The Banning of Grunge: Tammy Franks vs the Culture Cops

After a break of several weeks, during which I’ve shamelessly neglected this blog, I’m now (a) no longer employed full time with Renew Adelaide and (b) spending the next few weeks as a Writer in Residence with the SA Writers Centre. Whilst I’m here, I’ll be updating my ‘award winning’ book, ’21 Nights in July’ and working on my ‘long awaited’ personal history of the Building Code, of which this blog is the testing ground.

Thus, blogging on the topic of mundane planning regulations and subculture resumes. And to begin with, here’s the speech I delivered at the AGM for the South Australian Greens a couple of days back, written in response to MLC Tammy Frank’s recent speech in Parliament on amendments to the Liquor Licensing Act designed to remove references to ‘entertainment’, which you can read here. Her colleague Mark Parnell tells me there’s now a subcommittee consisting of members of all major parties continuing to review the Act, and the Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure along with the Premier’s Office certainly seem to be moving pretty positively towards reform.

That said, as Tammy’s speech pointed out, we still have a regulatory system populated with ‘Culture Cops’, and that in itself is a bit of an issue. So, taking that as my starting point, here’s the full speech:

***

A while back Tammy Franks put up an amendment to the Liquor Licensing Act of 1997 aiming to remove the word ‘entertainment’ from the Act, which basically follows a precedent set in NSW. They either removed or altered ‘Entertainment’ definitions from their licensing and planning acts in 2008, and also put through a variation to the Building Code of Australia, specifying that things like music and arts venues weren’t subject to the same level of building compliance as, say, the Festival Centre or a 50,000 person sports stadium. Which they are everywhere else in the country.

Tammy’s speech contained two phrases. First off, she referred to a liquor license granted to a city café which specified that, whilst they could serve alcohol, they couldn’t do so whilst ‘Grunge’ bands were performing. This led to one of the few occasions in which a parliamentary speech has been interjected with calls of ‘Grunge is not dead!’ But it led to another point she made, in which she pondered why licensing law should specify that ‘Grunge’ bands and alcohol can’t both appear in a café. Tammy referred to this as the work of the ‘Culture Cops’ because someone had obviously made a decision that ‘Grunge’ wasn’t allowed. Maybe they just really hated Pearl Jam, which is fair enough.

Which is sort of where I come in. I was previously the CEO of Renew Adelaide, I’m a board member of Renew Australia, and I founded a community run creative space called Format. I’m also an advocate for bridging the gap between planning and cultural policy, currently trying to popularise the expression ‘subcultural policy’, worked on the Raise the Bar campaign, and, thanks to those roles, I routinely see the Culture Cops doing things that would be hilarious if they weren’t so tragically stupid.

Both myself and, apparently, a lot of you find it weird that we have people who police culture. And once you wade through the regulatory and legal semantics that make it seem like it’s just a benign issue of public health and safety, there is a system in place that polices culture.

You quite literally need a license to be entertaining. That license is harder to obtain than simply serving booze to people watching TV. It’s harder to obtain the necessary approvals – which need to come through separate systems of planning, building compliance, noise restrictions and liquor licensing – for a music venue than it is to set up a Pokies lounge.

There’s something within that which suggests a legal enforcement of passivity. You don’t need a license to be bored. You don’t need a license to stare at a screen (provided that screen is under a certain size. Big screens are, under our Liquor Licensing Regulations, ‘entertaining’). But as soon as someone steps foot on a stage, or strums a guitar, all hell supposedly breaks loose. Now, if we had a government agency called the ‘Passivity Enforcement Agency’ or the “Agency Preventing the Performance of Grunge Music”, we’d think that was Orwellian. But run it through licensing enforcement and local council and call it ‘Public Health and Safety’ and it seems to be accepted.

It’s tempting to say this is an issue of poor government or a specific governmental agency stuffing up, but it’s more complex than that. There are plenty of people in government who struggle with the Culture Cops. There are Culture Cops themselves who don’t really understand why they’re policing grunge.

Whilst there are certainly a lot of ‘I regulate therefore I am’ types out there, and there is a role for wider community dialogue on human resource policy, this is also an issue of a system that’s (a) historically very old – licensing policy dates back to around the 1720s and is, indeed, older than the police force and virtually every other form of cultural policy (b) has been recruiting, training and producing a profession based around the policing of culture since the start of the industrial revolution and (c) accordingly has both a history and an entrenched profession that makes often quite weird regulatory systems appear ‘common sense’.

