The importance of the Jade Monkey saga to Adelaide shouldn’t be understated.

The small live music venue and its husband-wife ownership team unwittingly became a significant catalyst for change.

John Dexter – Jade Monkey saved, but there’s still a big elephant in the room

Their ongoing battle – prolonged past the point of the mainstream media’s attention span, and perhaps the public’s – arguably led to very substantial reforms to the state’s liquor licencing act, elevated South Australia’s live music scene to near the centre of the city’s public debate, and perhaps most significantly contributed substantially to the formation of Premier Jay Weatherill’s vibrant city drive.

For Zac and Naomi Coligan, the stress of the last nine months has worn heavily. They didn’t seek to be martyrs, and they weren’t comfortable when the role was thrust upon them. Nor did they did not actively seek publicity. Indeed, they generally shunned it, concerned about the impact it would have on their only goal – getting the Jade back open. In this, they have succeeded.

And yet, their impact and legacy on the city may far outstrip the actual impact of the venue itself.

In May last year a rather strange crowd filled the Jade Monkey in its old location in Twin Street, as its final days approached. With the venue to be demolished to make way for a new city hotel, the Premier’s then deputy chief of staff, Lois Boswell, seen by some as the key figure in driving the vibrancy agenda, rubbed shoulders with representatives of the Australian Hotels Association, the office of the Liquor Licencing Commissioner, senior bureaucrats from the planning department, and a rag-tag bunch of musicians and hipsters. These are not types often in the same room together.

The Jade quite literally brought them together. A department head told me the Jade broke down the walls and silos that separated the infrastructure, arts, planning and licencing teams in government. United with a common cause, and with the Premier telling them expressedly to get the Jade Monkey fixed – another crucial development – this small group nutted out a bunch of major reforms.

The most significant of those is obviously the small bars reforms – to which the Jade Monkey’s story, along with the experiences from a scattering of other small city bars, contributed. Ironically, the Jade would never benefit. Zac’s eventual selection of venue in Flinders Street was too big for the 120-patron capacity licence.

The liquor licencing legislation as it stood entrenched a status quo that had become extremely valuable to a large number of businesses. Over many decades the money associated with liquor licencing has bent and warped that legislation out of shape; it is now a tool for maintaining and furthering a set of business interests as much as anything else.

The problem with the liquor licencing act, many vibrancy advocates argue, is that it is simply too bent, too warped. The small bars licence reform merely polishes an apple, which is rotten at the core. This is the message from the second part of the Jade’s saga – the long, sapping battle to find a new venue.

Upon finding a suitable residence for the reborn Jade, Zac had to fight a six-month battle to win a licence, a battle that came so very close to killing the venue off once and for all. Without reflecting on the competing demands and arguments of the stakeholders, surely an effective liquor licence system would not condemn a proposed venue to such prolonged purgatory?

Will the State Government continue on this path with a full review of the liquor licencing act?

The political capital required would be enormous, as Planning Minister John Rau has told InDaily in the past.

One can’t see it happening in this electoral cycle; perhaps in the next, when a new or re-elected government is looking around for causes to champion?