James Thorpe

“Vibrancy is kind of like pornography,” is how one of the more candid dinner parties I attended recently began. “It’s impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.”  As someone who started their hospitality career in the same year that the lockout laws were declared in Sydney, I share the frustration of many about the widespread usage of the somewhat vague term “vibrancy.” At the same time, however, I am desperately relieved that it’s become such a common theme in public discussions about hospitality and culture.  Since 2013, and for my whole career, my industry has traded under siege; the scapegoats of government and media for alcohol-related street violence; the subjects of harsh and restrictive laws that devastated our trade and creative industries. In my advocacy, I’ve long described our planning and liquor licensing system in NSW as “hostile”, and even today find it difficult not to feel resentful at the way that whole period of our history played out.  It was only a few weeks ago, as I prepared to speak at the Time Out Future Shapers roundtable event, that I realised things had changed. The system, for the most part, is no longer hostile. For the first time in my life, all three layers of government – federal, state and local – are at the table, with an appetite for reform and a good faith understanding of the damage that’s been done.  We have a 24-Hour Commissioner, Michael Rodrigues – in my opinion, one of the most effective bureaucrats in NSW government hist