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. 

A cruisy ride for the august professor

TV One’s Close Up last night provided further evidence (not that it was needed) of the media’s unquestioning acceptance of the shrill propaganda emanating from the neo-wowser lobby.

Host Mark Sainsbury introduced the programme by asking whether “alcohol barons” were holding the government to ransom over proposals to cut the blood alcohol limit from 0.08 to 0.05. Implicit in Close Up 's coverage of the issue was that the government was wrong to reject advice from transport officials to lower the limit – the heavy implication being that since there was no valid reason for doing so, there could only be ulterior ones.

To prove this beyond all doubt Close Up wheeled out yet another academic “expert” on alcohol – this one a professor from Perth – who confirmed that, yes, the only possible explanation for the decision to call for further research was that the government was in the pockets of the liquor industry.

This wild assertion went completely unchallenged by Sainsbury. The possibility that the government had made a sensible decision not to be rushed into a law change on the basis of incomplete (I would say biased) research by anti-liquor extremists in the bureaucracy and the universities wasn’t considered.

Sainsbury’s lead-in to the item, in which he rhetorically asked “Who’s calling the shots?” and “Do the liquor barons have too much say?” was a clear signal that Close Up wasn’t going to waste time subjecting the professor’s claim to any scrutiny.

Instead, the hard questions were all directed at Bruce Robertson, representing the Hospitality Association. Here, writ large, was the simplistic heroes-and-villains scenario so beloved of tabloid television: hotel and bar owners bad, moralistic academics good.

I would like to have seen Sainsbury put a couple of simple questions to the smug-looking professor (smug, no doubt, because he knew he was in for an easy ride). I would have pointed out that the road toll, far from suddenly becoming a national crisis as the academics would have us believe, has been in steady decline for years. I would have pointed out that the AA has published data that raises serious doubts about the efficacy of reducing the blood alcohol limit. I would have pointed out that per capita alcohol consumption in New Zealand, contrary to the impression given by the anti-liquor activists, is below the OECD average (and below that of Australia). And I would have pointed out that in the most recent drink-driving blitz, only 0.58 percent of the 31,777 drivers tested were over the limit.

How would the professor square these facts with the almost hysterical clamour for liquor law changes that would penalise responsible, moderate drinkers?

Close Up has researchers. It wouldn’t have taken too much effort to come up with one or two questions that might at least give the illusion of balance. But like much of the media, Close Up has uncritically bought in to the moral panic promoted by the neo-wowser lobby.

I think of my late colleague Frank Haden’s wonderful dictum – “Doubt everyone with gusto” – and wonder whatever happened to journalistic scepticism.

Holding the line against the neo-wowsers

I’m not in the habit of expressing unalloyed admiration for politicians of any colour, but the more I see and hear of Transport Minister Steven Joyce, the more I like him. He's sharp, articulate and politically astute, but affable too.

Joyce was on Morning Report this morning calmly and sensibly batting away the latest salvo from the anti-liquor activists in the transport and health bureaucracies.

The latest phase in the neo-wowsers’ campaign to tighten the liquor laws (a campaign which, I grudgingly admit, has been adroitly planned and orchestrated – largely at the taxpayers’ expense) was the release under the Official Information Act of papers showing that the government disregarded an avalanche of “expert” advice from the Ministry of Transport on the need to reduce the legal blood alcohol limit from 0.08 to 0.05mg per 100ml of blood.

It has been a feature of the neo-wowsers’ campaign that their claims are generally accepted uncritically by the media, even when they don’t stand up to close analysis. It seems to be assumed that because they are public officials, and therefore theoretically concerned only with our wellbeing, their integrity is unassailable. Promoting the notion that they are driven by a "public good" mission is a central part of the neo-wowsers’ strategy. This is presumed to give them the moral high ground and therefore trump any counter-arguments.

The neo-wowsers are highly selective in their use of statistics, disregarding any figures that don’t suit their agenda, and they don’t seem too bothered if their statements are inconsistent. My reading of today’s Dom Post report, for example, indicates that on the one hand, transport officials are saying that if the legal blood alcohol level were reduced, up to 33 lives a year could be saved.

