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Jade Monkey not the end of licencing issue

Jul 08, 2013

On the surface, the Jade Monkey finally winning their liquor license is fantastic. Soon the venue will be back up and running in the old St Paul’s site off Pulteney Street.

It will once more provide Adelaide with a consistent stream of live music from new and established local acts. The venue is bigger than the old one, and what better place for gig-goers to come and pay tribute to local bands than an old church?

Yet, behind this lovely exterior and hard-fought victory, there is a reminder that the issues that surround establishing a venue in Adelaide have not gone away. It took nine months for this to happen in a city riddled with dozens of empty buildings.

Last year this subject was broached en masse. The impending destruction of the old Jade was a rallying point for those tired of the status quo in Adelaide’s cultural scene. Heck, the Premier and Mayor even sat in on a panel in the Jade Monkey to discuss with what we might now term “young entrepreneurs” and the issues that were preventing them from successfully setting up and running their businesses.

Those problems are, in brief, the restrictive entanglement of legislation relating to liquor licensing, the building code, noise restrictions and town planning. As National Live Music Co-ordinator and former Adelaidean, Dr Ianto Ware puts it: “South Australia has the most outmoded licensing laws in the entire country.”

The biggest hurdle for the Jade Monkey over the past year was overcoming the needs test, which provides any neighbour of a potential venue the right to legally object to a liquor license application. This was meant to function as a way of servicing the needs of the community, but now it is commonly used to sink venues before they’re afloat with a Manhattan-style barrage of legal proceedings.

This time, a nearby church was legally able to sap the Jade’s finances and prolong negotiations if they didn’t agree to certain conditions, like providing the name, address and telephone details of everyone employed in the venue. A spokesman from the church has stated that they were “delighted with the work our Barrister and Solicitor did”. I’ll bet they were. They had a legal avenue to cajole a live music venue into limiting the services they could provide their customers. Love thy neighbour?

Last year, we had broad acknowledgment from the politicos that the system is a mess, and what has come of that acknowledgement? The obvious necessity of reform in Adelaide to bring us up to speed with the rest of the country still sits, gathering dust, in the too-hard-basket.

There has been progress, it’s true. The establishment of the small venue licence was a great step forward for venues and night-life in Adelaide. In years to come we should see culture flourish in small venues under this new licence, hopefully to the degree it has in cities all around the country. However, this licence doesn’t effectively cover the problems with existing legislation for venues of more than 120 people. It’s a band aid on a hemorrhaging wound.
The legislative elephant in the room is still there, angrily stamping around, braying in venue runners’ faces, but ignored by those in the position to effect change. The nine month period between drinks for the Jade Monkey proves the difficulty in setting up a venue in the city yet again.

State and local government rallied behind keeping the Jade Monkey intact, volunteering expertise and some funds to make sure they would find a new home. It was a noble and wise effort considering the public outcry when we learned the Jade would be demolished. Yet, even with these resources it took the better part of a year to find a suitable place in Adelaide. This wasn’t because the owners of the Jade Monkey are finicky and wanted to find the one perfect spot. It was due to the unfortunate confluence of out-dated legislation.

The efforts that proved so popular in the youth electorate have extended into the vibrancy campaign, Splash Adelaide, small bar licence and entrepreneurial hubs. But it will become very tiresome if the Government is required to step in every time there is a public outcry over a venue’s closure. What is needed is a wholesale effort to reform the laws that govern how these places are set up. It will make pollies’ and punters’ lives easier in the long run.

The Jade Monkey is not the end of this issue, nor was it the beginning. We will see countless venue runners come up against the might of wealthy Goliaths in Adelaide, only to be struck down because of out-dated, inhibiting and anti-competitive legislation.

That is, of course, unless those in power actually do something about it.

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