The Age’s editorial today is very disappointing, raising a few new arguments for Victoria’s new 2am lockout, but ultimately failing to justify the policy.

The comparison between the lockout and the regulation of trading hours is interesting. But the justifications for lockouts and trading hours regulations are entirely different. The latter is supposed to protect employees from being forced to work excessive hours. Whether you agree with them or not, it is possible to argue that trading hours regulations are part of a suite of labor laws.

But the sole purpose of a lockout is to restrict certain forms of consumption, where the government bans the community from purchasing goods or services in order to deter the actions of a small minority. Banning consumption, or limiting it to certain hours, is a restriction on civil liberty, no matter how blithely the editorial writer dismisses it. As the lockout reveals, the existence of civil liberties becomes more obvious when they are lost.

More worryingly, the editorial continues the trend of blurring the distinction between the lockout and the Federal binge drinking campaign. But binge drinking doesn’t cause violence. Certainly, in most of the highly publicised incidents of violence, alcohol is involved. But it is nevertheless not clear that lowering the binge drinking rate will similarly lower incidents of violence. Drinking late at night is at best a secondary cause of violence - the first cause is a belief that one can get away with lawlessness. As a consequence, the most direct way to tackle street violence is police. If the government was serious about the issue, they would be dramatically increasing the police in the CDB late at night - a view which appears to be shared by the police themselves.

Indeed, editorial writer appears to be subconsciously aware of this. As they write, “The problem that the lockout is intended to overcome is violence spawned by binge drinking, which typically takes place elsewhere, in night clubs and pubs with late licences.”

The answer then is surely not to impose an untargeted ban on late-night bar-hopping - punishing the small bars which the writer appears to be fond of - but instead to target those specific night clubs and pubs where violence is most common. A story that has gotten much attention today has been one where a strip club bouncer got into a brawl at 4:30am Sunday morning on King Street. Melbournians will know Kings Street as a seedy part of town inhabited almost entirely by strip clubs - a well-resourced police force would have been able to predict that this was a potentially violent part of town, and a potentially violent time of the week. (Apparently, Herald Sun readers voted King St as the most dangerous area of the city.)

And the editorial fails the recognise the crucial importance of the licence freeze to Melbourne’s nightlife. The 2am lockout is very high profile, but constitutes only one part of the state government’s attack on the city’s culture.

Nevertheless, by avoiding the issue of shortfalls in policing, and trying to squeeze the lockout into a narrative about binge drinking, The Age’s editorial misses the crucial issue with the 2am lockout - the lockout does not directly tackle the problem it seeks to address. And while doing so, it imposes draconian restrictions on the vast majority of law-abiding Melburnians, dramatically curtailing the nightlife that the city is justifably proud of.