That implies that 33 of the 137 people reportedly killed last year in car accidents involving alcohol had blood alcohol levels of between 0.05 and 0.08. Yet Radio New Zealand’s report quotes a transport official as saying people with a blood alcohol level of between 0.05 and 0.08 caused 30 deaths between 2006 and 2008.

I’m no mathematician, but there seems to be a marked discrepancy here. But what the heck – any old figures will do as long as they help stampede the public into thinking we have an alcohol-induced crisis on the roads, notwithstanding the rather inconvenient fact that the road toll is steadily trending downwards.

Clearly the release of the MOT papers was intended to embarrass the government into backing down and accepting the neo-wowsers’ demand for a lower legal blood alcohol limit. But to his credit, Joyce stood firm on the government’s decision to seek more detailed research specific to New Zealand.

Studies have already been done which call into question the neo-wowsers’ simplistic claims about the benefits of reducing the limit. For example an ESR study for the police looked at 1,046 drivers who died between 2004 and 2009, of whom 48 percent tested positive for drugs or alcohol either alone or in combination.

The ESR report says that 21 of 351 deceased drivers in the study who had used alcohol – just 2 percent of the 1,046 drivers in the study – had blood alcohol levels of between 0.05 and 0.08. Only 10 of these drivers had used alcohol alone, while the other 11 had also used a potentially impairing drug.

Of the 351 drivers who had used alcohol, either alone or in combination with another drug, 28 percent had levels of 81-160mg, 35 percent had levels of 161-240mg and 15 percent had levels over 240mg/100ml of blood.

This not only confirms that the real menace on the roads is caused by seriously heavy drinkers, who disregard the legal limits anyway, but also suggests that the use of drugs such as cannabis is a critical factor too.

Even if it could be proved that reducing the blood alcohol limit would reduce the road toll, is that on its own a compelling argument for it? Reducing the speed limit from 100 kmh to 80 kmh would reduce the road toll too, but no one seriously suggests doing it. So would banning all vehicles with no disc brakes or electronic traction control. The question, as in so many issues, is where to strike an appropriate balance that takes reasonable account of safety considerations without becoming unduly oppressive.

If it were left to them, the compulsionists in the bureaucracy and the universities would err on the side of oppression; that’s their instinct because they know what’s best for everyone. Personally I’m relieved that Joyce is holding his hand up and refusing to be rushed.

Footnote: In the latest issue of The Listener, out this week, I argue that the neo-wowser lobby has grossly overstated our alcohol problem and conveniently overlooked the enormous advances in the drinking habits of the typical New Zealander.

It's inappropriate to be judgmental

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, August 3.)

IT SEEMS that in the 21st century, the worst thing anyone can be accused of is inappropriate behaviour.

We seem to have forgotten words like evil, wicked, outrageous, immoral, scandalous and reprehensible. They might as well be erased from the dictionary. They have been replaced by that one all-purpose weasel word “inappropriate”.

A policeman who beats up a suspect is accused of behaving inappropriately. A paedophile teacher admits inappropriate touching (whatever that may be). A politician who watches blue movies at the taxpayer’s expense confesses to inappropriate use of his ministerial credit card. A developer whose building mysteriously gains an extra three storeys acknowledges an inappropriate breach of the district plan. A Hollywood celeb caught snorting cocaine with one of his mistresses tearfully breaks down on television and admits it was an inappropriate lapse for which he hopes his wife and fans will forgive him.

This linguistic contamination has now spread to sport. New Zealand cyclist Julian Dean, head-butted in a sprint to the finish line during the Tour de France, said his assailant’s behaviour was “really inappropriate”. No doubt Springbok lock Bakkies Botha’s head-butting of All Black Jimmy Cowan was inappropriate too.

At this rate it can only be a matter of time before murderers like Clayton Weatherston stand accused of acting inappropriately toward their victims and Adolf Hitler is condemned in the history books for inappropriate behaviour toward the Jews.

