Guyon Espiner on booze

Guyon Espiner has written a critical book - a very critical book - about booze called The Drinking Game. It's about the place of alcohol in New Zealand society and it draws heavily on his own experiences.

There’s the big problem, right there. Espiner admits he was a problem drinker. The reader is bombarded with anecdotes about the times he drank to excess. There’s an almost boastful tone to some of these stories.

But most people who drink are not problem drinkers, as Espiner admits, and at the end of his book I was left wondering what the point was.

The Drinking Game purports to be a critical analysis, but a self-confessed problem drinker is no more capable of writing a balanced book about alcohol than a vegan is capable of writing a balanced book about the meat industry, or an atheist about the Catholic Church.

The entire book is coloured by Espiner’s own experiences, but they’re not typical. And because they’re not typical, you have to ask what relevance they have to people who are able to drink without getting blotto (which, at the risk of labouring a point, means most of the population).

His revelation that he has Type 1 diabetes, which finally provided the incentive he needed to give up drinking, makes him even more atypical. Yet he persists with the theme that his own experiences are somehow applicable to everyone.

Espiner has burrowed deeply into the academic literature, of which there’s no shortage. Almost all of it is hostile to alcohol (and to capitalism, I suspect), but ignores the ability of most people to drink without harming themselves or those around them. He relates cautionary tales about alcoholics, but again misses the point that alcoholics make up only a small minority of drinkers.

He lets himself down in places with sloppy research. He writes that Mac’s Brewery was founded in Dunedin (wrong; it was Nelson) and that Claytons was a zero-alcohol beer (it was non-alcoholic, but it wasn’t a beer). He even manages to place Bagram air force base in the wrong country despite having been there himself. Nit-picking readers might wonder what else he got wrong.

Like the finger-wagging academics he approvingly quotes, he rails against the supposedly malign influence of the booze barons and their hold over weak or venal politicians. If Espiner is to be believed, they wield an almost mystical power (an impression likely to be reinforced by the overwhelming vote in Parliament this week against Chloe Swarbrick's bill that would have banned alcohol sponsorship and advertising in sport). 

He also bewails the fact that alcohol has been “normalised”. But alcohol is normal, and has been for millennia, as Espiner acknowledges. He even grudgingly acknowledges alcohol’s benefits as an agent of social bonding and creativity: “Humans need to drink alcohol to be human,” he writes. Then he swiftly moves on, presumably because that bit doesn’t align with his overall theme.  

It’s possible to nod in agreement with some of Espiner’s points. Yes, New Zealand’s liquor laws did lurch from one extreme to another, to the point where many would agree there are now far too many outlets and licensing hours are ridiculously loose. Even people in the hospitality business say so.

But Espiner doesn’t give due credit to the early stages of that liberalisation process, which made social drinking immeasurably more civilised and inclusive than it used to be. He’s too young to remember the scungy, men-only public bars of the 1960s and 70s and the days when only the rich could afford to patronise the tiny number of restaurants that were permitted to serve wine.

Espiner can be an entertaining writer, though he tends to be rather too fascinated by himself. He’s also a capable journalist who has recently been lauded, justifiably, for his investigative work exposing the political lobbying racket. But there’s no more zealous crusader than the reformed sinner, and there’s an almost evangelical tone to his book that could be summarised as: “I gave up drinking! You should too!” But most people don’t need to.

Incidentally, the cover of Espiner's book carries a melodramatic plug ("This is real, it is raw, and it lays out the truth about booze") from his friend Patrick Gower, who made a documentary last year in which he too admitted a drinking problem. And you might wonder about the timing of a recent Morning Report item in which Corin Dann - who with his wife, Living Sober website manager Lotta Dann, is acknowledged in Espiner's book as a key source of advice and support - interviewed anti-alcohol activist Boyd Swinburn about the access to politicians enjoyed by liquor industry lobbyists, which Espiner had highlighted in his RNZ series. It all starts to look decidedly clubby. 

In the final analysis, The Drinking Game repackages a familiar message, albeit through a personal lens: liquor is too widely available, it’s too cheap, it’s advertised too much and politicians are incapable of resisting lobbying pressure from the industry. And of course booze is hazardous, at least for people who can’t control their intake.

We’ve heard all this before, ad nauseam. But Espiner isn’t entirely clear about what he thinks should be done about it, and in the end he gets us no closer to solving the old conundrum: should the majority of people who drink safely and responsibly be penalised because of the unfortunate things that happen to the minority who don’t?

(Disclosure: In a past life I was a wine writer, in which capacity I was provided with free wine for review purposes. I'm aware that in the eyes of some neo-wowsers in academia, that made me complicit in the liquor industry's attempt to enslave the population.)

 The Drinking Game, published by Allen and Unwin, $36.99.

Lotta Dann and the liquor debate

I was name-checked (I believe that’s the fashionable term) by Kim Hill on Saturday morning during a discussion about alcohol. (For the record, I don’t normally listen to Hill, but a friend texted me to say my name had come up during an interview. Naturally I later accessed her show via the RNZ website, praying she had defamed me and that I might enjoy a comfortable retirement on the proceeds. Sadly, the reference wasn’t legally actionable.)

Hill’s guest was Lotta Dann, who has written a book called The Wine O’Clock Myth. Dann is a recovering alcoholic who had her last drink eight years ago and now has a website, Living Sober, that offers encouragement and support for women with a drinking problem. In her book, which was also the subject of a feature story in Stuff’s YW magazine the previous weekend, she criticises the “normalisation” of alcohol and the liquor industry’s use of advertising that portrays drinking as glamorous and sophisticated. According to Dann, getting drunk with the girls can start out as an enjoyable social habit but end up leading women into some dark places. All of which I know to be true.

Early in the interview, Hill chimed in: “I can hear Karl du Fresne on the line as I speak, insisting that wine is a civilised beverage and that it’s only the outliers who make it a problem, and that the liquor industry should not be regulated for the sake of a few people who can’t take their booze.” This was probably intended as a dig, Hill and I not being mutual admirers, but it’s not a wholly inaccurate summation of the many columns I’ve written over the years about alcohol and the endless debate about how tightly it should be controlled.

Briefly restated, my position is that most New Zealand drinkers do consume alcohol moderately and responsibly. Our per capita liquor consumption is not high by international standards. Most of us are perfectly capable of enjoying a few drinks without causing mayhem on the roads, bashing our partners and kids or becoming alcoholics. But it’s pointless to deny (and I never have) that alcohol is a potentially dangerous and addictive drug that can cause serious social harm. The debate is all about where to strike the difficult regulatory balance between benefit and harm. 

For decades we had an extremely strict, religiously influenced regulatory regime that placed tight controls on liquor consumption and produced perverse, counter-productive consequences such as the notorious six o’clock swill and the advent of the suburban booze barn. From the 1970s onwards, the trend was one of gradual liberalisation.  It would be dishonest to pretend it hasn’t produced some undesirable outcomes, such as the boom in consumption of RTDS by young women and the proliferation of cheap  liquor outlets, but I would argue that New Zealanders are far more civilised drinkers now than they were 50 years ago.

