Liquor licence fees have increased in the state of Victoria so the liquor industry is able to pay for the social inconvenience it causes whenever it participates in the sort of cultural event you will notice covering virtually every brochure that promotes Victoria as Australia’s heartland of food and wine. It’s a sort of user-pays system of law and order, or so we are informed.Last night I would have paid good money for some law and order, but there was none available. Even as I write, I am sitting in a townhouse in the Victorian beach resort of Torquay, a place that through an amnesia of a spectacular scale in the planning department, has transformed itself from an idyllic seaside village into a hideous extension of Geelong’s western suburbs.Not only does the place occupy about twenty times the size it did about ten years ago, but it’s just crawling with people. Fair enough, you’d think Ð why develop the place if it’s to turn into a ghost town? It also happens to be the last weekend of summer, and despite some rather ordinary weather, it’s packed. No worries there either. But a lot of the people here, like us, are here for a short time, but a good time.Anyone who knows me well understands with 100% clarity that I love a decent party. I’m quite talented at staging them as well Ð even to the extent that my book launch in October brought with it some uninvited guests in blue. But that was ok too Ð I was able to resolve the issue to the satisfaction of all and they never came back.So at 1.22 am this Sunday morning I found myself calling the brand-new Torquay police station with a suggestion that some of their representatives might communicate with my new-found immediate neighbours, whose guests seemed to have formed the view that they were in fact, in King Street, Melbourne, instead of being surrounded on all sides by fellow residents of Torquay trying to snatch some sleep. I’m usually pretty lenient about this sort of thing, but when your door is being bashed down by would-be guests with alcoholically impaired satnav systems and social awareness cues, when your son is wondering if war has been declared, when your wife has bumped loudly and ungraciously into a cupboard while trying to figure out what’s going on, when your German Shepherd is wondering what flavour her new guests might taste of and your cat has buried himself under a spare bed, you feel you have the right to ask for help. And for somebody to respond.The brand-new Torquay police station was of no bloody use at all. I could leave a phone message there, the answering machine said, and a well-meaning representative of the law might just call me the next day. So I called the police at Geelong, the nearest city, about thirty minutes from here. They took my call at 1.24 am, declaring that while there was no police in my immediate area, they might be able to get someone to drop in from Geelong or even Airey’s Inlet, about twenty minutes the other way. When I called again at 1.41 am, to check that someone was coming, they said that they had nobody able to attend. But there was good news Ð an Emergency police crew was still in the area and had just completed a call. All I had to do was to call Emergency 000 and someone would be with me in mere moments. So at 1.43 am I took their advice, and was told all was in hand, and that someone would attend to the neighbours and I could go back to bed. Nearly an hour later, with the thin walls of my townhouse shaking as if adjacent to a malfunctioning nuclear reactor playing host to a rave party, I called 000 again, only to be told precisely the same thing: go to bed and all will be well.All of which proved to be the greatest load of verbal garbage. Nobody showed. Nobody called. Nobody did anything. That’s not to criticise the people who might have showed up, called or done something about it. They were probably running around trying to keep pace with a series of significantly greater issues where lives, not just my family’s sleep and sanity, might have been at stake. It’s not their fault.The people I’d like a piece out of are those who decided that despite creating a brand-new police station in a large, sprawling holiday destination like Torquay, it shouldn’t be populated by police men or women on Saturday nights, especially nights like the last Saturday of summer when people are certainly going to push the edge of the envelope. I guess in truth that I’ve learned an interesting lesson: it’s Wild West out here. If somebody had actually pressed a little harder on my front door at 2.30 am and actually got in, I’d have to deal with it myself. There is nobody here to help; nobody. So in future, I figure, I’ll only book into a holiday destination with a police station that actually has police in it during the hours of likely greatest demand.That’s what we pay taxes for. This is what the small winemakers, brewers and those who stage the sort of interesting experiences during broad daylight that our governments use to attract more visitors will have to pay more of from now on. But if the government reckons it’s all about user-pays, who can I call on to pay at two in the morning when I need the very help that they don’t want to provide?