Does it matter? Of course it does. “Inappropriate” is a mealy-mouthed word, a namby-pamby word. It is a prissy euphemism devised by schoolteacher liberals who don’t want to seem judgmental. It is a word that diminishes the gravity of bad behaviour and in so doing, subtly conditions us to excuse all manner of sleaze and vileness.

* * *

MY LOCAL paper recently published a photo taken at the opening of a newly established “hub” for a variety of community services.

The accompanying story announced that the offices would be shared by a plethora of organisations including Career Services, Workbridge, Supporting Families, a free budgeting service, Family Planning, addiction services and gambling help, a couple of Maori community organisations, Child Youth and Family and Work and Income.

The picture, which showed a predominantly female audience listening to a speech by government MP Paul Quinn, illustrated a striking phenomenon of our times.

A vast network of taxpayer-funded, or at least state-subsidised, community agencies has sprung up, all operating in similar fields and with functions that often overlap.

Their proliferation seems unrelated to whichever political party is in power. Labour governments create them in the belief that there’s no problem that can’t be solved by state intervention, and National leaves them alone because dismantling them is just too much hassle.

But who knows how much good they are doing? What scrutiny are they subjected to? How do we know we’re getting value for money?

No doubt some of these organisations have the ability to transform people’s lives, but it’s odds on that others are an utter waste of time, space and money. Trouble is, how do we know which is which?

A sceptical view, based on our stubbornly dismal statistics for child neglect, poor health, drug and alcohol addiction, teenage pregnancies, welfare dependency and family violence, is that they’re making bugger-all difference to anything. But they certainly provide careers for a lot of well-intentioned, middle-class women.

An even bleaker view is that these organisations may be part of the problem rather than the solution, discouraging people from taking greater responsibility for their own lives in the knowledge that helping agencies are always on hand to sort things out for them (in a non-judgmental way, of course).

* * *

AT THE core of the increasingly hysterical debate over liquor abuse lies a choice between a free society – in which we accept that a minority of people will behave criminally or irresponsibly, and take reasonable steps to control them and minimise the harm done – and an un-free society, in which unreasonable constraints on the responsible majority are justified by the need to control the behaviour of the irresponsible minority.

Of course, in the un-free society, much of the criminal minority disregards laws and controls anyway, so that the burden of compliance largely falls on the law-abiding and responsible. One example was the proposal (now on hold) to lower the legal blood alcohol limit to a level that would trap many safe drivers, but do nothing to deter potential killers who repeatedly drive while grossly intoxicated.

Other examples include the compulsory microchipping of dogs, which subjects law-abiding citizens to unnecessary compliance costs but is totally ineffectual against rogue dog owners; and the criminalisation of smacking, which puts good parents at risk of prosecution but does nothing to deter real abusers.

These are kneejerk laws passed to create the illusion that something is being done. They simply scratch a political itch.

The best that can be said of the people agitating so evangelistically for restrictive liquor laws is that they are convinced they are acting in our best interests. Like the Labour government that New Zealanders tossed out in 2008, they don’t think people can be trusted to make their own choices.

TV3 joins the wowser crusade

Sigh. Just when I was starting to think TV3 News wasn’t so bad after all (a cynic would say it’s because anything looks good alongside their competition), they do their best to drive me away again. Their lead item on Tuesday night was a shocker, though I mean that in the metaphorical rather than the literal sense.

It seems TV3, along with much of the mainstream media, has become an enthusiastic and uncritical accomplice in the concerted campaign of fear and panic over liquor abuse. This is the only possible explanation for its decision to lead the 6pm bulletin with a British “expert” on liquor and drug abuse, a Professor David Nutt, tut-tutting (or should that be nut-nutting?) over the government’s supposed capitulation to the liquor industry on the proposal to reduce the legal alcohol limit for drivers.

