There’s currently a war raging in Sydney and at the centre of the battle is the city’s controversial late-night lockout laws. The dire situation engulfing the NSW capital’s nightlife has reentered the public consciousness after NSW Premier Mike Baird praised the lockouts on Facebook.
In a post that’s been criticised as condescending and inaccurate, Baird wrote that violence has dropped in Kings Cross and the Sydney CBD. However, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics recently revealed that Baird was using faulty data to come to those conclusions.
Baird’s post has since gone viral and has been criticised by many Australian musicians, including Flight Facilities, Alison Wonderland, Yolanda Be Cool, and Nina Las Vegas. Now, Art Vs Science have shared a biting and rather catchy anthem protesting the lockout laws.
“Lock us out, lock us in and lock us down / Turn this wild city to a sleepy little town / Misguided rains you’re pouring heavy from above / But you can’t contain the flames of the fire that we love“, the band sing on the track, which the band recently uploaded to SoundCloud.
The track had previously appeared on the band’s 2015 album, Off the Edge of the Earth and Into Forever, Forever.
“We wrote a song about the frustration we felt from your government’s lockout laws,” the band wrote on Facebook. “You could have made public transport available from kings cross late at night, or changed the taxi changeover time, or allowed venues to choose their own closing time (like the UK did).”
“You could have encouraged other nightlife venues to be made further away from the city. You could have addressed the latent aggression of a society divided by money and social status, bubbling to the surface after a few drinks. But you didn’t.”
“You and your government chose instead to throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Readers can check out ‘You Got To Stop’ below.