The debate, still, is about how far governments should go to protect the minority of problem drinkers by regulating alcohol – through advertising rules, the legal drinking age, pricing mechanisms and so forth – without unfairly penalising the majority of people who drink moderately and responsibly. We still haven’t got the balance quite right and may never do, but we can't allow alcohol policy to be dictated by a noisy coterie of state-funded wowsers, moralists and control freaks in the bureaucracy and academia who bombard us with anti-alcohol propaganda, who don’t believe New Zealanders can be trusted to make responsible choices about drinking and who are also, I suspect, fundamentally hostile to capitalism.

But back to Lotta Dann. She seemed to agree with my proposition that alcohol causes no harm to people who can control their consumption. Her concern, which I totally understand, is for those people who can’t. But she went on to say: “Our [liquor] environment only pushes one side and doesn’t acknowledge there’s a dark side to this addictive drug”. I dispute that. No one who reads newspapers, watches TV or listens to the radio can fail to be aware of the shrill warnings constantly emanating from the neo-wowser lobby. The question is whether alcohol policy should be predicated on the harm it does to a minority without proper regard to the benefits enjoyed by the majority. It’s always going to be tricky.

As an aside, I know many people who, like Dann, have overcome their addiction to alcohol. They include some of my oldest and closest friends. I have huge respect for them. But at the same time, I wonder whether recovering alcoholics are necessarily the best people to determine what is best for society as a whole when it comes to liquor issues, since their perspective is likely to be coloured by their own problematic relationship with drink. Dann raises valid concerns and appears to have helped a lot of women. That can only be good. But someone who has personally struggled with alcoholism has seen the worst consequences of alcohol consumption, so may not be the most objective authority.

■ The Wine O’Clock Myth: The truth you need to know about women and alcohol, is out now.

Otago's academics know what's best for us, so let's put them in charge

The thought often occurs to me that New Zealand could save itself a whole lot of money and political argy-bargy by simply handing over the governance of the country to the academics of Otago University.

They know exactly what needs to be done. They never tire of telling us. Barely a week passes without one of their number pointing how simple it would be, using regulatory tools, to create a Utopia here in our remote corner of the Pacific.

If only we listened to their advice, New Zealand would be a fairer, safer, healthier and more equal society. (Not freer, though, because freedom can get in the way of Utopian visions and must be strictly controlled by people who know what’s best for us.)

For starters, if we listened to the Otago academics, we wouldn’t be a nation of drunks and fatties. Marketers of alcohol and unhealthy food would be made to stand in the naughty corner. But alas, we’re all at the mercy of greedy, manipulative capitalists and politicians who are too cowardly, or possibly venal, to do the right thing.  

We’ve been reminded of this – yet again – over the past few days by the indefatigable Professor Doug Sellman and a bright-eyed colleague named Simon Adamson, who appears to have taken over from Sellman as director of Otago University’s National Addiction Centre. Their message is that the government, by refusing to act on the mental health inquiry’s recommendations for tighter alcohol controls, is pandering to liquor industry lobbyists. "You gotta follow the money and ask who's benefiting from the status quo," Adamson told Newshub.

Health minister David Clark brusquely dismissed the claim, saying he refused to dignify it with a response. Well, of course he’d say that; he’s obviously in the pocket of the liquor barons and their shadowy propagandists. What else could you expect?

Another tireless moral crusader is Professor Kevin Clements, who is described on the Otago University website as the founding director of the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. (One of the things universities do very well, along with generous sabbaticals, mutual back-scratching through academic exchanges and endless rounds of taxpayer-funded international conferences, is the creation of  grandly titled institutes for the pursuit of ideological hobby-horses.)

One of Clements’ shticks is gun control, so it was no surprise when he popped up at the weekend in a radio report about the government’s gun buyback programme. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that New Zealanders own twice as many firearms per capita as Australians and six times as many as Britons, “so on a per capita basis New Zealand is a fairly overgunned society” – the clear implication being that we’re dangerously addicted to firearms and for our own safety, we need much stricter controls.

But hang on a minute. Surely the crucial consideration is not how many guns New Zealanders own, but how often they are used to kill people or commit other criminal acts. That’s what matters.

Here the statistics are interesting. Wikipedia, which publishes what appear to be reputable figures on gun ownership and related crime, confirms that New Zealand has a high rate of gun ownership, as you’d expect in a country with a substantial rural population and a large hunting community.

But while we own 30 firearms per 100 people, which is high by world standards, our rate of firearm-related deaths (including suicides) is low: 1.07 per 100,000.

The figures make it clear there is little or no co-relation between gun ownership and deaths caused by firearms, other than, perhaps, in the US, where there are 120 firearms per 100 people and 19.5 gun-related fatalities per 100,000. 

Australia has 14 guns per 100 people – half as many as New Zealand, as Clements said; yet its firearms-related death rate, at 1.04, is only microscopically lower than ours. Other comparisons can be made with Norway (31 guns per 100 people, 1.75 deaths per 100,000), Switzerland (24 guns per 100, 3.01 deaths per 100,000) and Canada (25 guns per 100, 2.05 deaths per 100,000). In other words, despite Clement’s alarmist pronouncement, New Zealand measures up very favourably.

On the other hand, Venezuela has a much lower rate of reported gun ownership than New Zealand (18 per 100 people) yet a death rate even higher than that of the US, at 26.48 per 100,000. And then there’s El Salvador, often described as the world’s most dangerous country: 12 guns per 100 people, 44.45 deaths per 100,000.

Even allowing for the possibility that statistics from some of these countries may not be totally reliable, it’s clear that firearm ownership figures on their own, such as those cited by Clements, are virtually meaningless. I wonder, does it ever occur to credulous journalists, most of whom have university degrees so have presumably been taught critical thinking, to challenge supposed experts over the simplistic and misleading use of statistics?

Evidently not. They have been ideologically programmed not to challenge the left-wing orthodoxy that prevails in universities, where indoctrination and conformist group-think have supplanted intellectual inquiry and academic rigour.  

To return to my opening thought, just think how much simpler life would be if academics were given the power to rule us. The great appeal of their regulatory prescriptions for society is that they don’t have to be weighed against public opinion or put to the test in the real world. Neither are academics bothered by inconvenient notions such as the right of individuals to make their own choices about how they live, all of which can make parliamentary democracy untidy and quarrelsome.

Academics aren’t constrained by accountability either, because they don’t have to answer to anyone. Unlike politicians, they don’t have to worry about incurring the resentment of the people who pay their salaries and risk being tossed out of office.

Perhaps most appealing of all, if academics governed us there would be none of the acrimony which characterises parliamentary rule, since they all appear to agree with each other.

The kiwi is a bird. I am a New Zealander.

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., December 13.)

Call me the paper’s resident Grinch. While other people make lists of cards to send and presents to buy, I’ve been compiling an inventory of things that get on my nerves. Here are a few:

• I am not a kiwi. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a freakish-looking bird with nostrils at the end of its beak. I do not scurry around in leaf litter at night probing the soil for grubs and worms.  I am of the species homo sapiens, not apteryx australis.

Accordingly, I cringe at the fashion across all the media for referring to New Zealanders as “Kiwis”. It’s patronising, cloyingly sentimental and just plain wrong. It promotes a comforting nationalistic myth that we are all the same, with common characteristics, opinions and aspirations, rather than representative of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the crooked timber of humanity, in all its glorious complexity.

