Forty-eight hours after Bruce Milne announced he could no longer afford to keep the doors of Collingwood’s iconic Tote Hotel open, no less a figure than John Brumby himself felt compelled to issue a statement on the matter. The Premier denied that recent revisions to liquor licensing laws were to blame for the Tote’s closure, citing the fact that increases to Milne’s license fees in 2010 were only about one thousand dollars – at his calculation, equivalent to less than the price of two pots per day.
Brumby’s statement would have been fine, were it not for the fact that Milne never said that the cost of the license increase was to blame for the Tote’s demise. From the outset, Milne told the music press that the stringent conditions associated with new licensing laws were leaving him drastically out of pocket. As a result of amendments to the Liquor Control Reform Act, which broadly classified venues on a “risk” basis determined by their proximity to the central business district and their hours of operation, Milne was obliged to install expensive CCTV cameras and pay security guards for each day his pub was licensed to be open past one in the morning. The former isn’t exactly small change, but the latter comprehensively rooted the Tote’s bottom line; the industry standard wage for security guards is between 35 and 40 dollars per hour, to say nothing of liability insurance and fees to security contractors. By Milne’s calculation, security compliance alone left him out of pocket by more than $60,000 per year. The greatest irony of this – certainly an irony not lost on Milne – is that the “high risk” conditions imposed on licensees would be unlikely to dint the profits of the owners of the larger venues where violence is a more regular occurrence, who already have more security and CCTV as a matter of course. Adding insult to injury, on the week of the Tote’s closure, a nightclub with the capacity for three thousand people was scheduled to be opened in South Melbourne, within walking distance to two other booze barns where regular police attendance on the weekend is all but an inevitability. It doesn’t take a genius to know that the next time we hear about that venue will be when the Herald Sun publishes a page three photo of some strapping young munter getting carried out the front door by a police constable or a paramedic.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that the blunt instrument of state Government policy has been brought to bear on licensees in such an absurd manner. At the height of the tabloid media’s “alcohol-fuelled violence” hysteria in 2008, the Government decided to introduce a 2am lockout for all licensed venues in the city. The shock of licensees quickly evolved into venom when, immediately before the legislation was introduced into parliament, Consumer Affairs Minister Tony Robinson announced that Crown Casino would be granted an exemption. (If you’ve ever wondered just how beholden to corporate interests the Brumby Government has become, consider that the lockout was applied to all venues regardless of their propensity for violence, then an exemption was granted to an establishment with more instances of violence than the next four worst-offending venues put together – a fact that doesn’t get the attention it deserves because of Crown’s lucrative sponsorship deals with just about every commercial media outlet in Melbourne.) In the end, the exemption was counterintuitive, as a coalition of licensees led by eccentric Cherry Bar owner James Young used it as the basis of their successful legal challenge to the lockout in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
Opposition to the lockout was buoyed by the law’s threat to the bottom line of every licensee in Melbourne. Since the Cain Labor Government’s deregulation of the hotel industry in the late eighties, and the advent of venues licensed to house thousands of people at a time, building an empire of high-capacity nightclubs with late night licenses has become an incredibly lucrative enterprise. Naturally, when the time came to take legal action, the Tony Montanas of Melbourne’s hospitality industry had deep pockets to draw from. Suffice it to say, Bruce Milne didn’t share this luxury while assessing his increasingly precarious financial situation. After unsuccessfully appealing to Liquor Licensing Victoria to reduce his hours of trade, Milne spent tens of thousands of dollars appealing to VCAT to have the Tote’s “high risk” status removed. Ultimately, Milne was only successful in having a temporary stay imposed on the conditions, on the provision that he ceased trading after one in the morning; the imminent expiry of this stay, the end of a rent freeze granted by Milne’s sympathetic landlord, and the prospect of more exorbitant legal costs informed Milne’s decision to throw in the towel.
The saving grace, in lieu of the resources of the anti-lockout campaign, was the strong outpouring of support for Milne and the Tote by 30 years’ worth of musicians, rock fans and Collingwood locals. More than two thousand people flocked to the corner of Wellington and Johnston Streets three days after the announcement to collectively mourn an institution that for so many, deflowered them of their rock and roll virginity, supported their bands, and served as a respite from an inner-city landscape where live music was already increasingly out of favour. The next day, Lord Mayor Robert Doyle condemned the Brumby Government for gutting Melbourne’s live music culture, and Eddie MacGuire used the stump afforded him by his Triple M breakfast show to lament the death of one of the pillars of his beloved Collingwood.
However much Doyle’s comments should be tempered by his well-known tendency towards embarrassing populism, and however dubious Eddie’s claim that as a “rock music station”, Triple M was required to support the Tote, it’s gratifying to know that two of Melbourne’s most influential citizens felt it necessary to directly criticise the Government’s licensing policy. It’s apparent that the Government became rattled by the uproar prompted by the Tote’s closure, further boosted by news that Elizabeth Street’s Arthouse would not renew its lease next year – to say nothing of the subsequent chorus of small-venue licensees that have come out to protest the licensing changes. Richard Wynne, the local Labor member for the inner-metropolitan seat where the Tote is located, has reportedly been the most vocal in Cabinet for a rethink of licensing laws – Wynne is currently sitting on a 3.5% margin ahead of the November state election, meaning that a change of 1500 votes could see the seat falling to the Greens on Liberal preferences. Both the Liberal Party and the Greens have sought to capitalise on the closure, despite the Liberal Party using constant reports of late night violence in the city as a big stick to beat the Brumby Government with in the media, and the Greens supporting the passage of the recent licensing changes through Parliament.
It’s been interesting to see how the Government has moderated its official line in the week after the closure. Premier Brumby initially said that Milne was only liable to pay an extra $1000 per year, a statement that was ridiculed off the airwaves by journalists when the costs of security and CCTV were pointed out. Next, the Government tried to claim that it was justified in levying these extra costs because of the incidences of violence and licensing breaches, immediately recognised as bullshit by anyone who had spent any time at the Tote, and further undermined by Milne’s claim that the local police station regarded the venue as one of the safest in the area. Had Christine Nixon still been Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, we may have seen the police union come out to lend support to this claim, but with the recent appointment of Simon Overland to succeed her, the union leadership is muting its criticism of the Government in favour of a renewed attempt at bridge building.
By Tuesday, with the credibility of its excuses all but evaporated, Tony Robinson appeared on a 7:30 Report story to declare: “we always knew that these laws would need fine-tuning” – about as much of a concession of defeat as you could expect to hear from a Government with such heavy emphasis on media management. Reports from The Age on subsequent days suggest that the Government is planning to revise the laws governing live music venues to reduce their operating costs. On Thursday, only Sue Maclellan, the Director of Liquor Licensing Victoria, was still defending the current liquor licensing policies and making smarmy reference to Milne’s lack of business acumen (heaven forbid that someone would run a bar for reasons other than trying to make a dollar). Maclellan, who has blithely defended the Government’s liquor policies through the lockout and the Tote’s closure, evidently didn’t get the memo from Brumby’s office. She even berated Milne for not seeking to negotiate with the Liquor Licensing Board, claiming his legal action in VCAT was redundant because the board would have reduced his trading hours through negotiation – presumably not knowing that Milne had already tried this avenue, with no success.
A frequent target of criticism by the Save the Tote campaign, Maclellan has gone from being a virtually unknown bureaucrat to having a massive public profile for all the wrong reasons. Having been isolated by the Government, she may end up taking the fall for the licensing laws, ultimately for nothing more than doing her job and giving her best callous bitch impression when called to account for it.

written by Sean Gleeson
photo by Steve Patrick