By Ian Neubauer
Violent glassing attacks in NSW and Queensland over the weekend have reignited the debate over the banning of glassware in pubs and clubs.
A 29-year-old woman suffered deep cuts to her hand and was taken to hospital after she was hit with a glass at a nightclub in Sydney’s Manly early Sunday morning, the ABC reported.
In Brisbane, a 27-year-old man received deep gashes to his neck and hands at a registered club in Redcliffe after a glass of beer was thrown in his face, Fairfax reported.
The incident follows a recent spate of glassings in Queensland’s Gold and Sunshine Coasts that irked Premier Anna Bligh but fell short of convincing her to call for a glassware ban.
“These sorts of incidents happen because people are too fuelled up with alcohol and issues that shouldn’t become violent become violent,” she said. “[But] I’d deal with this at the very source of the problem, and that is clamping down on irresponsible drinking.”
Bligh’s sentiments were echoed by the AHA, which supports any member hotel that voluntarily chooses to use plastic instead of glass but insists the concept would be undermined if forced from above.
“What we don’t want is to see these things become generic solution for problems that don’t exist in some place,” said AHA chief executive, Bill Healey.
One publican who disagrees is Scruffy Murphy’s proprietor, Malcolm McGuiness, a Sydney hotelier who switched to moulded plastic cups late last year after he saw an off-duty policeman glassed in the eye.
“To see the kind of damage a glass can do to a person sickened me. So I decided then and there to change from glass to plastic,” he said.
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