Nutt had nothing to say that hasn’t already been said by the vociferous New Zealand wowser lobby, led by the excitable Prof Doug Sellman. His statements were not new and neither were they news. They were simply one more expression of opinion – and a highly emotive one at that – by yet another sanctimonious academic who claims to know what’s best for us. The only thing new was that this time it was a sanctimonious academic with a British accent, which if anything made it even more irritating

As with climate change, we have given up expecting dispassionate, detached, objective statements from academics and health activists crusading for restrictive drinking laws. They are evangelists on a holy mission.

Nutt took the hoary old line that the government is in thrall to faceless liquor barons, and that only this can explain its decision to stall a reduction in the legal alcohol limit until more research has been done. This time-honoured wowser propaganda may play well to the impressionable, but it overlooks the fact that governments have wider responsibilities than to lobby groups, whether they represent the liquor industry or the latter-day temperance crusaders.

It may be that the government is holding the anti-liquor activists at bay because it recognises that there is a very large body of New Zealanders – those who don’t drink to excess, and therefore don’t deserve to be shackled by restrictive liquor laws – whose voices haven’t been heard in the debate. Much is made of the fact that the Law Commission report on the liquor laws attracted thousands of submissions, but by their very nature such exercises mainly bring out the committed activists. If the government is taking its time over liquor law changes because it wants to ensure the process isn’t wholly captured by the temperance evangelists (as the Law Commission appears to have been), then good on it. That’s called democracy.

Perhaps the anti-liquor campaigners, having succeeded in controlling the debate this far, suddenly sense the tide is turning against them. That may explain why they are turning up the volume, with “experts” like Nutt calling for lawyers to sue the liquor industry and urging a total ban on liquor advertising and supermarket wine sales. It might also explain Prof Sellman’s hysterical claims to a select committee recently about the level of alcohol-induced harm likely to result from the Rugby World Cup (70 serious or fatal road accidents, 400 babies with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, more than 10,000 physical and sexual assaults … phew!).

It’s the wowsers’ prerogative, of course, to indulge in doomsday fantasies in the hope that we will all be terrified into complying with their agenda. But it’s disappointing that news organisations like TV3 should be buying into their alarmist nonsense and giving them spurious credibility.

What time’s the Prime news bulletin on? I might have to change my routine.

Where's Professor Higgins when we need him?

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, June 8.)

SOMEWHERE in New Zealand – Auckland, it’s rumoured – there’s a speech academy that teaches young women to mangle the pronunciation of English. All Air New Zealand cabin crew are sent there for training before being allowed to make in-flight announcements.

Female television and radio journalists also take the course, their employers having negotiated a generous bulk discount.

This secret academy has refined to perfection the grotesque distortion of vowel sounds and the adoption of an infantile, sing-song mode of speech similar to that used by little girls addressing their favourite dolls.

Trainees are also instructed in the art of speaking as if they have just inhaled helium, so that what emerges resembles a shrill squeak rather than human speech.

A popular optional course provides expert tuition in the placing of emphasis on words such as “to”, “will”, “of”, “for”, “in” and “is” (as in, “please remain in your seats until the aircraft is outside the terminal building”, or “police will be widening the search for the missing man”).

On completion of training, graduates are guaranteed to speak a hackle-raising form of English that triggers an immediate, involuntary cringe from anyone who values euphonious speech and clear pronunciation.

Fascinated language scholars are tracking the development of this new form of New Zealand English and confidently predict that within a generation, it will be incomprehensible to anyone born before 1960. Already, overseas tourists boarding Air New Zealand flights expecting to hear English spoken have been known to panic on hearing the in-flight announcements and wonder whether they are on the right airline.

* * *

IT WAS encouraging to see Northland Maori MPs Kelvin Davis and Shane Jones pulling no punches – sorry, probably not the best figure of speech – in their condemnation of the Maori criminals who assaulted and robbed three French tourists in the Far North.

Branding them as “scum”, “mongrels” and “brainless bums”, Mr Davis said he was sickened and ashamed by the way some of his people treated visitors.