In any case, we managed perfectly well with “New Zealanders” until someone decided to infantilise us. It may be four syllables rather than two, but I think we can still get our tongues around it.

• That Air New Zealand engineers’ strike threatened for the week before Christmas. Déjà vu, anyone?

People over 50 will recall the Cook Strait ferry strikes that just happened to coincide with school holidays, or the walkouts by freezing workers that left yards full of sheep at the height of the killing season – anything to maximise the pressure on the employers to cave in.

A generation has grown up with no memory of the enormous economic harm done by industrial disruption during the 1970s. Some would say the subsequent labour law reforms which stripped unions of much of their power went too far. But by cynically and heartlessly calling a strike at the busiest time of the year for domestic air travel, the Aviation and Marine Engineers’ Association has obligingly reminded of us how things used to be.

The sense of nostalgia was sharpened by hearing the engineers’ spokesman interviewed on Morning Report. He spoke with an English accent, recalling an era when New Zealand unions were infected by British class warfare.

• What has Jacinda Ardern got against the letter T? On the TV news the other night she referred to hospidalidy and modorists. I’ve previously heard her speak of credibilidy, creadividy and inequalidy. And because the prime minister is an influencer and role model, other people are already imitating her pronunciation.

Nothing is more susceptible to the whims of fashion than pronunciation and language. The letter L seems well on its way to extinction in some usages – note how often you hear “vunnerable” and “howth” in place of “vulnerable” and “health” – while other words have inexplicably gained an extra syllable, so that we now have “befor-wah” and “unknowen”.

Now the inoffensive letter T, which never harmed a soul, is being usurped by a rampant, invasive D. Someone should mount a campaign to prodect the integridy of spoken English.

• Someone from Otago University watched 24 James Bond movies and read all the Bond books, carefully noting every occasion on which he drank alcohol and the high-risk activities that he engaged in afterwards. I’m not sure what the purpose of this exercise was, but I’m assuming the taxpayer paid for it.

Perhaps we’re supposed to assume it was a bit of a jape, but that wasn’t obvious from the interviews given by the professor (an academic title that once commanded respect) who led the project. He po-facedly pronounced that Bond drank a potentially fatal quantity of alcohol on one occasion and was a consistently heavy drinker over six decades.

But for heaven’s sake, Bond is a fantasy character. So what did this exercise achieve? Are the Otago researchers trying to persuade us that we shouldn’t try to emulate Bond’s drinking?

That would be consistent with their obsessive taxpayer-funded wowserism. But New Zealanders are no more likely to mimic Bond’s drinking patterns than they are to tussle with komodo dragons or indulge in any of the other absurd escapades that occur in his movies. What the research project really reveals is that the Otago academics don’t trust us to distinguish real life from Hollywood escapism – just as they don’t think we can be trusted to drink responsibly. 

• On a cheerful note more appropriate to the festive season, it was a joy to hear the prickly Chris Finlayson, former Minister of Treaty Negotiations, frankly unburden himself on radio of his feelings about the iwi leaders who for years have frustrated attempts to achieve a Treaty settlement in the Far North.

Finlayson, of course, is stepping down at the next election, so could afford to be blunt. But what a shame that politicians should have to wait for their impending retirement to tell us what they really think.

The neo-wowsers never let up

(First published in the Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and stuff.co.nz, September 5.)

So – the latest word from health researchers is that no level of alcohol consumption can be considered safe.

Let’s set aside the fact that we’re constantly bombarded with health and diet studies which frequently contradict each other – to the extent that many people are inclined to disregard them all – and take this latest one at face value.

Superficially, the results of the survey, conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, look persuasive.

The researchers found that while alcohol might be beneficial in some circumstances, the benefits are outweighed by risks which increase regardless of how little is consumed.

Not surprisingly, they found that the risks start out small with one drink a day, then increase as people consume more – hardly a stop-the-presses revelation.

Their conclusion: going teetotal is the only sure way to avoid the risk of harm.

Okay then. Now let’s apply the same test to a range of other human activities.

Travelling by car, indeed any form of transport, carries the risk of injury or death on the road. Does that mean we never go anywhere? No.

Getting married carries the risk that the relationship will end in an ugly and painful divorce. Does that mean people stay single? No.

Playing sport carries the risk of injury and disability. Does that mean we would be healthier if we were a nation of couch potatoes? No.

Investing money carries the risk that the investment will go belly-up and we’ll lose financially. Does that mean we hide our savings under the mattress? No.

Travelling to exotic places carries the risk of life-threatening illnesses from eating dodgy food or cutting our feet on poisonous coral. Does that mean we stay at home? No.

The point is that life would be unbearably dull – even pointless – without the pleasure, satisfaction and achievement that come from doing things that entail an element of risk.

Most people manage that risk by taking sensible precautions. They weigh the risks against the rewards and act accordingly.

We don’t drive fast in cars with bald tyres and munted brakes. We try to choose the right life partners and do our best to resolve any conflict that arises in the relationship.

If we play rugby, we wear mouth guards and avoid head-high tackles. If we ski, we stay on the designated slopes. If we push beyond those (relatively) safe limits, we accept the risk and take responsibility for the possible consequences.

I could go on, but you get my drift.

Now, back to alcohol. Most New Zealanders drink responsibly. They understand that excessive consumption carries risk.

Even the so-called experts, who never miss an opportunity to lecture us on the perils of alcohol, grudgingly accept that the great majority of people drink in moderation.

Alarmists in the health sector like to focus on the 20 percent of alcohol consumers whom they classify as “heavy” drinkers, but their definitions are questionable.

The “safe” drinking limits that guided British alcohol policy for years weren’t based on any hard data, but were plucked out of the air by a Royal College of Physicians working party which didn’t really have a clue how much alcohol was safe.

In the United States, a female heavy drinker is now classified as one who has eight or more drinks a week. Is it a good idea to regularly have eight or more drinks a week? Probably not. But to claim that anyone who does is a heavy drinker seems over the top.

I know lots of healthy, sober women who would exceed that limit at least occasionally. They would be shocked at the thought that they were officially considered heavy drinkers.

But of course that’s the aim: to scare people into cutting back or giving up altogether.

The publicly-funded neo-wowsers are on a moral crusade, and they never let up. They don’t trust ordinary people to make sensible decisions about what’s safe.

Another problem with alarmist studies such as the one mentioned above is that, as a recent editorial in The Listener pointed out, the scare-mongers never take into account the beneficial aspects of alcohol, both social and economic.

In Western civilisation, alcohol has been regarded for centuries as a means of socialising, relaxing and celebrating. You’d think that might count for something, but no.

Oh, and one other thing. According to one analysis of that recent American survey, it means that in a population of 100,000 people aged 15-95, 918 people are at risk of developing one of 23 alcohol-related conditions in a year if they have a drink every day, against 914 people who are at risk of developing the same problems if they never drink at all.

I don’t know about you, but they’re odds that I’m prepared to risk.

Stating the obvious

Quote of the day, from a Hawke's Bay District Health Board paper urging a ban on the sale of liquor at school fundraising events: " ... the promotion of the benefits and consumption [of alcohol] are likely conveying the message to the population of Hawke's Bay that drinking alcohol is a normal and socially accepted activity that has positive and wide-reaching consequences" (the italics are mine).

