Councillor Jess Scully on planning a better Sydney

As Sydney continues to grow in terms of population, there has been a palpable shift towards focusing on housing residents instead of providing them with culture and entertainment.

Right now, the City of Sydney is seeking a response from the community regarding initiatives to boost the culture and night-time economy of Sydney.

And while some may fear that move away from culture – particularly with the rising cost of living and evolving laws governing the city’s nightlife precincts – there is a glimmer of hope in the form of Councillor Jess Scully.

The creative industries expert, event director and public art curator is bringing her years of experience to the City of Sydney, in a bid to use her creativity and the arts to engage communities.

She isn’t one to shy away from the current situation faced by Sydneysiders who don’t want to fall out of love with their city.

“Sydney’s had a really rough couple of years. Our nightlife and our live music scenes have taken a total battering and it’s for a number of reasons.”

Scully explains that the shift to residential housing has “put a lot of pressure on existing venues and the lock-out laws”.

“We’re going to be feeling the effects for a really long time to come, and I don’t think we’ve ever really measured the real impact.”

“A lot of what we have is anecdotal, and it’s around foot traffic being down 80 per cent in places like Kings Cross. And we see the impact in places like Oxford Street, and the fact that Newtown has had a 300 per cent increase in people coming through Newtown station on the weekend.”

In order to get a better idea of how the local government plans to build a more creative and open Sydney, and how we, as individuals, can help make those plans a reality, we sat down with the Councilor for a chat.

How would we go about capturing, in a more measurable sense, how much of an impact the lockout laws have had?

I don’t know if there is [a model for measuring it]. How do we capture what’s lost? We will never know the artists and musicians and performers that we didn’t get, that missed out on having a stage. You can’t measure lost potential in that way.

I think the most positive thing that we can do is, rather than look back and think, “how have we been disadvantaged by this?” is to say, “well, what would it take to fix it and how can we make it better than it was before?”

You know, culture thrives in oppression and it’s sometimes the kind of impetus that you need as a city to start a movement and to appreciate what we have and to fight for our right to be in the city and to fight to make sure that just because we’re seeing a lot of demographic change in the city, that culture and diversity and creativity isn’t priced out of the city.

Given that the CBD is not hugely residential, but rather business-based, you would think that this would be the perfect area to have places that are open until the sun comes up?

Yeah, I do think [the perfect area] should be the CBD and I also think it should be the western part of the city, where we’re seeing a lot of small bars. There’s a real opportunity for us. You can access it by public transport which is the key thing that you need.

We need to think if we want to give people more options and want to see nightlife in different places, how do we incentivise that?

A lot of this comes down to planning and zoning. To say the CBD offers an opportunity, Oxford Street [also] offers an opportunity. Where else is there? Is it Alexandria? Is it Zetland? Where else can we have nightlife and what kind of nightlife do we have? Not everything is about bands and live music. We also need to have theatre, nightclubs, cabaret, cinema and electronic music.

You can’t let the market dictate [planning and zoning]. That’s the point of politics, really. That’s why we’re here is to say, “This is changing but this is important to the culture of the city. It’s important to the economy of the city. We need to maintain this”.

Do you think Keep Sydney Open provides an infrastructure to get through to younger people?

I think it’s a really great starting point and it’s helped make visible the fact that there’s a lot more young people in this sector. But we need to take it beyond clicktivism and we need to find new ways for young people to have their voices heard by local and state government in particular.

Anyway, that’s the medium-term game. The short-term game, and what the city’s doing right now, is [a] two-pronged approach. The first is that we’ve created new grants, so this is really important. There’ll be briefing sessions, and if you’ve never put music on in your venue and you want to try it out, or if you need additional sound-proofing work done to your venue, you can get a grant to do that.

The other way that we’re doing the work on making sure we can keep venues in the city is that we’ve released a discussion paper around introducing noise and building codes to the city, and also different uses for spaces. Partly this is because at the moment, there are three different agencies or the police and council and different people who respond to noise complaints. There are different standards. It’s all pretty subjective. How do we consolidate that and make it more consistent for people so they have some certainty about putting something on, that they’re not going to get shut down?

Do you feel like potential venue owners have too many regulations placed on them, while there’s maybe not enough on, say, property developers?

What we need is a holistic vision for the city that says, “People want to live, work and play,” and if we preference one of those things too far over the other, we don’t get a good result for today or for the future. One of the problems that we have is that right now is residential development, which brings in so many more dollars, more than any other type of development. So if you just let the market decide, every single thing you look at would become an apartment building.

One of the things that we’ve got that’s been sitting in front of the state government for about a year now is called the Central Sydney Planning Policy. It’s radically redesigning the heights in the city, but it’s saying that [at] the bottom of buildings, you have to have commercial and then you could have residential above a certain point. Which is important because if you want culture and nightlife uses of the city, you don’t want apartment buildings on level one. You want apartment buildings on level 50.

The other thing we need to do is build more capacity and resilience in the [music] sector, to build that leadership and come to us and say, “This is what we want,” not to say, “Hey, government, what are you going to do about it?” Great ideas very rarely come from government and also this is what people do every single day, people who run venues and put on shows. They know best where people will travel to and where people won’t travel to so I’d love to hear from them.

It’s really easy to be disheartened by our federal politics and our state politics but in local government, you can make an impact and make your voice heard where you live.

I just think the whole system is really set up for retired people with lots of time to give feedback and to get involved in local politics. It’s not set up for anyone under 40.

Do you think there’s a bureaucratic literacy that’s missing in younger generations?

Yeah – but not just in this generation. I didn’t know anything about local government until I started working in it.

Say there’s a 16-year-old who is going to be 18 by the time this stuff actually gets done. How do they make a submission to one of these?

We have a platform called SydneyYourSay.com.au. Every time the City of Sydney is examining a current issue or topic, we share a discussion paper on this site. The discussion paper puts forward some proposed solutions to the issues and asks the community for their feedback. Anyone can share their thoughts on the discussion paper through a survey or you can just leave a comment. We take into account every single comment that we get– that’s classified as a submission.

The most important thing, the easiest thing you can do is just contact any one of us. You’ve got 10 Councilors in the City of Sydney, including Clover. Our email addresses are all on the website. We’ve all got Facebook groups. Some of us are more progressive than others so I would suggest you contact us. Our job is to intercede on behalf of people and to say, “Hang on, what about these voices? Hang on, what about this angle?”

Residents and visitors alike are invited to provide feedback via the Sydney Your Say website before December 13.

There will also be additional briefing sessions early in the new year, and grants will open in February.