I was following the article for a while until it shifted and started blaming the politicians' religion as the driving force in the changes to the law. It sounds like the authors have an axe to grind.
For instance, they use this quote as an example of the Police Commissioner being a teetotaler against drinking and justifying it according to religion:
“In another foray into the state’s social and moral landscape, Mr Scipione says the rise in binge drinking among girls and young women is making them vulnerable to sexual assault, liaisons they may regret, psychological trauma, sexually transmitted infections and even a threat to their fertility.”
The Sun-Morning Herald article they link to [1] reports the police commissioner pointing the journalists to a 2011 study coming out discussing the impacts of binge drinking on young females and the PC is reiterating the conclusions of the study and asking people to be aware of the risks of their behavior and take commonsense measures to ward off potential negative outcomes. I'm missing the part where he's a frothing totalitarian religious zealot out to impose a strict religious interpretation on the population.
It's one thing to write a policy critique, which, I think the article mostly gets right and points out the impacts the laws are having on local entertainment and the impacts that has on other industries notorious for attracting and keeping you people, like technology. It's another thing to divest into an axe grinding tangent that ascribes malicious intent to politicians for religious reasons while providing spurious reasoning and support in the article. It's disingenuous to mix in personal opinion and interpretation of actions as verifiable fact without having links that show because A therefore B.
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/girls-drink-pact-20111...