Mike Baird Could Learn a Lot About Failed Lockouts From Melbourne

This weekend more than 10,000 people are expected to show for Keep Sydney Open—a protest against the city's controversial lockout laws. Presented as a policy against alcohol-fuelled violence, the lockout for many Sydneysiders has come to only represent the influence of casinos, which are exempt from the laws. For those watching on in Melbourne, lockouts laws are a dodged bullet.

Melbourne actually experimented with lockout laws back in 2008, when the Brumby Government trialled a curfew for three months. They offered a taste of what our northern neighbours have lived with since 2014, but were ultimately shelved by red-faced Victorian politicians. The question is, why was such policy copy-pasted onto Sydney six years after it was shown to be so ineffective and unpopular in Melbourne?

For those who don't remember, Melbourne's trial was also an attempt to tackle a rise in alcohol-fuelled violence, with 2 AM lockouts from venues around the CBD and inner-city suburbs such as Carlton, Fitzroy, and St Kilda. Revellers rocking up to a pub or club after 2 AM were sent away, while smokers weren't allowed outside for their customary dance-break dart if they wanted to stay at the venue.

This will sound familiar to smokers in Sydney. At club Spice, the line for the front is reportedly longer than the one for the bathroom, as people lean out one-by-one to enjoy a cigarette. Over in the now-defunct Good God Small Club, locked in partiers were known to resort to just smoking on the dance floor.

Back in Melbourne, early results from the new laws were troubling: The first weekend of the lockout was actually punctuated by a rise in violence. As former Brumby policy advisor Nicholas Reece later wrote: "When tens of thousands of people—of different social milieu, gender and states of intoxication—surge onto the street around the time of the lockout, it creates a violent flashpoint."

Pushback against the Melbourne laws was swift. Just as the cries of inequality and even corruption have raged in Sydney over the exception of the city's most violent venue, Star Casino, so too did they in Melbourne over the conspicuous exception of Crown. Bolstered by the Melbourne Locked Out Facebook page (at 28,000 likes, it was big for back then), a disgruntled group of 10,000 took to the streets—just as Sydney is planning to do this Sunday.

By September, a government-commissioned KPMG report on the lockout had found that alcohol-related violence had actually gone up. Alcohol-related presentations in hospitals also went up, as did ambulance transportations between 8 PM and midnight. The number of total reported assaults between midnight and 2 AM went up in each of the four locked-out areas, and by as much as 73 percent in the City of Yarra (which includes Fitzroy, Abbotsford, and Carlton).

As the biggest financial victims, Melbourne hospitality and music industry players also put the pressure on a floundering Brumby. A statement from Augusto Braidotti, general manager of the Cookie Group called the lockout a "dangerous social experiment." Of course with the Cookie Group owning Revolver Upstairs, a Melbourne establishment often not worth entering until well after 2 AM, Braidotti certainly had a lot to lose.

"It punishes fun loving Melbournians and tourists into a 70s-style lifestyle and it will make Responsible Serving of Alcohol very hard to monitor as punters will be locked into the one venue all night long," he said. "This lockout will fuel the already dangerous drug business and create an illegal venues market run by cashed up drug barons.

"It will mean more kids drinking in parks, private homes, on the street, where there are no licensed crowd controllers to look after them."

Amid the fallout, Premier Brumby buckled to public dissatisfaction and overwhelming evidence they lockout wasn't working, killing the laws off: "We've decided as government we will not be continuing with a permanent lockout," he said. Brumby blamed the poor results on the 46 nightclubs that had successfully appealed the lockout via VCAT, thus muddying the figures, but the results were in and lockouts were out.

Fast forward seven years and Sydney's youth are either taking $70 cabs to warehouse parties or taking their drugs before the sun goes down. Meanwhile the Andrews Government has announced ambitions to transform Melbourne into a 24-hour city while it gears up for its fourth White Night—otherwise known as the annual party where the state government encourages everyone to stay up all night.

Of course, it's important to note that Melbourne's lockouts never made it past the trial phrase, whereas Sydney's are enshrined in law and proving to be much harder to dismantle. Abandoned by the Brumby Government, the Melbourne lockout now serves as little more than a warning to future policy makers—a warning few seem to be taking heed of.