Council To Spend $250k Making Sure No One Comes To Their NYE Party

On January 1 this year, while most people were waking up to hangovers, cleaners in Melbourne were hard at work after an estimated 15,000 people celebrated New Year's Eve in Fitzroy's Edinburgh Gardens. If you're from the area you probably remember it: word spread through social media, everyone brought their own booze, someone organised speakers and DJs, and 2014 was rung in with the usual way. People got drunk, good times were had, some got arrested, and when it ended there was a shit ton of garbage everywhere.

The resulting media coverage was ferocious, slamming the out of control party, reckless youths, and the destruction of the gardens; it's a great story if you think about it. The Herald Sun ran a double page spread announcing "Hipsters on NYE Rampage", surrounded by photos of the kind people your parents assume you know.

The local council went on the front foot, as did Victorian Police— the party was illegal, the clean-up would cost $30,000, and again Australia's youth drinking culture had ruined things for everyone. Following the outcry the Yarra City Council, the local government that controls Edinburgh Gardens, passed a decision banning all alcohol consumption in public spaces from 9 PM 30 December until 9 AM 1 January.

To be fair, you can understand the motivation. $30,000 is a lot to spend cleaning up other people's shit. But it's dwarfed by the cost of policing the ban. The council has voted to put aside $250,000 from the budget for security and fencing.

Yarra City Councillor Jackie Fristacky explained to VICE how the aforementioned budget would be spent. "There are security guards, having a system put in place — the kind of thing that we put in place when we run a major festival, where you have to have facilities on site for event management. Where you've got a communications centre that is monitoring and supervising what is happening so if there are incidents you've got the capacity to deal with them. There's lighting, staffing, bin emptiers, putting out extra toilets, all those sorts of things you expect with crowds".

The ban on alcohol was passed by eight of the nine local councillors for the area. Stephen Jolly was the only councillor to vote against it. He told VICE that "honestly NYE this year in Yarra and Edinburgh Gardens will be like East Berlin before the fall of the wall… They're spending $250,000 to solve a $30,000 problem."

According to him last year's mess was a product of poor council planning and not the inevitable drinking. "The lights were second rate," he says. "There weren't enough toilets, there wasn't enough bins, there was no ban on glass. And as a consequence the next day, it was a mess."

Taking issue with the non-planning of the last two years, the the military planning of this year Stephen proposed another idea: "Use the very successful model that we have in Victoria for festivals like Meredith. Let's have a council organised BYO event, that's glass free, more toilets, more lights, more bins, better first aid, definitely free but we also organise the music — that was thrown out the window by the eight councillors."

"Parks are for everybody. We should be encouraging the fact that on NYE young people can come to a free event in a safe space and celebrate. We should be encouraging it — we should also be organising it."

Even with the council providing more funding for facilities to deal with the crowd the decision to ban alcohol remains. So will that crowd show?

"With the alcohol ban we wouldn't expect the kind of crowds we had last year," says Jackie Fristacky, "but it's still a costly exercise to take the precautions."

It's an interesting move to spend so much money on crowd control when you've removed the main motivator for a crowd to attend — being able to bring your own alcohol. After all, how many people turn up to a NYE party that doesn't have beer?

Follow Mitch on Twitter: @mitchmaxxparker