Emergency Room Doctors Say Australians Deserve Nationwide Lockouts

Sydney city has had lockout laws since early 2014, and a week ago, Queensland nightlife zones like Fortitude Valley got their own 3am last drinks laws—essentially shutting down nightlife in the city at the 3am curfew.

In Sydney, two and half years of lockouts have had a dramatic effect; people have stopped going out in great numbers—foot traffic at night in former red light district Kings Cross is down 80%—and alcohol-related assaults have also dramatically dropped—by 40% in Kings Cross, and 20% in the CBD.

But lockouts have also decimated the city's nightlife—over a dozen iconic Sydney clubs, from Goodgod Small Club to the Spice Cellar, Backroom and Q Bar; these and more have either changed hands or shut their doors. World Bar, one of the few live music venues still running in the Cross, used to employ six live acts on a Friday night. Now they can only afford two.

If the country's influential medical bodies get their way, the whole of Australia will soon have blanket laws that close bottle shops at 10pm and shut down alcohol service at clubs and pubs at 3am. That means every club in the country will be shut by 3am, except for the ones which get lockout exemptions for the pokies (because gambling's definitely not a bane of society).

That's what Australia's largest non-profit healthcare organisation St Vincent's called for the government to introduce earlier this month in their Restoring the Balance policy, which also wants to raise the price of alcohol and add booze warning labels to packaging, like cigarettes.

The head of the Emergency Department at St Vincent's hospital in Darlinghurst, Gordian Fulde, is the Senior Australian of the Year and one of the most vocal opponents of Australia's drinking culture. After the 2012 death of Thomas Kelly from a single punch, Fulde was among a few key people calling for Sydney's lockout laws, and his recent research—which shows significant drops in the number of serious alcohol-related injuries being treated at St Vincent's after lockouts started—is one of the keys pieces of evidence used now to support the laws.

But his arguments aren't always unassailable. On ABC's Lateline earlier this year, Fulde put lockout laws in the same public health basket as requiring people to wear seat belts in cars and helmets on bicycles. But if you don't wear a seatbelt, you're only hurting yourself. If you shut down Australia's nightlife after 3am, you're hurting everyone who works in that industry, from DJs and musicians to everyone else in the hospitality industry.

And on Q&A in February, Fulde controversially told an audience member not to whinge about lockouts because "you can still go to the casino." Unsurprisingly, social media lit up with aggrieved Australians pointing out the links between problem gambling and mental health—which you might expect to be a concern of a leading health professional—and the fact that gambling costs Australia up to $4.7 billion a year. Not to mention that Sydney's Star City casino is one of the most notoriously violent venues in NSW, despite it being mysteriously exempt from lockouts.

But Fulde and St Vincent's are far from the only influential medical experts calling for national last drinks and lockout laws. Both the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the lobby body for Emergency doctors also called for Sydney's lockout laws to be expanded nationwide at the end of last year, in order to ease the strain on Emergency Departments and to reduce the broader health problems that come with serious alcohol abuse, like liver disease and cancer.

And their demands could be called conservative when you compare them to peers like the Royal Australian College of Physicians. The RACP recently entered a controversial submission to a Federal inquiry that's looking at whether Australia needs national lockout and last drinks laws. Besides calling for a nation-wide drinking curfew that shuts pubs, clubs and bottle shops, the RACP also called for some of the most extreme laws yet to curb Australia's thirst for liquor, including: raising the legal drinking age over 18; increasing the cost of alcohol with minimum pricing; lowering the blood alcohol limit for all drivers to zero percent; and adding gruesome health warning labels to alcohol packaging.

But most controversial of all was their call for all "women of reproductive age who misuse alcohol" to be given forced medical screenings and "interventions" under the guise of preventing fetal alcohol syndrome. Under the current guidelines, "misusing" alcohol means having more than two standard drinks each day. So if you're female, aged between 13 and 50 and partial to sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, you'd be in line for a government mandated intervention into your "problem drinking."

The religious temperance movement, which promotes sober lifestyles and moral Christian fortitude, also still has a hand in lobbying against alcohol. The Australian branch of the Independent Order of Rechabites, a group originally founded in the 19th Century to "promote total abstinence from alcoholic beverages," has a Board of Directors stacked with doctors who are also prominent names at influential alcohol policy research groups like the National Alliance for Action on Alcohol and the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research.

The strict laws are necessary, RACP president Dr Nicholas Talley told The Age, because five thousand people still die in Australia each year from alcohol. "We don't believe it's appropriate to do nothing," Dr Talley said. "The harms from alcohol remain very significant and we're not doing enough about it."

Nationwide lockouts would also benefit the economy, the RACP says, because there'll be less people chucking sickies when they're hungover. But as we all know from history and personal experience, banning things or reducing access to them doesn't make them go away. It often makes them more desirable and creates a black market. You only need to look at Australia's prodigious appetite for illegal drugs to know that we don't take well to being told "you can't have this."

No matter what doctors or the police tell us, Australians will keep drinking to excess, eating pills and racking up powders to our heart's desire, as Dr Alex Wodak knows. He's Australia's leading light for sensible drug harm reduction policies—but he's also one of the most vocal supporters of lockout laws; he recently entered a five-page submission to the Callinan review of Sydney's lockouts arguing strongly for the government to keep the restrictions in place.