As an example, I’ve been working with Suzie Wong’s Room, a tiny 80 person bar on Port Road, which has become a focal point for Culture Cop antics at their very worst. The owner, Nina Jerebica, did everything right – and was initially praised by the Culture Cops for having done so, and was accordingly told she’d be granted a Restaurant License with Entertainment Consent. I’ve used her as an example before, and I hope she won’t mind me doing so again. Her case is a text book example of faults within the regulation of licensing and culture.

Nina’s problems began when, after submitting her application, an employee in the Office of Liquor Licensing and Gaming (OGLC) incorrectly informed her that the license had been processed when, in fact, it hadn’t. There’s never really been a clear explanation as to why this happened, but from an outside perspective it looks like a communications lapse within the OGLC. Which in itself isn’t abnormal – those things happen in large departments handling complex paperwork. Except this led to Suzie Wong’s Room operating under the mistaken belief that they were licensed, until they were raided for the first of many times by the Licensing Enforcement Division of SAPOL (the SA Police), who told them they weren’t.

Why SAPOL ultimately delivered the news the venue wasn’t properly licensed, when the application was lodged with the OGLC, who are ultimately, responsible for processing it, is something I’m not even going to pass conjecture on.

On top of that, the Culture Cops within the City of Charles Sturt have their own little licensing policy, which specifies, and I quote:

“Any Entertainment provided shall not […] be advertised or promoted to the general public in any fashion which promotes the premises as an entertainment venue.”

Councils currently have a right to insert clauses into liquor licenses through the licensing conciliation process, so they inserted that into hers. And most of them do that. The ACC does the same thing. If you want a restaurant license in the ACC area with an entertainment consent, their Liquor Licensing policy dictates that:

“Entertainment shall be limited to solo artists, two piece jazz bands or similar.”

Again, I’m not sure how a specification for ‘jazz bands’ has anything to do with liquor licensing. But this is probably why the café mentioned above can’t host ‘Grunge’. Whoever wrote the ACC licensing policy evidently did like jazz, but not Grunge.

The ACC’s current licensing policy was put in place in 2007 and was due for review in 2010. To my knowledge, it still hasn’t been updated, although in their defence Council passed a motion on April 24^th of this year that their administration should prepare a report on how it might be updated. Not having any formal relationship with Council, I’m not sure how that process is rolling out. But I have seen the report written after that meeting in which they report on the need to do a report.

Regardless, in the face of local government Culture Cops, Nina committed the sin of thinking it might be nice to have live music, because apparently some people like listening to live music more than they like watching TV or sitting in silence. I don’t think she’s ever hosted Grunge bands, but she’d often have bands either providing background music or putting on shows. It’s a pretty small venue, so the bands weren’t exactly huge.

Regardless, she advertised them via a sandwich board out the front, posters in the window and on her Facebook page – all three of which make it obvious that she runs a little restaurant, not an ‘entertainment venue’. But there is live music and live music, apparently, is entertaining, and by advertising it in any way – even on a Facebook page clearly defining the venue as a restaurant – Nina was, according to the Culture Cops, running an illegal entertainment venue. Which is apparently a licensing issue, because drinking is one thing, but drinking whilst being entertained is a whole other issue.

So the Culture Cops from the LED went apeshit and took her to court, both for having operated without a license (which the OGLC appeared to have lost) and for breaching Council’s conditions that the venue couldn’t be advertised as an entertainment venue. And told her she needed to reapply for an Entertainment License.

So she applied for an Entertainment License, and the Culture Cops in the Council went apeshit and told her she’d need to change all her existing planning approvals, and apply for new ones, in the same category as the Entertainment Centre, because an Entertainment Venue is very different from a Restaurant with an Entertainment Consent, even if for all extensive purposes the business itself is doing exactly the same thing and only the label has changed. Unfortunately, whilst the label might have changed, the business hadn’t and an 80 person bar can’t exactly reach the same sorts of building compliance as a 15,000 seat music venue.

So then there was some more licensing commission hearings, and Court appearances in which Nina was charged for the OGLC losing her paperwork, and Council protested that they hadn’t actually intended the condition about ‘not promoting the premises as an entertainment venue’ to mean she couldn’t promote entertainment, and then for several months, Licensing had a long debate about whether a counter bar was the same as a table and decided it wasn’t and someone from an agency I won’t name told Nina she’d be all right if she just kept dirty plates on all the tables, because apparently that did something no one but they seem to understand. Also, Council got really upset about the tread height of the stairs, which they hadn’t initially cared about but then they decided they did.

The most incomprehensible was a police report that listed, and I quote, “a play on words to continue to breech the conditions of her license.” This related to a joke on the Suzie Wong’s Facebook site about hosting a ‘jazzy trio melody pizza’. How a ‘play on words’ makes a venue any more dangerous a place to drink is beyond me, but I can only be thankful it wasn’t a Grunge Trio Melody Pizza, in which case it would probably have been a crime under the Prevention of Disrespect to Kurt Cobain Act.