I couldn't have put it better myself. So what's the problem?

Resolutely po-faced

Publicly funded wowsers never rest in their attempts to whip up moral panic over our supposed enslavement by alcohol. Even when statistics point to declining liquor consumption, which you’d think would be welcomed, these doomsters remain resolutely po-faced.  

RNZ led its 7 o’clock news bulletin this morning with a report that Australian teenagers are turning away from alcohol. Deakin University researchers found that only 45 percent of teenagers in 2015 had drunk a full glass of alcohol compared with 70 percent 15 years earlier.

Nicki Jackson, executive director of New Zealand's Alcohol Healthwatch, said that was in line with what was happening here. Reason to be positive, surely? Er, no. According to Jackson, we mustn’t be complacent.

“Yes, there’s been declines [sic] in young people choosing to take up drinking but we’ve seen no declines whatsoever in the style in which young people drink. They’re still drinking very heavily, so that culture hasn’t changed.” Even good news is bad news, then.

Then comes Jackson’s alarmist crunchline: “hazardous binge-drinking” has been getting worse (she cited no figures, and the official definition of “binge-drinking” is dodgy anyway) and the government needs to raise the price of alcohol.

Nothing new here: it’s the same tired old refrain. In fact the only surprising thing about this non-news item was that someone at RNZ considered it important enough to lead the bulletin.

Alcohol Healthwatch would realise, of course, that Sunday morning is a quiet time in newsrooms and would have timed its statement to take advantage of that fact. Obviously, it could also count on the RNZ duty editor giving the non-story prominence, because RNZ journalists – in fact journalists generally – tend to be sympathetic toward sanctimonious pressure groups pushing moral panic buttons.

There was evidence of that in another alcohol-related story on Stuff three days ago. This one, sourced from the taxpayer-funded Health Promotion Agency, cited research that purportedly showed older New Zealanders were drinking to greater excess and more frequently than adults in eight other countries.

According to the research, New Zealand had the second-highest proportion of 50-plus drinkers after England. And what were the other countries? The United States, South Africa, China, Mexico, Ghana, India and Russia.

Of the nine countries with which we were compared, only two – England and the US – could be described as culturally and socially similar to New Zealand, and even the US is very different from us when it comes to social habits.

It follows that no self-respecting researcher could draw any useful conclusion from this “research”. It’s a nonsense. Far more meaningful (and ideologically unbiased) are the per capita alcohol consumption figures compiled by the OECD, which consistently show New Zealand to be roughly in the middle of the table and behind comparable countries such as Britain and Australia.

This doesn’t deter academics such as Andy Towers from Massey University, who was quoted in the Stuff story, from extracting pessimistic conclusions from the available “research”. Towers was quoted as saying New Zealanders aged 50-plus had “concerning” drinking habits.

There was a time when journalists were trained to be sceptical and to “doubt everything with gusto”, in the words of my late colleague Frank Haden. Not so these days, when claims by moralistic academics are accepted unquestioningly and meaningless surveys are cited in an attempt to convince us, contrary to all our everyday observations and experience, that New Zealand is awash in alcohol.

Licensing trusts: a great social experiment that mostly failed

(This is a slightly longer version of a story first published in The Dominion Post, October 13.)

It probably comes as a surprise to many people to learn there are still places in New Zealand where it’s not possible to buy wine or beer in a supermarket. Invercargill is one such place. West Auckland is another.

These are not “dry” areas, where local voters have chosen to remain liquor-free. New Zealand lost the last of those (two in Auckland, one in Wellington) in 1999.  

They are, however, a lingering hangover – although that may not be the most appropriate word – from an era when anti-liquor fervour caused legislators to seek a balance between total prohibition and an open-slather alcohol regime where the much-vilified booze barons, the rich men who controlled the liquor trade, would hold sway.

The solution, as prohibitionist sentiment gradually abated and areas that had previously been dry chose to go “wet”, was for voters to be given a choice: they could either allow ownership of liquor outlets by private enterprise, or they could opt for community control.

Under the community control model, voters would elect licensing trusts to run hotels, taverns and bottle stores. Each trust would enjoy a monopoly on liquor sales within its area and profits would be ploughed back into the community.

In a country that remained deeply suspicious of the privately owned liquor trade, the trust option seemed an ideal “third way”. People would have access to alcohol, but its sale would be controlled by elected local representatives who would ensure it was managed responsibly for the community’s benefit.

The first licensing trust was established in Invercargill in 1944, after 38 years as a “dry” city. The Invercargill trust still enjoys a monopoly on liquor sales in that city (other than in clubs and licensed restaurants) because apparently that’s what the community wants. 

Three other trusts – Mataura (also in Southland) and Portage and Waitakere (both in West Auckland) – have retained similar monopoly rights, which explains why mystified visitors to those areas can’t find wine or beer in local supermarkets.

But in all other areas where licensing trusts have survived, voters – often frustrated by lack of choice or disheartened by the trusts’ poor performance – have taken advantage of “competition polls” to strip them of their monopolies. Hence in places like Masterton, trusts are still active in the local liquor trade but must now compete with privately owned bars and liquor outlets, including supermarkets.

A government working party headed by Sir George Laking in the late 1980s recommended that trust monopoly powers, which were out of step with the general trend toward deregulation, should be abolished altogether. But parliament, which was often cautious to the point of timidity on liquor issues, decided that the public should have a choice – hence the competition polls, which gave voters a chance to register their dissatisfaction with trusts that failed to measure up.

The patchy history of the trusts is told in the recently published book A Great Social Experiment, by Bernard Teahan. It’s a story of social and political idealism that often collided disastrously with commercial realities.

Teahan sets the story against a backdrop of wowserism, the deeply ingrained suspicion of alcohol and its purveyors which brought New Zealand to the brink of country-wide prohibition in 1919.

Licensing trusts grew out of dissatisfaction with widespread drunkenness, primitive drinking conditions and distrust of powerful brewing interests. Rex Mason, the reformist Minister of Justice in the Labour government of the 1930s and 40s, threw his weight behind the idea and so did prime minister Peter Fraser, who saw trusts as a way of eliminating profit as the sole motivator of liquor sales. Profit was explicitly not intended to be the trusts’ primary goal.

Masterton followed Invercargill’s lead in 1947 and other trusts were established in quick succession. Between 1947 and 1975, voters in 57 areas backed the creation of trusts, although only 30 became operational. Nineteen are still functioning today.

Teahan records that brewery companies, which effectively controlled the hotel industry, opposed the trust concept every step of the way. The National Party showed little enthusiasm either, although up-and-coming National politician Jack Marshall, a devout Presbyterian who would eventually lead the party, supported trusts and thought they might force brewers to lift their game.

Local councils were often instrumental in getting trusts established. A key figure behind Auckland’s ill-fated Mt Albert trust – which never became operational and was eventually swallowed by the neighbouring Portage trust – was Frank Ryan, long-serving mayor of Mt Albert (and the father of actress and environmental activist Lucy Lawless).

Ironically, as trusts struggled to get established because of inadequate capital and the crippling cost of loan finance, many ended up depending on supportive arrangements with the big two brewery companies – in effect, sleeping with the enemy.

