Do you agree? Sydney is now an “an international joke.”

Is Sydney a ghost town? An international joke?

Will the last person in Sydney turn out the lights?

A blistering tirade by entrepreneur Matt Barrie about the dire state of Sydney after the introduction of lock out laws has gone viral, prompting a city-wide debate on whether the lock-out laws have changed Sydney from a vibrant, international city into a waste land.

Titled “Would The Last Person in Sydney Please Turn The Lights Out”, the 8400-word LinkedIn feature by the head of Freelancer.com has had more than 700,000 readers and is the most-read on Sydney’s Reddit site.

Talk back radio has been awash with callers reviving the Sydney vs Melbourne debate, deploring the time they walked the streets just looking for a beer after a late night and remembering the good old days of bar hopping and bouncer dodging on a vomit strewn Kings Cross street.

Matt Barrie’s essay claims that Sydney has become a ghost town.

“Walk up Bayswater Road, Oxford Street or the Golden Mile and club after club is closed; not just after 1.30am, but permanently” he writes.

“Kings Cross, in particular, has been decimated so badly that it will never, ever, come back as an entertainment precinct.”

Mr Barrie told Fairfax Media that the article had “clearly hit a nerve.”

“The Premier of Victoria tweeted it. Victoria knows how to build a cultural and social fabric for their society,” he told the newspaper.

In his essay he cites declines in foot traffic of up to 84 per cent in Kings Cross and the downfall of more than 40 nightlife venues.

“The soul of the city has been destroyed.”

He writes:

“On Saturday nights tumbleweeds blow across the main entertainment precincts for Sydney- Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and Oxford Street. And oh, how ridiculous these rules have become in Sydney. A special little person has decided that there is a certain time at night when we are all allowed to go out, and there is a certain time that we are allowed into an establishment and a certain time that we are all supposed to be tucked into bed.

It is now illegal to buy a bottle of wine after 10pm in the City of Sydney because not a single one of us is to be trusted with any level of personal responsibility. Apparently there is an epidemic of people being bashed to death over dinner with a bottle of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc that we have all been blissfully unaware of.

Mr Barrie says the ”total and utter destruction of Sydney’s nightlife is almost complete.”

A recent a City of Sydney report, on which he based his essay, found the 1.30am lockout and 3am last drinks laws have reduced the number of late-night revellers on the city’s streets while contributing to an ongoing decrease in violence and drunken antics.

At 11pm on the Friday, the study counted 2000 fewer pedestrians in the Cross – a decrease of 58 per cent.

At 4am, foot traffic was down by about 800 people apiece in Kings Cross and Oxford Street – just over 80 per cent on 2012 figures.

The report, Late Night Management Areas Research: Phase 4, recorded incidents of antisocial behaviour which they classified as serious (physical and verbal fights, shouting), less serious (staggering, vomiting and street drinking) and non-serious (“incidents of playing or singing”).

The number of serious and less serious incidents fell from 3650 in 2010 to 1327 in 2012 and then 703 in 2015 – a decrease of 80 per cent over five years.

Newtown which does not come under the lockout, was the only area that’s seen a rise in foot traffic on both Friday and Saturday nights until 4am. Pedestrian numbers were up by more than 200 per cent at their peak, with 1740 more people counted at midnight on a Saturday.

Mr Barrie quotes this report saying the damage to the nighttime economy is “staggering”.

He cites inconsistencies with the law:

“Likewise it is now illegal to have a scotch on the rocks after midnight in the City of Sydney because someone might die. You can drink it if you put some Coca-cola in it, but you can’t drink it if the Coca-cola has been mixed previously with it and it’s been put in a can. Because that is an “alcopop” whatever the hell that means. The only person more confused than me is the bartender. The poor sod is only trying to scrape a few nickels to make it through university; not only are they struggling with their hours being drastically cut back with venues shutting, but the government is now threatening them personally with fines if they break any of the rules.”

 

He squarely put the blame on the NSW Liberal Government and the influence of the two casinos in Sydney ( both which do not fall into the lock out law zone)  and refers to the single punch deaths of Thomas Kelly and Daniel Christie, after which Sydney’s nightlife laws were restructured.

 “Two young men that would be turning in their graves if they knew that their deaths had been hijacked to beat up some moral outrage over the sort of human tragedy that sells newspapers to put up a political smokescreen, push a prohibitionist evangelical agenda, sell a suburb to developers, and boost the coffers of a couple of casinos.”

He says the result is a city where it is harder to buy a drink than in Pyongyang.

It is not a topic he holds dear alone, only last year British comedian Russell Brand has criticised Sydney’s lockout laws saying ““Anything that impairs people’s personal freedom, generally speaking, or collective freedoms or public freedoms I am broadly against.”

But Senior Australian of the Year, Gordian Fulde a central figure in the push for lock-out laws in the Cross, has recently described the decrease in severe head injuries since the laws were introduced as “spectacular and terrific”. He told a query on Q&A this week about whether we were becoming a nanny state that it wasn’t about the individual.

“It is not all about you, the individual. The cost to the system, the hospitals, the ambulance, the police, the loss of income, all that sort of thing and a lifetime of brain injury care. It is not just about the single decision — aren’t we lucky we don’t have guns like America?”

What do you think? Has Sydney lost its soul?