A Brief Guide To Unfathomable Liquor Licensing Reforms

If there was a sustained outbreak of people smashing their thumbs with hammers as part of ill-conceived home DIY endeavours, what would be your idea of an appropriate solution? Slapping a massive new licensing fee on all hardware stores? Cutting off every third person’s hands so there was no risk of them hammering their thumbs anymore? Banning the use of hammers on all odd-numbered days to cut down on the incidence of self-inflicted hammercide? I’m tending to assume, unless you’re a complete thundering loon, that those options would not be considered rational solutions by anyone.

On a level which is not by any means a million miles away from this kind of logic, the gazebos in charge of liquor licensing in Victoria have attacked the much-trumpeted problems of drunken and drugged young fatheads loose on the streets, kerbs and dance floors of Melbourne Town, committing random acts of violence against strangers, each other, and probably, given the level of brain-activity concerned, themselves by accident. (And, forced to make a choice, I’d like to see rather more of the latter, and rather less of any of the alternatives.)

Unlike some kneejerk ‘fight the power’ types, I don’t think this whole scenario is a beat-up, incidentally. I don’t think there’s any shortage of this kind of violence, and I don’t think there’s been a time where it’s been any worse, on a general basis. Basically, I’d be struggling to think of any time since I was of an age to legally consume alcohol and be out amongst those doing same, where people here handled being drunk any worse. I don’t think the ‘party’-type drugs are doing them any favours either.

However, it’s how the State Government’s liquor licensing pharaohs are going about their business that’s bunching my lingerie at the moment.

The operators of the well-known loveable live music rat-hole The Tote have just been forced to close its doors and put all staff members on the bread-line, and probably a fair few musos who had regular-ish gigs there as well. This, according to co-licensee Bruce Milne, was specifically due to massive hikes in the licensing costs, due to being assessed as a high-risk venue, according to the liquor licensing nabobs. (There were other factors, but enforced increased costs due to liquor licensing requirements are the common thread running through all of these.)

The problem here is that according to local police quoted on the issue, and virtually all those who have regularly attended live music events at The Tote, dating back to when that was the music venue name and the pub was still officially known as the Ivanhoe Hotel (when dinosaurs ruled Collingwood), the only high-risk involved was of getting drunk, playing pool or the jukebox and having your ears sand-blasted by some live music. It’s not like the Tote was any sort of volcanic hotbed of violence. A lot of the people who went there knew each other. It was a good-times type venue. You’d have more chance of getting into a fight standing on any street corner in the CBD of Melbourne any night of the week. And probably, realistically, at the footy too, not that they’ll be conducting a major liquor licensing hike at sporting events that will put them out of business.

In a judgement which smacks of hasty “knees-bent running about” type thinking, from middle-management nobs who want to be seen to be making decisions to justify their pay-cheques, but aren’t really equipped for thinking about decisions, the Tote was ruled high-risk because it was in a high-risk area.

This is a tremendous nonsense. According to the papers, the whole CBD of Melbourne is a high-risk area these days. By that kind of logic, every licensed venue in Melbourne, from the kerbside cafes that serve the odd beer to the old buffers’ “establishment” clubs to the Windsor Hotel, and beyond, should all have to pay skyscraping licensing fees. They’re all in a “high-risk area”.

What would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t using their skull as a suppository is that the nature and track record of the individual business would have to have some input in whether a particular venue or other liquor-selling operation was truly high-risk, and thus deserving of higher licensing fees. Otherwise the laws are a nonsense. Otherwise, the stated aim of all this general pissfarting around – to achieve a safer Melbourne, via appropriate controls on liquor sales (and I’m only guessing that that’s what they’re trying to achieve, because the current approach will obviously do absolutely nothing to achieve that aim) becomes a statement without any rational foundation.

In the case of The Tote, the wrong people were victimised. The list of those so victimised would include Bruce and James Milne, all the staff, all people who have looked at The Tote as an oasis for scruffy, disreputable loud live rock music for decades, the bands, the live music industry, anyone in Melbourne into what, for want of a more agreeable term and for the sake of brevity, we’ll call ‘alternative’ music.

A virtual non-risk venue was called high-risk, and licensing fees in line with being ‘high-risk’ were levied, forcing the licensees to realise they couldn’t afford to operate the pub with that sort of financial albatross around their necks. (I won’t say “make a profit” because I have my doubts as to what sort of “profit” they were making even under the previous licensing and security costs regime.) The venue was forced to close, specifically due to this situation. If the liquor licensing schmedleys think this made one person on the streets of Melbourne safer on an average night (or any night), they’re absolute turnips. If they DON’T think that, why has this situation been allowed to occur on their watch?

