It happens to the best of us; an insouciant selfie here, a self-aware gleeful live-tweet stream there. But it’s easy to get cocky and start to feel like your social media followers are like real ones; admiring, loyal, and supportive of your ideals and political framework.
Yesterday Mike Baird posted an impassioned Facebook response to the recent spate of articles arguing that excessive regulation has seen Sydney turn from a once vibrant city to a joyless nanny state. The lockout laws, introduced by Baird’s predecessor but enthusiastically supported and policed by Baird’s administration, have been blamed for a slew of restaurant and bar closures in Kings Cross and the CBD, a stifling of the local music scene, and such incongruous and unsettling sights as drug sniffer dogs at Boy Charlton Pool.
“Let’s start with a statistic about Sydney’s nightlife that matters: alcohol related assaults have decreased by 42.2 per cent in the CBD since we introduced the “lock-out laws,” began the post.
“…There has been a growing hysteria this week about nightlife in Sydney.
The main complaints seem to be that you can’t drink till dawn any more and you can’t impulse-buy a bottle of white after 10pm.”
The characterisation of the complaints as tantamount to whining that 'the service in this joint is terrible', led to almost ten thousand responses, most of which appeared resentful of his flippancy. Many also attacked him for cynically using the deaths of two young men in Kings Cross to justify a political agenda.
Before long, commenters questioned why the lockout zone's odd shape happened to encircle, though strangely not include, Star city Casino, and the handful of Sydney bars who have been granted exemption to the lockout laws as long as they stop serving alcohol and any other form of entertainment other than pokie machines.
Higher than AFL *and* Channel 9! Source: Twitter
And so, #casinomike was born.
Poor Mike. We hope you're not taking it too hard. Or if you are, maybe you can take solace in someone who knows what it's like to be suddenly to be suddenly and inexplicably cast in the cold. Remember this guy?
That's Michael Turnbull, reject from The Bachelorette, for those of you who don't share Baird's taste in TV. Source: Network Ten