Wodak is a figure both revered and reviled by lawmakers for his harm reduction work. You might know him as one of the most respected advocates for pill-testing. His picture hangs among the Great and Good of Australian society in the National Portrait Gallery, in honour of his pioneering work in harm reduction, including starting the country's first needle exchanges and safe injecting rooms without government authority. That made him a temporary enemy of former NSW Premier Bob Carr back in the late '90s, and earlier this year it made him an enemy of current NSW Deputy Premier Troy Grant, who claimed that activists like Wodak who run pill-testing programs without government permission could be arrested and charged with manslaughter.

But despite his support for sensible management of drugs, including decriminalising illegal drugs, Wodak is also heavily in favour of restricting our access to alcohol. This seems contradictory: having easy access to alcohol causes a lot of damage, so we should restrict it. But having restrictions on safely using illegal drugs also causes a lot of harm, so those restrictions should be relaxed (including providing access to pill-testing, safe drug-using equipment, and even decriminalisation).

"Alcohol costs the community twice the revenue gained by government, so alcohol is a pretty big problem," Wodak told a public forum on lockouts in 2014. "Yes, this [lockout legislation] does restrict people's liberty, but remember that your liberty to get legless and punch me unconscious restricts my right to live in a safe environment… If we have evidence…that you can produce a reduction in violence by restricting alcohol modestly, then [the Premier] should introduce such restrictions."

This is an argument that doesn't really allow for the knock-on effects that blanket nightlife restrictions have on late night culture and music, and the personality of a city. When people stop going out and the music venues start dying off, you lose the city's rich music culture, generations of talent, and all the positive effects that come from having lots of fun things to do after-hours, like the economic benefit from people being out eating and drinking late at night, and the boost to international tourism when you have a reputation as a vibrant, 24-hour city.

The reality is: Australia's drinking problem isn't as bad as we think.

There's a perception that Australians are more or less barely-evolved from drunken convicts who like to get into fist fights, and that's why we can't be trusted to stay out late drinking. But it simply isn't true. Our taste for risky drinking is being sated: data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that national consumption of alcohol fell to a 50-year low in 2014 – we're drinking less overall for the first time since 1966.

And heavy drinkers are in the minority: new evidence released this year shows that 60% of the Australian population drink moderately, while 20% don't drink at all, and the remaining 20% are the heavy boozing "super-consumers" who put away 75% of the booze sold.

Alcohol-related assaults were also trending downwards: it's been well-documented by crime statisticians that the number of assaults in Sydney was dropping steadily for five years before the lockout laws were rushed in.

Keep Sydney Open's campaign manager Tyson Koh recently returned from Amsterdam's Night Mayor conference, where he said that "this idea that Europeans are so well-behaved when it comes to socialising compared to us, the descendants of convicts," was busted wide open.

"Amsterdam is a city that not only has to deal with people coming in from other parts of the Holland for a good time, but other parts of the continent," Koh said. "They have to deal with guys punching each other over a misconstrued glance, people falling into the canals while taking a piss and just about everything else you can imagine with being a hedonist's Disneyland. In short: our problems are not unique."

Even some doctors agree. On SBS show The Feed, a doctor—who wanted to remain anonymous, as they were "fearful of the repercussions" from their colleagues at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital—spoke about why they don't support the lockouts, despite dealing with alcohol-related injuries every weekend in Emergency.

"Lots of nurses, doctors and other medical professionals are also people who want to have a functioning city and a vibrant nightlife," they said. "It feels like we hear from a couple of strong [medical] voices who are speaking up very publicly in support of these lockout laws, and I feel like we're not getting a clear picture of people's opinions within the hospitals."

It makes sense that medical professionals want to stop people getting boozed up: doctors have to deal with the fall-out when people get pissed and injured, so naturally they believe if we just stop people from getting pissed, there'll be less damage.

And there's no doubt that alcohol has a social, and financial cost in Australia—up to billions a year according to some studies by anti-alcohol campaigners. But there's also no denying that alcohol is inextricably linked with all kinds of other fun cultural pursuits, like going to clubs or festivals or seeing live music or theatre.

Take away the bar sales or the ability to open late at night and those venues lose money and can't afford to hire musicians and performers. Sydney's already seen the direct results of late night venues losing 30% of their income to reduced trading hours – the city's nightlife is a shadow of its former self. And there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that becoming a ghost town hasn't made Sydney feel any safer: many submissions to the NSW liquor law review came from CBD and Kings Cross residents complaining that they feel less safe walking home at night in empty streets; and from Newtown residents complaining that the atmosphere in their queer-friendly suburb has changed for the worse with the influx of drinkers who used to go to the Cross or the city.

The City of Sydney, the Greens and other groups have called on the NSW government to scale back the lockout laws with exemptions for safe, well run music venues—even the NSW police are open to "a conversation" about scaling back lockouts. The NSW government will make a decision this August or September about whether there'll be any relief from late night curfews, but for the rest of the country the fight is only just beginning.

Nick Jarvis is on Twitter over here.