THE BYRON SHIRE Volume 26 #45 Tuesday, April 24, 2012 Mullumbimby 02 6684 1777 Byron Bay 02 6685 5222 Fax 02 6684 1719 editor@echo.net.au adcopy@echo.net.au www.echo.net.au 23,200 copies every week
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H O P E F U L A R T E FA C T O F R E A S O N
Rudd backs binge campaign
Boarding house ‘a recipe for disaster’, court told Luis Feliu
The redevelopment of a sports centre at Brunswick Heads into a highdensity boarding house would foster anti-social behaviour similar to the inner-city suburb of Redfern in Sydney, a former police officer has warned the Land and Environment Court. At the on-site first day last Thursday of a two-day court hearing into the controversial plan to convert the gym-squash-pool complex into a 27-unit boarding house in Teven Street, rear neighbour and local motel operator Warren Dick said problems from occupants of the boarding house would spill onto surrounding streets.
‘Mental outcomes’ Former PM Kevin Rudd, left, meets local youth during a surprise visit to the Byron Youth Service on Friday. He backed a local initiative, Cringe the Binge, to tackle binge drinking among local young people. Story & photo Luis Feliu
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has lent his weight and his 1.1 million online followers to back a Byron Youth Service (BYS) initiative to tackle binge drinking among the young. During a surprise visit to the BYS centre in Byron Bay on Friday to hear about its national project Cringe the Binge and how the federal government could help, Mr Rudd immediately offered to do an on-the-spot video clip to post on YouTube for his legions of fans to promote the campaign that day. Accompanied by Richmond MP Justine Elliot, Mr Rudd said the project aimed to raise consciousness that binge drinking ‘is a problem and can stuff your brain’. After watching a video presentation of the project, he agreed with BYS director Di Mahoney that Byron Bay had a unique problem with youth binge drinking due to the tourist town’s ‘saturation’ almost every night with social drinking which reflected on youth who saw it as a normal way of life.
Mr Rudd said that contrasted starkly with his hometown Brisbane where social drinking was confined mostly to a Friday or Saturday night. Ms Mahoney told him ‘we want to reverse the culture of drinking and make binge drinking uncool’. ‘Two million tourists come to Byron each year and many are drinking every night and there’s a party atmosphere and that has a lot of impact on our kids who think it’s normal, it’s a vicious cycle,’ she said. ‘We therefore need to engage young people to get the message out.’ The Cringe the Binge project will involve a website and a national Weekend of Action each November when everyone will be asked to consider their own drinking habits and donate what they would normally spend that weekend on alcohol to the project instead, via the website. Cringe the Binge will be promoted on TV, radio, print and social media by a stable of youth ‘stars’ including sporting and music identities. Organisers also aim to hold a national conference in Byron Bay on the subject. ‘We now need seed funding to get
Mr Dick said that as a former Sydney police officer, he often worked in the high-density suburb of Redfern which had many boarding houses and blocks of units and saw first hand how the ‘mental outcomes of occupants spilt onto streets’. ‘I’m not judging them but from my experience the occupants (of boarding houses) find it hard to get on in normal society... it will also be hard to maintain and require a lot of effort when you have 12 rooms full of 30 people,’ he said. ‘There’ll be lots of baggage not just here but other streets as well, and dis-
ruption to local amenity from noise and traffic. ‘Car parking around here will be a nightmare when you have 27 people and their friends also wanting to park cars, they will overspill on the street. I envisage long-term social impacts in the area… I’ve operated down in Redfern and seen the problems from this style of housing.’ Byron Shire Council is defending its refusal of the boarding house of 34 units which it deems an overdevelopment of the site and which would set a precedent for an unacceptable level of density and destroy the village’s character. Owners of the property Murray and Julia Stebbing appealed against the councillors’ 8-1 decision last June and recently amended their plan by reducing the number of units to 27.
High distress
Brunswick Heads Progress Associit off the ground; we have $35,000 in ation president Jill Ball told the court the kitty already and hope Byron can that research showed that a majority be the first Cringe the Binge town in of boarding house residents experiAustralia, it will benefit the commuenced high psychological distress and nity and business here,’ Ms Mahoney almost a third of those having mentaltold Mr Rudd. health or drug and alcohol issues. ‘We find that in Byron Bay, youth Mrs Ball said research had also binge-drinking statistics are higher shown more than 70 per cent of than the rest of NSW if not Australia, boarding house residents were unemwe have 10,000 schoolies here every ployed and those who lived in them November and there’s a lot more liqmore than 13 weeks were categorised uor licences per head of population as being in ‘tertiary homelessness’. than in other parts of NSW. continued on page 2 ‘Recently, police identified Byron Bay as the fourth most dangerous suburb in NSW for alcohol-fuelled street violence, there were three knifings alone in the past month here, our youth worker Deb Pearse says it’s like a war zone out there some nights. ‘With this campaign, we’d like to build on our award-winning Project U-Turn to reverse the problem of youth binge drinking, and make young people aware how dangerous it is and how it can affect their health, when they’re in that zone they get into fights, drink drive, have accidents or be raped.’ Residents gather at the on-site court hearing at Brunswick Heads. See more at www.bys.org.au.
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