It went on and on. The only word to describe it was ‘convoluted’, with Licensing, SAPOL and the Local Government all pitching in with their own opinions, all charging their own fees, and all doing so in relative isolation from each other.

And herein likes a major part of the problem, not both in Adelaide but nationally. It is routine to have three totally detached silos of government trying to assert state and local planning ordinances, building compliance, and state and local licensing policy, with no consistent mechanisms of communication either with each other or with Nina.

Whilst there is a strong case that the Culture Cop mentality is a human resource and capacity building problem, most people in most jobs are just normal people and, given the opportunity, most of them probably don’t give a shit about the distinction within regulatory frameworks about ‘Jazz’ and ‘Grunge’. And most of them probably wouldn’t want to have to spend three years in court just because some small bar had booked Doe.

Or, my god, can you imagine the nightmare if Tortoise toured? Horror!

Maybe they’d only be allowed to play if David Pajo wasn’t in the line-up? Although on the upside that might settle any debates about whether Slint were associated with Grunge or not.

Regardless, the end result was that Suzie Wong’s, despite doing everything right, had to spend more than $10,000 going through a regulatory process that, in NSW – which removed ‘Entertainment’ clauses – would have cost her about $500. Horrible to watch was the degree to which there was no affordable or clear recourse for her to appeal, no consistency and no clear path forward.

Ultimately, we only started to make positive headway because senior state government planners have got involved in unravelling the missing chains of communication, the inconsistencies and bewilderment.

And I must say that I’ve been impressed by the State Government’s increased interest in dealing with the Culture Cops, as have I by the Liberals and, indeed, the Greens. The bipartisan support for re-thinking how we handle Culture Cops is honestly very positive to see.

But we shouldn’t need to get senior state government employees involved in saving an 80 person venue from over-regulation, and we shouldn’t need to run campaigns like Raise the Bar or pass amendments to make ‘Entertainment’ legal in South Australia. It shouldn’t take a Deputy Premier and his senior staff wading through the reports of a local government planner to let an 80 person bar host a few bands, jazz or otherwise, and by rights I should be here talking about cultural policies that would allow us to help support the kind of world we want to see, not discussing technical definitions of entertainment pertaining to ‘Grunge’ and ‘Jazz’.

Unfortunately, we currently face a situation whereby it is easier to set up a bar where people sit around staring at a TV, or simply staring at a wall, or worse yet, playing the pokies, than it is to obtain entertainment consent. In his brilliant book The Mayor’s A Square, and his report to the Australia Council and the NSW Arts ministry entitled ‘Vanishing Acts’, Shane Homan enforces this point, looking at the way hosting live music or entertainment has simply been made economically unviable through excessive regulation. Even if a pub or a bar wanted to host a band, or wanted to host music and art over dedicating rooms to pokies, the regulatory costs would be so astronomical they probably wouldn’t survive. He argued that, in NSW, there was a legally enforced, economic incentive to prioritise pokies and binge drinking over live entertainment, and concluded that such a system enforced passivity and discouraged participatory cultural engagement. Following the work of musicians-turned-activists like John Wardle, NSW changed their laws. We’re now trying to do that here.

Like I said, if we had a government department called ‘The Department for Preventing People Playing Grunge’ we’d think that was pretty Orwellian. But we effectively have agencies that perform that role, and the Culture Cops who run them conceal that impact by presenting themselves as guardians of public health and safety. Maybe they do that with the best of intents, maybe they do it because the systems are too confusing to find solutions, maybe they do it because they hate Pearl Jam.

Regardless, in the face of massive public dissatisfaction and the scrutiny of elected members and senior policy advisors from all major political parties in the State at the current time, the status quo within regulatory frameworks remains a stubborn beast to change. Indeed, in many quarters, it’s still perceived as ‘common sense’ that banning Grunge and word plays on Facebook will make us safer when we drink. It is this assumption, more than just the wording of a particular Act, that Tammy’s speech brought into the spot light because it strips this logic back to what it is: a policing of cultural production that seems to have little real logic behind it.

To conclude, I had a conversation with a guy in Victoria who was a musician and now runs music venues. He’s been dealing with very similar issues, and has this argument based on Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that:

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts […]

He argued that if the cultural life of our community includes Grunge, then we have a right to freely participate in it. We have a right to make word plays on Facebook. We have a right to learn three chords and go form a band and get up on a stage. And to paraphrase Kurt Cobain himself, we have a right to walk into venues like Suzie Wong’s and say “Here we are now, let us entertain ourselves” without fear that someone employed to moderate alcohol sales of all things, can dictate what form that entertainment takes.