Fellow Labour MP Mr Jones called for the attackers’ relatives and friends to dob them in, saying they had tarnished Northland’s reputation.

What made their ringing condemnation all the more forceful is that it’s rare for Maori leaders to be so blunt in holding their own people to account. We are accustomed to them directing their rhetoric the other way – at the Pakeha majority that is supposedly the cause of all Maori problems. This conveniently puts the onus for all the ills suffered by Maori on someone else.

Rarely if ever do you hear Maori leaders rebuking their people for their high crime rate, drug use, mistreatment of children or neglect of education.

We could do with a resurgence of the inspirational Maori leadership of past generations – leadership that challenges Maori to take greater responsibility for themselves and gets away from the relentless focus on compensation that too often benefits only a tribal elite.

* * *

A RECENT caller to Justin du Fresne’s radio talkback show suggested that drunks who clog hospital emergency departments on Friday and Saturday nights, seeking treatment for injuries caused in fights or accidents, should be presented with a bill for the trouble they cause. If they refuse to pay, or don’t have the money, the caller suggested arrangements could be made to have their pay or benefit docked at source.

It sounded like an idea worth pursuing. The practical implementation would take some working out, but it would help drive home the message that people who drink to excess should be made to take responsibility for the consequences. Far better that than reintroducing wowserish restrictions that would make responsible drinkers pay for the bad behaviour of the minority.

As it happens, the talkback caller’s idea wasn’t entirely original, though he probably thought it was. Buried deep in the Law Commission’s mammoth report on the liquor laws (at page 392) is a suggestion that police be given the power to impose a financial charge on drunks who have to be driven home or placed in custody for their own safety.

The commission comments: “We think there should be some means of recovering from these individuals some of the expense to which their behaviour puts the state.”

It suggested a sum of about $250 in each case. Given that more than 21,000 intoxicated people in 2007-08 were nannied by the police, it could be a nice little earner.

The commission doesn’t appear to have considered extending the idea to hospitals, but it did quote Wellington Hospital emergency department doctor Paul Quigley as saying it was unacceptable for drunks to use resources such as ambulances to the detriment of worthier users.

Well, make them pay. If it’s feasible for the police, why not hospitals too?

Make alcohol harder to get, and you make it even more alluring

People directly caught up in awful events, or even on their periphery, are not likely to make the most rational judgments about them. We respectfully hear them out, but their arguments are often clouded - understandably - by intense emotion.

Take the Auckland doctor whose son attends the same school as James Webster, the 16-year-old who tragically drank himself to death at the weekend. Dr Margaret Abercrombie dashed off a letter to the prime minister urging the government to take action over teenage drinking. On Kathryn Ryan’s Nine to Noon programme on Radio New Zealand today, Dr Abercrombie said Parliament should make it more difficult to get access to alcohol. She mentioned price increases as one tool for reducing availability.

The immediate and obvious problem with this approach is that there is nothing Parliament could have done to prevent James getting hold of the bottle of vodka that killed him. It belonged to his grandmother and he obtained it from a cupboard at her home. Besides, at 16, James was two years below the legal purchasing age even now, demonstrating that age controls are of limited effectiveness in curtailing teenage drinking.

To be fair, Dr Abercrombie wasn’t talking only about James’ death, but about the wider problem of teenage binge drinking. But even here we are left with a problem that I believe defies simplistic legislative solutions.

New Zealand teenagers, in common with those of the same age group in other predominantly Anglo-Saxon countries, regard getting pissed as a rite of passage. It has always seemed to me that there is a large element of defiance involved in this.

They see their elders as hypocritically consuming alcohol but wanting to deny it to them. Teenagers being teenagers, their instinct is to defy authority. Alcohol thus takes on the aura of forbidden fruit; it becomes even more desirable.

I wouldn’t argue that this alone explains New Zealand’s teenage binge-drinking culture, but it’s an important factor. It follows that the more you try to keep teenagers from getting access to alcohol, the more determined they will become to acquire it by one means or another. If they can’t buy it legally, they’ll raid the liquor cupboard at home.