The last functioning trust, Flaxmere (Hastings), was established in 1975. By then the flaws in the trust model were becoming obvious. Even with a monopoly, many were unable to stay afloat.

The enthusiasm and good intentions of the elected boards that controlled trusts were all too rarely matched by the necessary business skills or funding.  Many trusts tested the patience of their communities by taking years to open their first outlets.

One, the Stokes Valley Licensing Trust in Lower Hutt, failed spectacularly after only a year because the Licensing Control Commission required it to provide hotel accommodation where there was no demand for it.

Others over-reached themselves of their own volition, incurring massive debt to build grandiose premises on the basis of wildly over-optimistic business projections. One example was the Orewa trust, north of Auckland, which destroyed a healthy balance sheet by investing heavily in a substantial restaurant where there was no market to support it.

In their desperation to prove themselves, a few trusts resorted to dodgy practices (such as borrowing money without approval) which attracted the attention of the Auditor-General.  Management was often sloppy: Wellington’s Johnsonville trust somehow lost $200,000 worth of stock for which no one was held accountable.

Poor service and sub-standard facilities are other factors cited by Teahan as harmful to the image of the trust movement. Civilised drinking conditions were central to the trust philosophy, yet Teahan describes the Otara trust’s pub in South Auckland as a “dark and dingy barn”, designed to maximise consumption.

Otara also had problems with violence and lawlessness, as did some other trusts. The Porirua trust’s first tavern was known locally as the Flying Jug because of the frequency with which brawls erupted. This was not what the architects of the trust movement had envisaged.

Even Teahan, a true believer in the trust model (he spent most of his career in trust management), acknowledges that trustees and their managers were often not up to the job. Communities grew tired of hearing promises of good things to come, only to be let down when trust-owned outlets closed or another dismal set of financial results was announced - always with a fresh batch of excuses.

By the 1980s, the great social experiment was in peril. A few of the longer-established trusts, having had decades in which to build up a solid base, were strongly embedded in their communities and trading profitably. But changing social expectations and a more liberal and sophisticated drinking environment placed demands on the newer trusts that they were hopelessly ill-equipped to meet.

Teahan says the trust model fell out of favour because “the market philosophy became the all-powerful belief”. But in fact most of the “demised” trusts, to use his own euphemistic terminology for those that failed, were undone by their inability to live up to their idealistic vision.  

Addressing a licensing trusts conference in 1990, former prime minister David Lange described trusts as a bizarre experiment and said they were an endangered species.

He was almost right. Four trusts in the Wellington area subsequently collapsed after years of governance so shambolic and muddle-headed that it became almost painful to watch. Even Teahan is scathing in his criticism of trusts that imploded because of egos, personal whims and political agendas.

The 1990s was also the decade in which competition polls – usually initiated by supermarket chains chafing at their inability to sell wine and beer – began turning the tide against trust monopolies.

Where areas voted to renounce their “dry” status but chose to reject the trust option, as in Auckland’s Grey Lynn and Wellington’s Tawa, Teahan acknowledges that the poor performance of trusts in neighbouring areas was a factor.

Yet the better-managed trusts survive, and a few weaker ones have been saved by being brought under the control of successful operators.

At least one has moved far beyond its original remit. What was originally the Masterton trust (which Teahan managed) is now Trust House, which operates licensed premises on behalf of several trusts and also has substantial investments in social housing, aged care and even supermarkets.

The Invercargill trust, the mother ship, is still flying and seems to enjoy solid support from its community. According to Teahan, the southern city is one place where supermarkets haven’t bothered to push for a competition poll because they don’t think they could win.

Teahan points out that successful trusts return millions of dollars to their communities: nearly $27 million nationwide in 2014.

This is the argument that trusts always fall back on, even when their performance has been dire. It’s what they emphasise whenever their monopolies have been under attack from supermarkets and other private interests.

But much of the money invested in community assets comes from gaming profits which, under law, private hotel and bar owners with gaming facilities must also return to the community.

Teahan retains an almost evangelistic faith in the trust concept despite its many failures. The irony is that his book, which is obviously intended to promote the virtues of trusts, also serves as a crushing indictment of the concept because it can’t avoid acknowledging the many ways in which it was flawed.

A Great Social Experiment: The Story of Licensing Trusts in New Zealand, by Bernard Teahan (Fraser Books, $39.50). 

We gave young drinkers a chance to be treated as adults, and they blew it

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, July 12.)

I’m going to surprise myself in this column by reluctantly conceding that the legal age for the purchase of liquor should be returned to 20.

For decades, I have argued in favour of liberalised liquor laws. And for the most part, I believe I have been proved right.

Thanks to gradual liberalisation, most of the alcohol drunk in New Zealand today is consumed in vastly more civilised conditions than when I began patronising pubs.

The primitive six o’clock swill, which encouraged men to knock back as much beer as possible in the limited time available before pubs closed (and what awful beer it was), was then still a recent memory.

Even after pub hours were extended till 10pm in 1967, New Zealand’s drinking culture left a lot to be desired.

Sure, hotel owners upgraded their bars and women started going to pubs, which inevitably improved male behaviour. But perverse licensing laws encouraged the notorious “booze barns” of the 1970s: big pubs surrounded by acres of car parks. Small wonder that the road toll peaked during that decade.

Nonetheless, the 70s also brought some modest but significant improvements – notably the introduction of the BYO licence that enabled people to take their own wine and beer to restaurants. That was the beginning of the café culture that we enjoy today.

Dining out had previously been something people did on special occasions in expensive licensed restaurants, but the BYO licence meant it gradually came to be regarded as a routine part of urban life.

With it, New Zealand’s drinking culture began to undergo a slow transformation. We were drinking in more congenial surroundings, in mixed company, and more often with food. All these were civilising influences.  

The pace of reform picked up throughout the 80s and 90s, although liquor law changes were often confused, anomalous and piecemeal, reflecting a timid parliament that still treated liquor issues as political banana-skin territory.

The vociferous anti-liquor lobby – a strange alliance between religiously motivated campaigners and activists driven by an ideological agenda – fought the changes every step of the way. But over time, the law inexorably moved in the direction of liberalisation.

Limitations on opening hours were effectively abolished and supermarkets won the right to sell wine – although initially not on Sundays, when they were ludicrously required to hide their wine shelves lest we be tempted.

On the issue of opening hours, I thought we lurched from one extreme to another. But I applauded the overall trend.

And just as the reformers had expected, the changes led to a marked improvement in our drinking culture.  If you treat people as adults capable of making their own intelligent decisions, they generally respond accordingly.

Contrary to the dire predictions of the wowser lobby, per capita consumption of alcohol declined from about 1975 onwards, with a particularly significant drop in the 1990s. What’s more, from 1985 onwards the road toll steadily fell.

So why, in 2017, is alcohol such an issue? TVNZ’s Sunday programme last week included an item – just the latest of many – showing young women almost literally legless from intoxication.

High-profile political aspirant Gareth Morgan wants the excise tax on alcohol increased and the liquor purchasing age lifted to 20. On talkback radio, callers overwhelmingly backed him.

The public mood appears to have swung back in favour of tighter controls. So where did it all go wrong?

There seems little doubt that the turning point came when Parliament voted in 1999 to lower the liquor purchasing age to 18. That was when per capita alcohol consumption started to rise again. It was also when the phrase “binge drinking” entered the nation’s vocabulary.

