Fifty times that many women die by what is euphemistically known as “domestic” violence. Shall we ban male-female cohabitation, as probable cause? Loading A biotoxin metaphor is apt. A novice gardener - so the Night Time Industries Association told the lockout inquiry - might spray his weeds with Roundup. But a true gardener knows the herbicide will “kill anything vegetative in the garden and, [in] the groundwater, anything in its path”. I’d go further. The lockout laws were the Agent Orange of Sydney’s emergent fringe culture. In five short years they effectively defoliated Sydney’s inner-city nightlife, killing hundreds of businesses and poisoning the live music-and-poetry scene just starting to emerge from the new small bars legislation. I understand the impulse. Safety matters. But there are two critical questions. One, how far was safety actually enhanced? And two, even if safety improved, was it worth it? This is a bycatch question: we killed a thousand squid, dugong and dolphin and – hmm, did we actually get our tuna?

The parliamentary committee that recommended lifting the lockout received 793 submissions. Of these, the most cogent and closely-argued was from Matt Barrie, CEO of the hugely successful Freelancer.com, who hit headlines a couple of years ago with a LinkedIn piece called, “Would the last person in Sydney please turn the lights off?” Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: Barrie was thoughtful but passionate. He listed some of the fine and swanky clubs destroyed - the award-winning Hugos Lounge, the ultra-chic Jimmy Liks, the beloved World Bar. He showed the desolate streets, the farewell-and-thanks notices, the chained doors. He showed international lamentation about Sydney’s vanished mojo, speculation that it was a Melbourne plot. “Mike Baird,” he said, “has turned Sydney into Detroit.” Reinforcing the WestConnex and light rail destructions, it sounded plausible. Loading But Barrie, who holds an engineering Masters from Stanford, also tested the numbers. He showed an 80 per cent drop in foot-traffic, on already declining pedestrian-flow. In 2010, he noted, City of Sydney reports showed 58 per cent of night time visitors were “going out socialising.” Five years later, that same proportion was “returning home”.

More tellingly, Barrie uses his incisive intellect to cast serious doubt on the official fudging of statistics - both to disguise the destruction and to artificially enhance the safety picture. Loading The night-life figures, he argues, are gerrymandered, using different time and place categories to disguise the drop-off. And the safety arguments are similarly mishandled. Dr Gordian Fulde has been at the centre of the safety push from the start. Thirty-year head of St Vincent's emergency, board member of the Thomas Kelly Foundation and long-time campaigner against drunken violence, he also co-authored the 2015 paper much-cited by proponents to show that the lockout was a safety-success. In 2016, two years after the lockout was introduced, Fulde described his department before it as a “war zone” and the subsequent decrease in serious head injury as “spectacular and terrific.” This Dr Fulde took as evidence of social learning, that “you don't have to be totally drunk and ugly to enjoy”.

But Barrie questions Fulde’s methods – not of doctoring, but of numeracy. In a catalogue of errors and inconsistencies, he points out a basic arithmetic mistake that saw serious alcohol-related injuries were misreported as 1564 (out of 13,110) instead of 564 and notes that, during the lockout hours (1am-4am) “the total difference is approximately 25 patients over an entire year”. Loading Even this 25, he says, is inflated by inclusion of patients who themselves have had a drink, but are far from being victims of alcohol-fuelled violence. “A lady having a glass of champagne at dinner at home, who subsequently falls down a staircase after tripping on a cat would be included in these statistics.” It’s closely argued and worth a read, or two. But the upshot is that both the rationale behind the laws, and their supposed achievement, are squashy to the point of ridicule. The one clear consequence of our five-year prohibition is the swath of cultural destruction through the heart of a city that, let’s face it, has never had culture to spare. Kings Cross has always traded on its rep as a seething den of vice. I recall my first moments there, and some wonderful, wild evenings. Now, it’s dead. The famous Coke sign presides over empty streets. And still the government wants to punish it. “Kings Cross still doesn’t have the transport options,” said committee chair Natalie Ward MLC, “but … if given better streetscape, better lighting, if it diversifies its licences … can absolutely have away forward.”

Seriously, nanny? In a touching inquiry submission, Nicholas Molnar pleaded from generational envy. “My parents would leave the house at midnight and get back home at 8 ... To say Sydney is a 24-hour city is a joke. Whilst alcohol is restricted, drugs rule the dance floor and it disgusts me …” Young Molnar yearns only to “see and experience Sydney as my brothers knew it, as my parents knew it.” Is that too much to ask?