By DPA
Sydney : It’s not often that a service industry boss boasts that his customers are an uncouth lot who prefer swilling beer, eating sausages and dancing to drinking wine, chatting and reading books.
But that’s the view of John Thorpe, president of the Sydney branch of the publicans’ lobby group. He’s fighting a move by Lord Mayor Clover Moore for Sydney to copy Melbourne and legislate to have café-style liquor outlets where people can have a quiet drink.
Licensing laws in Sydney mean that pubs are giant establishments packed with poker machines and video screens playing non-stop sport. Thorpe, a publican himself, maintains that Sydney pubs provide what Sydney people want.
“People can sit down, talk about history, chew the fat and gaze into each other’s eyes and all this sort of baloney, but it’s pie in the sky stuff,” Thorpe said. “That’s not what Sydney wants. There’s a lot more entertainment than sitting there chatting.”
Thorpe insists the twin cities have a different outlook on life.
“We aren’t barbarians, but we don’t want to sit in a hole and drink Chardonnay and read a book,” he said.
Not surprisingly, indignant Sydney residents wrote to newspaper editors and called talkback radio hosts. They said Thorpe was an embarrassment to them.
David Mackinnon complained that “not all Sydney-siders want to sit in boofy, blokey bars with plasma screens blaring out horse races and the footy, dulled only by the irritating trill of wall-to-wall poker machines.”