But let’s be clear. In this context, “binge drinking” means youth drinking. If we have a problem, that’s where it lies, and that’s where any law changes need to be directed.

A majority of parliamentarians believed in 1999 that young New Zealanders could be trusted to drink in a civilised fashion. I did too, but we were wrong.

They were given the opportunity to behave like adults, and they blew it. Spectacularly.

Young women, especially, have let us down. They seem to have adopted the view that equal rights mean the right to render yourself comatose in Courtenay Place – a perverse distortion of the “girls can do anything” mantra.

In this they were helped immeasurably by liquor industry entrepreneur Michael Erceg’s promotion of sweet, fizzy RTDs, which made alcohol palatable to a new market segment that didn’t care much for beer or wine.

My wife reckons we can’t blame young people and we shouldn’t expect 18-year-olds to behave like adults. My response is, why not? They expect to be treated like adults in every other respect. Besides, if 18-year-olds in European countries can handle their liquor, why can't young New Zealanders?

Perhaps they’ve led such protected, molly-coddled lives as children - protected from any behaviour deemed to be risky, even walking to school - that they run amok at their first taste of independence. Perhaps lollipops, rather than alcohol, would be commensurate with their level of maturity.

Whatever the reason, we’ve ended up in a very disheartening place. And if it takes a return to tougher laws to sort the problem out, then perhaps that’s what we must do. 

How to alienate your best friends

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, March 8.)

I find myself in the unfamiliar situation of being in agreement with Winston Peters. The New Zealand First leader thinks the police have lost the plot, and so do I.

Peters has attacked the police for wanting to curtail the right of people to take their own wine and beer to race meetings. He uses his customary blustering rhetoric, describing the police as politically correct wowsers and comparing them with Nazis.

But he’s right when he says government policy should recognise that the vast majority of New Zealanders treat alcohol responsibly – a fact wilfully ignored by zealots in the police hierarchy, the public health sector and the universities, who think we’re all helpless drunks.  

Peters is also undoubtedly correct when he predicts that a prohibition on people taking their own alcohol to race meetings would soon become a blanket ban on alcohol at other community events, and possibly even family picnics.

The latest police proposal surfaced in a briefing paper on ways to reduce “alcohol-related harm” – three words that I suspect the staff at Police Headquarters in Wellington are required to chant for five minutes at the start of every working day to remind them of their primary mission.

The briefing paper identified BYO alcohol at race meetings as a “key issue”. This caused immediate alarm on the West Coast, where the Kumara race meeting, at which people have traditionally been allowed to drink their own alcohol, is a signature event on the social calendar.

West Coast mayor Bruce Smith says that if the police get their way, they will kill off an event that has been attracting West Coast families for 134 years. And you can be sure the Kumara races won’t be the only meeting affected.

I’ve often attended the races at the picturesque Tauherenikau course, in the Wairarapa. It’s an old-style, family-friendly country race meeting that attracts people from Wellington as well from the Wairarapa.

As at Kumara, people are allowed to take their own liquor. Many racegoers arrive early and set up picnic tables under the trees, often in the same spot they’ve occupied for years.  There are no bag searches or other controls.

And you know what? In all the years I’ve been attending the Tauherenikau races, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who was visibly drunk, still less behaving badly.  The police are barely visible.

Yet the police hierarchy claims to have identified race meetings as a “key” cause of alcohol-related harm. This represents the latest step in a long campaign by police to redefine themselves as moral custodians whose primary function is not so much to prevent crime or catch crooks as to protect society from its own foolishness.

There have been innumerable examples in recent years of this Mother Hen approach to policing. In Wellington, police have subjected bar owners to such harassment that the city’s most experienced and respected hospitality operator – a man whose bars and restaurants have an exemplary record – declared last year that bar owners now saw the police as the opposition, not an ally.

Heavy-handed policing was also blamed when the once spectacularly successful Wellington Rugby Sevens fell out of favour with the public. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

It’s significant that Peters has now taken hold of this issue. No politician has a keener nose for public discontent, and his nostrils will be twitching more than ever in an election year when his party stands a good chance of holding the balance of power.

He will have noted that the single-minded, anti-liquor mindset adopted by the police hierarchy is putting officers offside with the community they are paid to serve.

I picked up a sudden, unmistakeable change of mood a couple of summers ago, when – without prompting from me – friends began expressing their irritation about being breath-tested on their way to work, or complaining about the bullying demeanour of police officers at outdoor events where people were harmlessly (and legally) enjoying a drink.

I have also noted a growing public feeling that police priorities are cockeyed and their resources misused. Ninety per cent of burglaries go unsolved and victims of crime frequently complain that calls to the police go unheeded.

A business owner told me last week that even when he provided the police with video footage of organised shoplifters at work, and evidence of their identity, no action was taken. Yet the police always seem to have enough officers for alcohol checkpoints, even in places and at times of day when the likelihood of catching drunk drivers must be minimal.

If I’m hearing this, the politicians must be hearing it too. Likewise, police officers in the community must be aware of mounting dissatisfaction.

What should especially concern the police and government is that the grumbling is coming not from the usual habitual complainers, but from conservative, law-abiding people – the type whose natural inclination is to respect and support the police. It takes a special sort of incompetence – or perhaps I should say dogmatic zeal – to alienate your best friends. 

The road toll statistics they tried to bury

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 9.)

I checked the latest road toll statistics a few days ago. Interesting.

For the year from January 1, road deaths were up from 291 last year to 300. For the 12 months to Tuesday, they were up from 315 to 328.

For driver fatalities, the figures were up from 138 to 151 (for the calendar year to date) and from 146 to 170 (over 12 months)

These are not big increases, but they appear to be more than mere statistical blips.

Even more interesting are some of the figures from a Ministry of Transport booklet called Alcohol and Drugs 2016.

Most of the tables in the booklet pull together figures covering the years 2013-2015 without breaking them down year by year. They reveal that alcohol and/or drugs contributed to 12 per cent of fatal smashes.

This might come as a surprise. Given the official obsession with alcohol as a risk factor (all those checkpoints, all those TV ads, all those earnest lectures from senior police officers every holiday period), I imagine most people would have thought the ratio of deaths attributable to booze must be much higher.

But what especially interested me was whether road deaths involving alcohol had decreased since the legal blood-alcohol limit was lowered on December 1 2014.

This is information of some importance, since the objective of the law change was to reduce the road toll. But you have to turn to page 8 before you find any figures relating to the year after the new limits kicked in.

These reveal that the number of alcohol-affected drivers involved in fatal crashes actually increased from 70 to 90 in the 12 months after the new law came into effect.

This was not what we were led to expect. It is the opposite of what the new limit was intended to achieve, which was to deter people who had been drinking from getting behind the wheel.

Opponents of the law change argued that it would punish safe, law-abiding motorists while hard-core drink-drivers would continue to flout the law with impunity. That appears to be precisely what has happened.

Drink-drive fatalities last year were the highest since 2010. In the 20-24 age group, the number of alcohol-affected male drivers involved in fatal crashes increased from 12 to 22 – that’s nearly double. For men overall, the number was up from 56 to 82.

