It has been good to see some acknowledgement in the past couple of weeks that Mooloolaba has problems with violence.

Early in the morning, generally on weekends, drunks and thugs are at their worst in just about every town in Australia.

Mooloolaba is no different.

The police model measures violence here against that elsewhere, and produces a conclusion that we don’t really have a problem.

And that’s our problem. We want Mooloolaba to be different. We want the Sunshine Coast to be different.

Our tourism strip has another problem.

Upstairs are apartments and the mums, dads and kids that pour into Mooloolaba for a family holiday.

Downstairs are nightclubs and bars that attract young adults looking for a night out that example has taught should include the consumption of large amounts of alcohol.

There is an argument that you shift the nightclubs and bars out of the holiday town and create a separate nightclub precinct.

That won’t fix anything. It just shifts the problem and we would continue to wake up to the same horror headlines newspapers all over Australia carry many Sunday and Monday mornings.

Mayor Bob and Mooloolaba traders have backed the return to the beat of the Ranger Pat patrols of four years ago.

I’m not so sure.

I’ve known Pat Quinn for a long time, I like the bloke and I think he has done a lot of good things on the streets, a lot of which have gone un-noticed and unacknowledged.

But I’ve never been very comfortable with the Pied Piper cult that has grown around the job he did for council before he was messily let go in favour of another security delivery model that never was fully explained or eventuated for that matter.

By all means bring Pat back, but I would urge against just sticking him out on the streets and expecting miracles.

If we really want a different culture here, we firstly have to remember it’s our sons and daughters as well as tourists who are customers of the clubs and bars, not just in Mooloolaba, but across the Sunshine Coast.

And if our community, through council programs in conjunction with the schools and parents, could educate our own kids about the behaviour that’s acceptable here and the behaviour that could get them into a load of trouble – and by all means use Pat for this – we would have taken a big step towards fixing the problem.

The community also has to accept that the Queensland Police Service is not going to be able to allocate resources here greater than allocated elsewhere just because we say we aspire to different standards.

If we want a bigger security presence around known trouble spots at night, we are going to not only have to pay for it, but also train it to behave the way Pat has shown works.

And that is not the way, despite licensing and regulation, many of the bouncers behave at the front doors of some clubs and bars.

Nothing much will change regardless of what model is adopted unless licensees manage the aggression out of their premises.

By that I mean better train their staff, ensure they are in sufficient numbers to control with passive force problems that occur and create an environment that appeals to the better instincts in people.

Woodford Folk Festival has 130,000 people engage in six days of party, music and mayhem each year and rarely does anyone get hurt.

There is a lesson in that which we have still to learn.

The Ranger Pat patrols had some considerable success because Pat treated those he confronted with respect and expected it in return.

The key to be learned from that is not that we need a Pied Piper to miraculously spirit away all the rats.

What we need is an environment that doesn’t attract rats in the first place.

I have no doubt that Pat’s got a role to play, but its time we started to look hard at the bigger picture.

Burmese horror
On an entirely other note I received pictures in an email on Saturday of the catastrophe in Burma.

They stopped me in my tracks.

Any deal with the Junta to get as much help as possible into that country as quickly as possible is acceptable.

You’ll hear it said in Australia at least once every day – we don’t know how lucky we are.