Someone's having a Barry

According to something I heard on Triple J this morning, there is now a national push to have Barry Manilow music piped into shopping centre car parks all over the country. Apparently there is a concern about the number of hoons hanging around in these places (much like everywhere else it seems), and it is felt that playing "daggy" music at them might make them congregate somewhere else (at least until the people at point B complain about it). Isn't the "pass the problem onto someone else" approach wonderful?

I hate to break it to the chaps who came up with the idea, but similar schemes have been tried before. Every-so-often Pacific Fair shopping centre on the Gold Coast takes this approach. It's usually at the Southern entrance near the cinemas that it can be heard. Generally it takes about a weekend for them to realise that they "daggy" music is driving as many of the shoppers away as hoons, and consequently costing the retailers in the area money. Within a couple of days things are back to the way they were before it all started. Of course, there are numerous other places that have tried the same approach, and all with the same level of "success". And regardless of the objections of other patrons, does anyone seriously expect the hoons to even hear Barry over the doof-doof crap they usually play on their car stereos?

Isn't it just so amusing when people continue to persist with ideas that have been shown time and again not to work?

I've said this before, but it seems to have fallen onto deaf ears, so I'll say it again. If people really want to get rid of hoons, the only way to go about it is through policing. Start by hiring enough police so that the average response time to a call might just fall below two days, and actually give them some powers to deal with the situation (car confiscations would be an obvious place to start). Then hire some court judges who might just apply traffic laws as they are written -- rather than letting people off because punishing them would somehow be "inappropriate".