If the numbers had gone the other way, I’m sure the ministry would have been shouting from the rooftops. As it is, it’s hard to escape the impression the figures were buried. 

We shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised that the law change hasn’t delivered the promised improvement. Control-freak policy-makers and poll-driven politicians refuse to accept that human behaviour can’t conveniently be changed by legislative decree.

That’s also apparent from the anti-smacking law (on average, one child continues to be killed by domestic violence every five weeks while responsible parents risk prosecution for disciplining out-of-control kids with a harmless slap) and from laughably ineffective dog-control rules, which have entered a whole new realm of fantasy with the expectation that owners of dangerous dogs will obtain special high-risk dog owner licences, submit their dogs to good citizenship tests, have their properties inspected and demonstrate they understand their legal obligations.

Yeah, right. Can’t you just see gang members meekly queuing at council offices to fill in the forms and register their blood-flecked pitbulls for obedience training?

Now here’s the key point. Any benefits arising from lower blood-alcohol limits – and so far there don’t seem to be any – should be weighed against the social downsides. As we brace for the annual bout of Christmas finger-wagging, we should ask whether New Zealanders’ enjoyment of life has been unnecessarily diminished just to satisfy the bureaucratic urge to regulate and control.

There’s an economic cost too. Country pubs - the heart of some rural communities - are going out of business and wineries can expect fewer summer visitors because people fret that a harmless tasting will push them over the limit.

Any supposed benefit must also be weighed against the undoubted change in the public attitude toward the police, who are increasingly resented as bullies and harassers - unwilling or unable to attend burglaries, but never short of the numbers to run alcohol checkpoints at all hours of the day, or to hamper law-abiding bar owners in their attempts to run a business, or to make the staging of public events such as wine festivals so onerous that some participating companies decide that it's just not worth the effort any more.

It's not booze that's the problem - it's us

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and Nelson Mail, June 1.)

It has become accepted wisdom that New Zealand has a serious drinking problem. But do we? And if we do, what’s the reason?

Let’s start by tackling that first question. In 2014 the World Health Organisation published a table showing per capita alcohol consumption in 190 countries.

New Zealand was ranked 31^st . At first glance, that seems a bit of a worry. It suggests we’re among the world’s heaviest boozers.

But that ranking needs to be put into perspective. In many of those 190 countries, especially those in Asia and Africa, alcohol has never been a big part of the local culture. Consumption is accordingly modest.

Many Asians have a good biological reason to avoid liquor. It’s estimated that 36 per cent of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans lack the vital enzymes (technically known as acetaldehyde dehydrogenases) that enable their bodies to metabolise alcohol.

For these unfortunate souls, drinking can induce nausea, trigger a rash and cause the heart to race – all good reasons for abstaining.

Now, factor in the many countries where drinking is discouraged and even prohibited for religious reasons. That includes the entire Islamic world.

Take all that into account, and the list of countries that New Zealand can meaningfully be compared with becomes a lot shorter.

A better way of assessing where we stand in terms of alcohol consumption is to look at countries that are broadly similar to us culturally and ethnically. Here we emerge in a more favourable light.

According to the WHO figures, New Zealanders drink 10.9 litres of pure alcohol per year. That’s less than the French and Australians (12.2), the Irish (11.9), the Germans (11.8), the British (11.6) and the Danes (11.4).

So what conclusion what can we draw from our WHO ranking? A common reaction might be one of surprise.

We have been so bombarded by anti-liquor propaganda – some of it verging on hysterical – that many people are convinced we really are in the grip of a ruinous binge-drinking culture.

Relax. We’re not.  In fact official figures show that alcohol consumption in New Zealand is in gradual decline – another fact at odds with the constant barrage of anti-liquor rhetoric.

Does this mean we don’t have a drinking problem after all? Well, no.

The vast majority of New Zealanders who enjoy alcohol do so responsibly and in moderation. They drink without causing harm to themselves or others.

Panic over binge drinking is generated by a small but highly visible minority of mainly young drinkers who haven’t learned to control their consumption.

These are the drunks the TV cameras love to show fighting, falling over and vomiting in the gutter in Wellington’s Courtenay Place or Auckland’s Fort St in the early hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings.

They are a problem, but they are not typical of New Zealand drinkers. Just ask yourself: when did you last witness a brawl in a café where people were drinking, at a family gathering or even in the local pub?

Now, let’s return to the second question I posed at the start of this column. If we do have a drinking problem – and we do, though it’s a very limited one – then what causes it?

The finger-waggers in the universities and the public health bureaucracy will say it’s the demon drink. That’s the justification for their determined campaign to reduce alcohol availability – in other words, to limit the free exercise of choice by other New Zealanders.

But if alcohol is the problem, how is it that most of us are able to enjoy it without turning violent or causing mayhem on the road? If alcohol has us in its grip, how come we’re able to drink in moderation and know when to stop?

An answer was provided in a report written last year by British anthropologist Anne Fox, who has made a career out of studying drinking cultures.

Fox was commissioned by the liquor conglomerate Lion to study drinking behaviour in New Zealand and Australia. Predictably her credibility was questioned because of where her funding came from, but no one has seriously challenged her main finding – which was, in a nutshell, that it’s not alcohol that’s the problem: it’s us.

For whatever reason, a culture has developed in Australia and New Zealand in which alcohol is used as a convenient excuse for behaving badly and failing to exercise self-control. 

But bad behaviour is not an inevitable consequence of drinking, and it doesn’t happen elsewhere in the world.

In a recent column in the Listener, Berlin-based New Zealand journalist Cathrin Schaer marvelled that alcohol is freely available everywhere in Germany and drinking is considered a pleasurable part of everyday life.

German laws, she wrote, tend to emphasise individual responsibility. Behave badly and you’ll be busted, but otherwise you’re free to drink where and when you like.

Getting drunk, Schaer added, is considered uncool. “It’s as though an unwritten social code says if we treat you like an adult, you’d better act like one.”

In New Zealand, the reverse is true. Drinkers are expected to behave badly because it’s not their fault – it’s the booze. This view empowers the control freaks who want to change us by making alcohol harder to get.

But if the Germans can drink responsibly (and the French, and the Spanish, and the Dutch), then why can’t we? For the answer to that question we have to stop blaming alcohol and take a hard, critical look at ourselves.

I know who I believe ....

Further to my post last Friday about Dr Anne Fox's report, here's a (relatively) recent story from the Timaru Herald  which backs up Fox's view that alcohol is used as an excuse for violence and other bad behaviour.

The views expressed in the Herald's article are identical to ones I've heard from people working with family violence offenders in the Wairarapa. I regard these real-world opinions as carrying a lot more weight than those of hysterical, agenda-driven academics.

How the media treat alcohol heretics

It’s funny, isn’t it, that a report questioning the demonisation of alcohol should get wide publicity only when it’s attacked by puritanical academics – this, nearly a year after its release.

That was the fate of British anthropologist Anne Fox’s March 2015 paper in which she argued that it’s simplistic and wrong to blame alcohol for violence and other bad behaviour.

Fox’s research, commissioned by liquor conglomerate Lion, was largely ignored by the media on its release. An odd exception was an interview with Fox on Wallace Chapman’s Sunday Mornings programme on Radio New Zealand – a rare case of someone from outside the politically approved (i.e. left-leaning) list getting airtime from the state broadcaster.