The message that a lot of people aren’t getting is that, as bad as the unnecessary loss of The Tote is, it’s probably the finer edge of a wedge as large as the Rialto building.

The other week I dropped by a small grog shop, Swords, in the South Melbourne Market. The friendly and helpful Joe who runs the joint asked me to sign a petition – something I normally do about as often as I transform stale rye bread into gold with a wave of my magical pinkie finger. I signed this one, however.

Apparently liquor licensing, in its slightly short of infinite wisdom, has designated this tiny cubicle of a grog shop as a “high-risk” operation, complete with matching licence fees/security demands etc, because it sells liquor after 8pm. We’re talking about a miniscule little box of a shop in a fruit market that sells a small selection of wine and boutique beers to the kinds of yuppies, bored young well-heeled mummies, and harmless shambling loner types like Unca Leapster that you’re likely to find wandering around the South Melbourne Market, for Odin’s sake.

Forget selling crateloads of CUB product at retail beer-barn prices, and I can’t even think whether or not they sell spirits. It’s a boutique wine and beer outlet. The nearest thing they get to unfettered lawless liquor-driven excess is that the moustache-bearing nice guy in charge of the operation gives you a mixed six-pack discount for beer whether or not you realise that there is a mixed six-pack discount. It’s not exactly Tombstone, Arizona in there.

As the manager guy rightly pointed out to me, the only real beneficiary of stores like his, and others in the same chain, or of a similar kind, being forced out of existence by insane and mis-applied licensing fees, will be the liquor mega-stores and drive-thru chains, who can afford to soak up licence-fee hikes (although I bet some of them won’t be delighted by them either – I doubt every suburban Joe or Jolene running a local franchise of a big-name chain liquor outlet can afford these kinds of fee hikes and security costs either) and will pick up the business from the smaller retailers that go under.

(Of course, we’ll end up with less choice of retailers, and less access to choice of product, and those making small-batch beers will have less access to customers, making their operations less viable, but I have a feeling that liquor licensing is a fair few decades away from addressing that as a problem, or even recognising it as one.)

There are any number of ‘worst parts’ to the current liquor licensing approach in this state, but a couple of them stand out like Fido’s scrotal area. Number One is, the designation of what’s “high risk” is demonstrably being applied completely indiscriminately, and unique businesses with strong appeal to a particular market are being effectively forced out of business, when there is absolutely no need for this to occur.

Number Two is, and this is the heartbreaker, and the bit that makes all this so irredeemably idiotic, forcing liquor sellers like The Tote and specialist liquor retailers out of business achieves absolutely NOTHING towards making Melbourne a safer place to live in terms of alcohol-fuelled violence, which is the whole aim/panic behind liquor licensing’s current actions. Even considering the notion, for five seconds, over whether closing The Tote or a tiny licensed grocer like Swords at the South Melbourne market, could make the average person in Melbourne less at risk of being donged on the scone by a hormone-charged, booze-soaked ninny of a nightclub escapee out on the streets filled with rage because he’s (a) a plonker, and (b) couldn’t pick up on the night in question, would tell anyone given to rational thought that the whole idea is insane.

The main problem is, quite frankly, young idiots who are far too full of themselves (not to mention drugs and alcohol), driven more or less insane by head-splitting crap tinker-toy dance music over the length of an evening while they’re trying to pick up, attending people-factory type huge nightclub/pub style venues, getting maggotted, and being comprehensively unable to handle it and still act in a manner vaguely resembling a human being.

Fixing the problem is not as easy as identifying it, incidentally. Cutting down operating hours doesn’t remove the problem. It’s a logic akin to cutting down the number of people hammering their own thumbs in DIY accidents by limited the use of hammers to odd-numbered days. If people want to go out and get obliterated and then inflict themselves on the innocent citizenry, and this is acknowledged as being a problem, you have to do the non-populist, non-rabble-rousing, long-term, hard-yards solution, which is analysing why young idiots feel like that and act like that, and then going about the business of trying to effectively educate (and penalise, probably) them, so you eradicate the cause at the root of the problem, as best you could achieve this.

Anything else is a band-aid solution, at best.

Closing joints like The Tote, similar music venues, small specialist liquor outlets etc, isn’t even a band-aid solution. That’s like trying to help your cut finger to heal by sticking it in hot fat, rather than putting a band-aid on it. There’s no benefit to this course of action whatsoever. The people concerned with liquor licensing in Victoria should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Because they apparently don’t have that level of thought or imagination working for them, my alternative is that they should be publicly shamed into feeling thoroughly ashamed of themselves. And then they can pull the finger out, leave the weirdo/small/specialist/harmless venues and liquor retailers alone, and go about actually addressing the problem, like they were meant to in the first place. Idiots.

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