Renee Sankey is the owner of Utopia, the first adult swingers club that has had to make a development application on the Gold Coast.
With its mirror ball, UV lights and pool tables, Utopia is like any other nightclub on the Gold Coast.
Until you leave the dance floor and walk in to a room with a freshly made bed, lubricant in a dispenser on the wall, condoms on a side table and a giant hanging leather swing where adults' sexual fantasies are regularly carried out.
Utopia is based in Burleigh Heads and a few months ago was forced by a complaint to make a development application to the Gold Coast City Council.
Unsure what category to put it under -- it doesn't hold a liquor licence -- the application
was eventually filed under indoor recreation and is sailing smoothly towards being approved.
Mrs Sankey said the club catered mostly to mature couples in their 30s or 40s who were comfortable enough to talk to each other about their fantasies and
about 60 couples attended each weekend.
A Brisbane swingers' club is boasting that it is the first in the country to gain council approval and operate just like any other business.
With 600 couples on their membership list and council approval to keep swinging, the owners of
Couples International, Bryan and Leesa Horn, could not be happier.
Now we're seen as a lifestyle choice not just as an underground hidden culture that has been around since if not well before the 70s until now, Mrs Horn told AM.
Earlier this year, the Brisbane City Council threatened to shut it down because the building was zoned inappropriately. But Mr and Mrs Horn lodged a re-zoning application:
We did have objections from the moral right. But the tone of the objection was about suggesting that child molesters come here and that sort of thing, which is, I mean, who would ever know frankly.
Councillor Helen Abrahams says the
majority of submissions in the planning application were in favour of the application and the building has been re-zoned as a nightclub, which she says is the most appropriate category the council had. She says council had to consider the application
purely as a zoning decision: Council cannot consider the moral aspects of this application, and in fact the condition of development clearly states that this is only for the purpose of the building. It does not comment on the legality of whether a
swingers' club is lawful under state legislation .
Update: Nutters Miffed
13th September 2008
Australian Christian Lobby Queensland Director Peter Earle
said it was a shame local councillors representlng local nutters were effectively gagged when it came to controversial sex venues in their communities:
To gag councillors from discussing the social implications of such activity and force them
to approve these applications solely on town planning grounds is ridiculous.
The Integrated Planning Act must be amended to give power back to local [nutter] communities