Apart from that and an article I wrote for The Listener, Fox’s paper was clearly deemed by media gatekeepers to be of no public interest, despite intense debate going back years over alcohol-related issues.

I can only surmise that this was because her key finding – that alcohol is too easily made a scapegoat for antisocial behaviour – was considered heretical, since it conflicted with the barrage of almost hysterical anti-liquor rhetoric New Zealanders are bombarded with.

It was only when two academics (one only a PhD student) issued a shallow and poorly written – in fact almost incomprehensible – critique this week that Fox’s paper got legs in the mainstream media, and then only because it provided a platform from which to attack her.

One News, Radio New Zealand and the New Zealand Herald all eagerly seized the opportunity to cast doubts on Fox’s credibility.

It’s not hard to follow the groupthink of the media decision-makers. Fox’s research was seen as ineradicably tainted because it was funded by Lion. Academics, on the other hand, are regarded as having only the purest of motives.

Of all the coverage yesterday, Radio New Zealand’s was the most appallingly one-sided. Interviewing a Hawke’s Bay emergency department doctor, whom we were obviously supposed to regard as the ultimate authority on the pernicious effects of alcohol, Summer Report presenter Teresa Cowie made her bias clear by referring to Fox’s research as “dodgy” – a plainly defamatory statement when made in respect of an anthropologist who has specialised in studying drinking cultures and substance abuse.

The interview demonstrated that many journalists are incapable of reporting fairly and impartially on alcohol-related issues. Sympathetic interviews with emergency department doctors – hardly the most objective commentators, given that they are confronted every day by the most extreme effects of alcohol – win out over measured, detached reporting.

To recap on Fox’s report, she argued that New Zealanders and Australians use drunkenness as an excuse for actions that wouldn’t be acceptable if the perpetrators were sober. But she pointed out that liquor consumption need not be synonymous with violence or bad behaviour – indeed, isn’t synonymous with antisocial behaviour for the vast majority of New Zealand drinkers, or indeed in many countries that have higher rates of alcohol consumption than ours.

Blaming alcohol as the sole cause of violence, she believes, diverts attention from “maladaptive cultural norms” that allow New Zealand and Australian men to be violent and aggressive.

As I wrote in The Listener: “Fox’s conclusion is that while alcohol gets the blame, the real problems are rooted in our cultural attitudes. We treat liquor as if it exerts some mystical power over us, thus allowing us to exempt ourselves from personal responsibility when we behave badly.”

This argument must have gone down like a cup of cold sick among the army of tut-tutting public health academics and bureaucrats who have spent years pushing for regulatory restraints on alcohol availability and consumption.

In their eyes, New Zealanders are powerless to control their behaviour once in the grip of alcohol and its manipulative purveyors. Talk of individual responsibility is anathema to the wowser lobby because it places the blame for antisocial behaviour squarely where it belongs – on the perpetrator rather than the demon drink.

The critique of Fox’s paper, written for the journal Addiction by University of Auckland PhD student Nicki Jackson and University of Newcastle (Australia) professor Kypros Kypri, argues that her research is unsound and has the potential to undermine “evidence-based” countermeasures to alcohol-related harm.

Inevitably, they highlight the fact that Fox’s research was funded by a brewery company. They also fault her paper on the basis that it was not peer-reviewed and had no “ethical” approval. Their own critique, of course, is packed with references to the mountains of academic literature on the dangers of alcohol.

But Fox’s critics spectacularly miss the point of her report. Nowhere in her paper did she deny a link between alcohol and violence. What she disputes is that alcohol is the cause.

Fox herself has methodically taken the critique apart in a response in which, among other things, she accuses Jackson and Kypri of misrepresenting statistics. One notable example relates to the percentage of Australian bar patrons questioned in a survey who had supposedly experienced violence over a three-month period.

Jackson and Kypri said the figure was one in 10, but Fox reveals the survey question didn’t actually mention the word “violence”. It asked patrons how many times they had experienced or witnessed [Fox’s italics] “any form of verbal, physical or sexual aggression in or around licensed venues in the three months prior to interview”.

As Fox says, this provides a very subjective measure. Some people might regard raised voices as evidence of aggression. You have to ask: whose credibility is in doubt here?

Fox also questions Kypri’s objectivity, alleging he’s a director of an obscure but long-established organisation called the Independent Order of Rechabites, which promotes abstinence from alcohol. In the New Zealand Herald, Kypri denied this, saying he’s involved in the Australian Rechabite Foundation, which he portrayed as a research and advocacy organisation. But he’s being cute: the Australian Rechabite Foundation’s website makes it clear that the foundation is an offshoot of, and affiliated with, the order.

“In my view,” Fox writes, “religious temperance beliefs about alcohol can cloud one’s objective scientific judgement, and such affiliations should be declared in conflict of interest statements as they belie an underlying non-scientific agenda.”

There’s an interesting contrast here. Fox was open about Lion’s sponsorship of her research, as she had to be (although she insists her contract gave her complete independence). Shouldn’t Kypri have similarly declared his affiliation with the Rechabites, which arguably had the same potential to sway his judgment?

I have my own doubts about the reliability of the Jackson-Kypri critique, given the authors’ claims that Fox’s findings were being used “extensively” by the liquor industry (they cite just one article in an Australian industry magazine), in the “mainstream media” (they mention only one instance – my Listener story) and in submissions by government agencies on public policy (again, they give only one instance – a relatively brief reference in a submission by the Director of the NSW Office of Public Prosecutions on alcohol- and drug-fuelled violence).

I know hyperbole when I see it; I’m a journalist, after all. When your story’s weak, the temptation is to pump it up by exaggerating.

As for the criticism that Fox didn’t seek ethical approval from an institution, she points out that her paper was written for a lay audience, not an academic journal.  That shows in her language, which is direct and clear, in marked contrast to the tortuous jargon used by her critics.

The irony here is that Fox’s report didn’t let the alcohol industry off the hook. She criticised some alcohol advertising for promoting macho behaviour and made no attempt to play down the negative effects of excessive alcohol consumption, especially among the young.

In her response to the critique, she writes: “My mission is not to absolve alcohol from all blame for societal problems – alcohol dependence is clearly a problem and a burden on health resources. However, it is obvious that blaming alcohol alone for violence in the NTE [night-time economy, the academic phrase for places where people drink] is an obfuscation of the real causes and does a disservice to the victims of violence.”

I don’t deny that there may have been flaws in Fox’s report. What research paper isn’t open to criticism? I accept too that she was an easy target because of the source of her financial backing. But as someone who has been writing about alcohol issues for nearly 40 years, I found her main conclusions compelling.

They are borne out by everyday observation, which confirms that most New Zealanders are perfectly capable of drinking without getting violent or otherwise behaving badly. Ask yourself: when did you last witness a brawl, or even an angry confrontation, in a café where people were drinking?

In other words, it’s wrong and simplistic to blame liquor. End of story.

But here’s the main point. Fox’s paper provided an opportunity for a debate that might have shed some new light on the ugly side of New Zealand’s drinking culture. It offered an alternative explanation to that pushed relentlessly by agenda-driven academics and bureaucrats. But her critics would rather shut the debate down, and sadly the media have allowed themselves to be co-opted toward that end.