This is nothing new. I remember the frisson of excitement when, as a primary school pupil, I aided and abetted a friend in pillaging his parents’ cocktail cabinet. Granted, there was a degree of curiosity about what alcohol tasted like; but far more important was the thrill of defying and outfoxing our parents.

Later, in my teenage years, my friends and I would go to great lengths to procure illicit alcohol – not because we particularly liked the stuff (it took me years to acquire a taste for beer) but because drinking it made us feel like real men. Whoever in our group had a driver’s licence would be delegated to take us to whatever pub was known to have a clandestine after-hours trade and to ask no questions about age. This often meant a round trip of 80 miles, which was a measure of our determination.

But there’s a potent factor affecting teenage drinking today that wasn’t around even in my time. It was identified in an article in the New Zealand Herald earlier this year by Michael Duncan, a sociology lecturer at Carey Baptist College in Auckland.

Duncan noted that radio host Murray Deaker had recently interviewed Sir Geoffrey Palmer about binge-drinking by young women and both had concurred that the message must be got to these young women that drinking to get drunk was quite simply dangerous.

Duncan then went on:

“I agree with Deaker’s and Palmer’s views but not with their recommended action. To tell these young middle-class women today that drinking to get drunk is dangerous is to only exacerbate the problem.

“The very reason why many young women drink to get drunk is because it is dangerous. They drink to get drunk so as to be in danger. Let me explain.

“Many of these young women come from middle-class homes where they were brought up on a diet of safety. Their well-meaning parents worked hard to keep them from harm's way. Schools, play yards, swimming pools, outings, malls, you name it; all had to be safe for their children. It is this generation of children that has become known as the ‘cotton-wool kids’.”

In this culture of fear, Duncan wrote, risk was stigmatised and an excessive preoccupation with precaution and safety became the new bottom line. “These girls were brought up to be risk- averse. But then the inevitable happened and these girls morphed into young women. Not surprisingly, they began to individuate themselves from their parents, principals and inherited principles; they rebelled against safety and looked for danger. For cotton-wool kids recklessness has become the new form of rebellion.”

For many of these young women, he concluded, binge-drinking was not about alcohol or simply getting “pissed”. Rather, it was about creating dangerous situations where they didn’t know what would happen next. Drinking sessions, for them, were a high-wire act, full of exhilarating fear and unanswered questions. Having been brought up on safety, they hungered for risk.

That’s a very perceptive analysis, my only criticism being that Duncan confined it to young women. I believe it applies at least equally to young men who cut loose the moment they escape parental control and are able to make up for all the risky behaviour they weren’t allowed to indulge in earlier. Binge-drinking is just one manifestation of that; the boy-racer culture is another, arguably more lethal, one.

Hence my misgivings about the restrictive approach advocated by the Law Commission in its recent report on the liquor laws, and even more vociferously espoused by the New Wowser lobby in the health agencies and universities. By making alcohol harder to get, they risk making it seem even more dangerous and hence more alluring.

Sure, we have a serious and worrying teenage binge-drinking problem. There’s no point in pretending otherwise. And it has been greatly exacerbated by some liquor companies that have aggressively targeted the youth market – none more so than Independent Liquor, which pioneered alco-pops, and was rightly fingered by Dominion Post columnist Linley Boniface yesterday. It becomes that much harder to defend responsible liquor consumption when a segment of the industry seems determined to promote irresponsible consumption. (The Liquorland chain is culpable too, as Linley demonstrated when she revealed a slogan from the company’s website: “We’ll get the stuff to your car – because why only buy as much as you can carry?”. Small wonder the New Wowsers have gained so much political traction when these morons play into their hands.)

My concern, as explained before in this blog, is that turning the clock back on liberalisation of the liquor laws will serve at best to prolong, and at worst set back, an already difficult struggle (and it has gone on for decades) to get to a point where teenagers will no longer regard alcohol purely as means of writing themselves off.

