -- like all of us -- but each has now been robbed of a chance at redemption. And each would probably still be alive if they had been able to access their drugs legally from a regulated system.

The world-wide carnage caused by prohibition is increasing (see stories 6, 7 and 8 at the link embedded in the headline). It's well past time to change our approach.

* 22 March: More reliable sources now say there were only two actual deaths in the area and that it was more likely that the overdoses were caused by mixing the legal pharmaceutical Xanax (like Valium but stronger) with the rather low quality heroin that's generally around lately. Also the beat up about Afghani Brown heroin seems to be largely in the media's imagination.

Doggy doo as class leveller

'Who d'ya think's gonna clean that lot up, eh?' came ringing from the street in the broad western suburbs accent so detested by the local gentry. 'Who's job d'ya think it is!'

The harangue continued and I couldn't resist opening the door to have a look. There was a guy bearing the marks of rough trade berating a leggy blonde attached to an ornamental white dog. She had just popped out of the rear garage entrance of her block of million-dollar Brougham Street apartments on a Saturday morning to let her pet relieve itself steamingly on the pavement. Her head was down, eyes averted in that sheepish manner typical of such litterers as she scurried back into the garage which was sprinkled with Porsches and a Rolls Royce.

He followed her towards the slowly closing rolladoor, emphasising his point with a few expletives.

I couldn't help laughing at this reversal of the usual social hierarchy and congratulated the guy as he walked past, telling him that I didn't have a dog because I didn't want to spend half my life picking up warm dog-poop.

'The trouble is, neither do they,' he rejoined.

Council heavies quash Barons action

An informal public action protesting the demolition of the Barons Building was shut down by Council heavies but not until it had made its point and a small crowd had enjoyed a bit of afternoon fun in the Roslyn Street park.

One resident had complained because he could hear music, apparently preferring a year or so of full-on construction noise opposite his flat.

Even the Police had come by and decided the volume was too low to merit interference.

The action was opened by Jill McKay, bar manager on Baron's first night ever (pictured below). She railed against the insensitivity of indiscriminate development and urged people to get others active, before being interviewed on community radio.

A revolving line-up of musicians then presented an impromptu concert featuring improvised songs about life before the Barons demolition, some soaring violin from Peter and a crunchy rock 'n' Roll set from Paul, with yours truly on percussion.

Since Council has decided to approve the demolition nothing short of mass public action is seen to have any chance of stopping it, and in these days of self-interested indifference there is little chance of that.

Also pictured are Peter, Chris Dussledorp and Vashti Hughes serenading the street.

Gormly exhibits himself again

It's true. The kind folks at Gallery 26 in Milsons Point have given me a whole wall to exhibit works. It's a new gallery, run by a collective of artists. Several rooms over two floors are now full of a superb variety of paintings, stained glass, photography, sculpture (both metal and wood), etchings and dioramas.

I am featuring some new work, notably three from a new series Steel on steel which comprise large black-and-white prints on metallic Kodak stock and mounted on galvanised steel sheet.

There is also one piece from another series I am working on -- the Fractal Coast series which I plan to show in its own exhibition when I find the time and the right venue, and ANOTHER series, Gothic Sydney, which feature Sydney's famous fruit bats.

The images here show Corrugations from Steel on steel and Honeycomb dream from Fractal coast. The two others from Steel on steel have a Kings Cross connection. Resurrection in the lightwell of the Carousel refers to the still-missing Juanita Neilson, and The roof of the Bourbon with Darling Point in the distance shows a surprising perspective on this local landmark. 

There are also several smaller pieces from my neo-surrealist collection as seen on myphotoart.com.au.

The grand opening is this evening, 11 December 2007 at 26 Alfred Street Milsons Point (from the pedestrian or bike ramps off the Bridge, head down towards Luna Park)

Closing date for the exhibition is not set. 

Another late-night booze fest

Kings Cross IS going to the dogs with new clubs opening up on every corner. Tut tut. It looks to me as if the Cross is simply Sydney's premier club precinct and locals who don't like that will just have to live with it. Meanwhile sights like this Campari launch at Favelas in Kellett Way on a random Wednesday night provide some compensation. This is not the sort of thing one sees in Pymble. Shame the Barons Building opposite is about to be demolished. There goes the neighbourhood.

