#kso

Prior reviews: none, this is a new party

I’m not going to bullshit you here. Live music is my life. If I go to seventy gigs in a year, it’s been a quiet year. I’m better at standing in the audience than performing on stage, which is why I am a historian rather than a frontman or a guitarist in a band you might know. I have no idea what I would do or who I would be without live music—but I do know that I would be a lesser person in a worse place.

Moving from Melbourne, one of the world’s great music hubs, to NSW in order to chase my academic career has not been easy. This state does not make it easy for creative people to thrive. It lets that awful fucking casino get away with everything, while stigmatising the night-time economy. It’s moronic because it means what late-night events do exist—especially in a city like Wollongong, where I live—are the most absolute unsafe trash. Everybody with talent is moving to Melbourne and everybody who wants to see them is sitting on their arse at home rather than having a social life. If you want to start a music venue or run live events, you are going to find yourself up against a system that assumes violence is the default and does not give a shit about what a cultural life means for the community.

So, look, I’m entirely with this party’s objectives. I don’t like some of their rhetoric about the “nanny state”, which is usually a lazy crutch relied upon by right-wing whingers, but in general this party’s policies appeal to me. They are a bit narrow, a bit single-issue, despite gestures towards larger concerns, so they will not be at the top of my preferences. Parliaments handle a vast array of business, after all; I have emphasised in past elections my dislike for single-issue parties no matter how much I support the issue. But Keep Sydney Open have made some effort to address questions of small business, policing, cultural heritage, and social inclusion. They are new and they are galvanised by an important issue. Good on them.