Keep Sydney Open Challenge Young Lockout Supporters To Stage Their Own Rally

Lockout-opposed collective Keep Sydney Open have published a video challenging any young Sydneysiders who support the city’s controversial lockout laws to holy a rally in support of them.

The video comes just days after a Fairfax and ReachTEL poll of 1,600 voters across NSW found that 60% of young people are in favour of the New South Wales lockout laws, and even want them extended.

Tyson Koh from Keep Sydney Open begins the video (below) by thanking all the supporters of their cause. He then addresses the Fairfax poll directly.

“This poll apparently displays the overwhelming support for the lockouts,” he says. “The thing that has a lot of people scratching their heads is that apparently a lot of this support comes from young people.”

He then fires cynically-tinged shots across the bow of these alleged lockout-supporting youths.

“What I’d like to do is issue a challenge. Indeed if there is that much support for the lockout, then what Keep Sydney Open would like to do is see you guys have a rally,” he says.

“We had one about six months ago in February and it was one of the best attended single-issue rally’s in memory. So I’d like to see something similar from all of the people who support the lockouts.”

Earlier in the video, Koh also speaks about what has been lost thanks to the lockout laws, and challenges anyone to “come into the city at night, around Darlinghurst and Oxford Street… around 9pm to see for yourself. See if it compares with the vibrancy of Sydney in the ’70s and ’80s, or even five or ten years ago”.

“We’ve moved beyond this false dichotomy of lockouts or no lockouts, as if they are the only options available to us,” Koh says.

“There’s a whole suite of solutions that we could instead engage in, that would mean we’re kept safe as well as allowing people to go out and have a good time.”

The results of the Fairfax and ReachTEL poll Koh mentions inspired a Fairfax article titled ‘No surprise the young support lock-out laws’, though Stoney Roads were quick to point out that the article was written by Domain Review Editor and longtime property journalist Jennifer Duke, who was unlikely to provide the most balanced of opinions on the subject.

Watch Keep Sydney Open’s message for young lockout law supporters (and non-fans), below.

Watch: Keep Sydney Open Challenges Lockout Supporters To Hold A Rally

Gallery: The Funniest Anti-Lockout Banners From The ‘Keep Sydney Open’ Rally (21.02.16)