It would be "reckless and irresponsible" for small bars to be granted permanent approval to serve drinks like shots later into the night, liquor-harm prevention advocate Tony Brown says.
At least five small bars have applied to remove a condition which restricts the service of shots, drinks with more than 30ml of alcohol and pre-made drinks with an alcohol by volume content greater than 5 per cent.
Venues which participated in a six-month trial to March this year were allowed to serve these types of drinks beyond 10pm. Their trading hours were also extended until 2am for small bars and midnight for restaurants, or 10pm on Sundays.
Despite the trial concluding in March, venues are still free of the restrictions because a a Statement of Regulatory Intent which allowed it to occur is in place until December 31 in order to give operators time to apply for permanent changes.
If venues don't gain individual approvals from council and the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority before then, they will no longer be able to trade past their existing approved operating hours nor serve the higher alcohol content drinks later into the night.
With a flurry of operators lodging applications in recent months, Mr Brown has written to the chair of the ILGA and Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello to express "disappointment and frustration with the debasement of the regulation of alcohol in Newcastle".
The letter, written on behalf of multiple community groups, also serves as an objection to the applications from Blue Kahunas, Basement on Market, Uptowns Bar, Milk Bar, Neighbours on Market and Koutetsu.
Mr Brown wrote that the assessment of applications individually, rather than from a precinct-wide approach, "bypasses" the "cumulative impact and flow-on assessment of the likely net negative social impacts".
"We are concerned with the obvious conflict of interest associated with the independent evaluation of each of these individual applications when both ILGA and Liquor & Gaming NSW were involved in and supported the small bar trial," he said.
The state government used the small bar trial as part of its justification for an expanded year-long trial of relaxed trading restrictions for pubs and clubs in Newcastle's CBD and Hamilton, despite the city's police commander Wayne Humphrey saying axing lockouts would be "absolute lunacy".
Mr Brown said if the small bar venues' licence variations were approved, pubs and clubs would likely seek "the removal of the same proven intoxication safeguards" because "you could not ... reasonably justify two sets of safety standards of drink practices for different classes of licensed premises".
"We understand that the limited number of small bars who fully participated in the trial represented less than 10 per cent of all licensed premises in Newcastle's CBD eligible to have participated ... a trial that was subjected to no independent and rigorous review and validation, or terms of reference," he said.
