MIKE BAIRD USED DODGY STATS TO DEFEND LOCKOUT LAWS

By James Branson

In the face of a wave of criticism over Sydney’s draconian alcohol licence and lockout laws, Premier Mike Baird penned a Facebook post defending his government’s nightlife-destroying policies.

Turns out some of the stats he used were a little dodgy, to say the least. Baird’s claim that assaults in the CBD are down 42.2 percent was way off, with Director the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics, Dr Don Weatherburn, telling ABC radio that The Premier had based his comments on data from immediately before the laws were introduced, when in fact CBD assaults had been on a steady decline since 2008 – over five years before the laws were introduced.

“What the lockout laws did was accelerate that downward trend,” Dr Weatherburn said.

Mr Baird characterised calls for an end to lockout laws as “growing hysteria”, in his post, going on to say that “the main complaints seem to be that you can’t drink till dawn anymore and you can’t impulse-buy a bottle of wine after 10pm”.

Sorry for wanting to be treated like adults, Mike.

The Premier’s post came in the aftermath of a widely shared tirade on LinkedIn by Matt Barrie titled “Would the last person in Sydney please turn the lights out?”

Mr Barrie responded to the Premier’s post with a statistical smack-down:

The NSW Government will begin a review of the lockout laws this month, although Mike Baird doesn’t foresee any changes:

“It’s going to take a lot for me to change my mind on a policy that is so clearly improving this city,” he said.