Crown Street building bites the dust

Last night the upstairs tenants and patrons of the Indian Chilli Restaurant on Crown Street near Foveaux heard ominous cracking sounds and called police, who evacuated several buildings and closed the street.

The whole building, next door to the construction site for Council's new Surry Hills Community Centre, had started listing, a large crack appearing between it and the next terrace.

Today a large wrecking crane tore the building apart, levering most of it into the excavation next door in a cloud of dust damped down by several fire hoses.

Speculating spectators surmised that the large hole council had dug next to it was behind the disaster but Council is not admitting any liability and dodged reporters' questions about compensation for the Restaurant.

The cost of the Surry Hills Community Centre had already blown out massively before it even commenced. It is billed on its designer hoardings (pictured below) as 'A benchmark in environmental design' with silhouettes of cute guys holding hands and glowing messages from Clover Moore. Part of the hoarding came down with the demolished building.

Environmental experts also challenge the 'environmental benchmark' label as there are several other comparable buildings in Sydney that are far more self-sufficient.

Still, it looks good in Clover Moore's newsletters and that's what counts. Here's the Sydney Morning Herald account.

I wonder why Sydney is turning to drink

It's almost amusing watching the public panic about rising alcohol consumption and associated social problems. Almost.

Here's a theory. All but the terminally naïve now know they can't bring happy, nonviolent drugs like cannabis or MDMA on a night out because there are too many sniffer dogs. The only alternatives are Friday night TV, meditation, stamp-collecting or alcohol.

Surprise surprise, liquor venues are opening everywhere, drinking is on the rise, the demographics of Oxford Street are going downhill fast. People are not stamp-collecting but drinking more, drinking stuff like a certain Australian rum about which it is said 'there's a bushfire and a bashing in every bottle.' What an un-fun city Sydney is becoming. 

The only allowable solutions are repressive -- from more police to residents pushing councils to restrict venues. Anything but address root causes.

I know regulated legal supply of more socially benign drugs won't be happening anytime soon but I can't help documenting the insanity of the conservative establishment.

Here's a story about MDMA we won't be seeing repeated in Australia.

The pictures below tell a story too, I think. Let's caption them 'Police exacerbating a problem that can't be properly policed because there aren't enough police'.

UK heroin trial makes life easier for everyone else

A trial in the UK of three supervised injecting centres which supplied heroin and methodone clearly shows that regulated supply removes most of the problems of addiction and slashes the fallout and drug-related crime suffered by the wider community.

Ten percent of drug addicts commit three-quarters of acquisitive crime, reports The Independent. They are caught between irresistible cravings and a prohibited drug market that charges prohibitive prices. Crime is the solution for that ten percent, and the rest of us suffer.

Addicts in the trial received either methodone or pharmaceutical grade heroin under strict conditions, going a step further than the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross. The drugs were injected on-site under supervision with no takeaways allowed.

Meanwhile back home we see Don Weatherburn, director of BOCSAR, saying 'If we want to get the most out of demand reduction... we have to inflict some harm.' (SMH 26 10 07). I'm sure the latest victim of a heroin-related mugging or home break-in would be pleased, especially after reading the UK story. I would love to debate Mr Weatherburn on on his belief that inflicting harm reduces harm. Prohibition brings many harms to the community, persecutes those who use drugs other than alcohol, diverts police from solving real crime and costs the taxpayer by locking up large sections of the population.

Prohibitionists continue to assert that regulated supply would not undermine and shrink the criminal drug supply chain but this UK trial (and common sense) indicates they are wrong. And re-directing drug addicts from the rebellion and glamour of an underground economy into a medically supervised environment removes the 'heroin chic' element from the culture while limiting the ability of existing users to initiate new users.

That refutes another prohibitionist argument -- that regulated supply will encourage more users -- and counters Mr Weatherburn's belief that inflicting harm is necessary to reduce demand.

Now watch the christian right ignore these facts and continue their hysterical and oppressive dogma.