Thousands Woken Again By Noise Polluters

By Em Allen on January 9, 2014 in

Is there anyone else out there who believes that no person, institution, organisation or government has the right to wake (and keep awake) thousands of people with an amplified public address system?

7.30am on Sunday mornings is a pretty universally accepted time for community silence, peace and quiet. Apart from the high percentage of the population who stay up and out that bit later on Saturday nights, there are the nurses, ambos, fireys, police, chefs, waiters, bar staff and many others who know that at least on Sunday mornings they won’t be woken early by construction sites or traffic noise.

Public address systems are usually the subject of tight controls. When not being used for instructions and directions in emergency situations, they require permits for use and have restrictions on loudness, duration and times of use.

Not so, it seems, on Sydney’s beaches. These natural amphitheatres often have thousands of people living around their rim, usually in fairly high density types of housing. Up to seven thousand people per square kilometre is common and in some areas it can be much higher. Let’s use Coogee Beach as an example and let’s assume, conserva- tively, that a quarter of those people were out until late last Saturday night (November 23).

Coogee, extending to Rainbow Street in the south, Carrington Road in the west and Clovelly Road in the north, has a permanent population of around 14,000, with up to another 1,500 in hotels and hostels. Public address systems on the beach can be heard quite clearly in around 60% of this area, particularly in the hills to the south and north. That’s at least 9,000 people who were forced to listen to the beach P.A. system at 7.30am and on to 11.30am last Sunday morning, the 24th!

The event on the beach appeared to have perhaps 300 participants. These were the intended audience of the P.A. announcements. That means 30 times that number were victims of gratuitous, annoying, and often inane announcements, observations, reminders, invitations to a sausage sizzle afterwards, and other endless drivel that they were not at all interested in hearing.

For the quarter of those 9,000 that were sleeping at 7.30am when the P.A. started up, and who would have far preferred to keep on sleeping until towards 11.30am when it eventually stopped, they had every right to be very, very angry!

Governments, whether federal, state or local, have an even stricter obligation to conform to the law than do ordinary citizens. In many matters environmental, local government is usually the compliance and enforcement agent for pollution, community amenity and neighbour disputes (including noise and nuisance).

Last Sunday morning my neighbour, the local council, approved an activity on its property that woke me and maybe another two and a half thousand people and kept us awake for four hours. Seven weeks ago an even louder ‘party’ with music, as well as shrieking announcements, started at 7.45am on Sunday, September 29. That was a function held by the Eastern Beaches Area Command (police)!

Of course, it’s the council itself that has the biggest, loudest P.A. of all and it uses it from any time after about 7.00am on any day of the week just to tell one boardrider to move out of the flagged area, while another 9,000 people eavesdrop and curse!