I don’t know what the solution is, beyond suggesting that it lies in a much more complex social and cultural change than is likely to be achieved through simplistic legislative and regulatory changes (though they may have a role to play). But I do know the solution doesn’t lie in telling teenagers they can’t drink – the prohibition approach. Whatever barriers are placed in their way, they’ll find a way around them; they will delight in outwitting the law, because that’s how teenagers behave. And the risk is that stricter laws will drive them into the hands of black marketers and we’ll end up with even less control than we have now.

Politics at its most cynical

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, April 27.)

SAY the word “sneaky”. Now try drawing it out, like this: sneak-key.

There, you’ve got it.

Sneak-key is a freshly coined term for a prime minister who secretly dispatches the Minister of Maori Affairs to New York so that he can commit New Zealand to a declaration that the previous government refused to sign and that New Zealanders have never been given an opportunity to debate.

Then, when word gets out, the PM pretends it didn’t really matter much because the declaration was only symbolic anyway.

If that was the case – if signing the declaration was only a gesture – why did it have to be done so furtively? Why couldn’t Mr Key do what good leaders do in liberal democracies and clearly announce in advance what the government intended to do, so that the country was at least informed even if it hadn’t had a chance to make up its mind?

The answer is obvious. Mr Key knew people would rightly object to New Zealand signing a declaration without first having an informed discussion about the implications, but he gambled on getting away with it because of his personal popularity.

This is politics at its most cynical. It demonstrates contempt for the electorate.

So now New Zealand is a signatory to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and while Mr Key was airily dismissing it as a matter of no great significance, Maori expectations were being ramped up to unprecedented levels.

There’s a yawning credibility gap here. Either Mr Key is right, and the declaration is just a feel-good, “aspirational” statement of no practical consequence, or High Court judge Sir Eddie Durie, the Labour Party, public law expert Mai Chen and ACT leader Rodney Hide are right, and the declaration could have profound and far-reaching consequences.

If Mr Key had been open and up-front, I might have been inclined to accept his word. But he wasn’t, so I don’t.

That acrid smell in the air is the National Government’s political capital burning up.

* * *

THE CRESCENDO of anti-liquor propaganda has risen to deafening proportions as Parliament prepares to receive the Law Commission’s final report, due today, on suggested changes to the alcohol laws.

Over the past few weeks, New Zealanders have been bombarded with dire and sometimes near-hysterical claims about the damage being done by alcohol abuse.

If this issue is to be decided by the sheer volume of propaganda, then the wowser lobby – largely funded by our taxes – has it in the bag. They have run a sustained and cleverly orchestrated campaign designed to panic New Zealanders into thinking we’re a nation of helpless drunks. There can be no doubt that their objective was to put pressure on the commission to recommend law changes that will sharply diminish individual responsibility and punish moderate drinkers.

Polls indicate the wowsers have largely been successful in convincing New Zealanders that we all need time in the detox unit. The liquor industry, for all its supposed political influence, is trailing well behind in the war of public opinion.

Personally I won’t lose any sleep over whatever happens to the liquor industry barons. By greedily continuing to promote the Kiwi pisshead culture and pushing alco-pops to young women, they have played into the hands of the neo-puritan propagandists in the universities and the health bureaucracy.

What bothers me is that those who will pay the price, literally and figuratively, for harsher liquor laws will include the vast majority of people who drink responsibly and have benefited enormously from the gradual liberalisation of the past 30-odd years.

We’ve been here before, of course. Just as dog attacks were used to justify a crackdown on law-abiding dog owners, and just as good parents were potentially criminalised because of the actions of child abusers, so responsible drinkers risk being penalised for the misbehaviour of the relatively small number who drink to excess.

* * *

ONE OF the significant achievements of the Internet, for which it isn’t really given due credit, is that it gives courage to cowards.

Letters to newspaper editors require a name and address; have done for decades. Even on radio talkback shows, anonymity isn’t complete because there’s always the chance someone might recognise the caller’s voice. Besides, the host can dump anyone who gets too offensive. These checks tend to filter out people with extreme views who don’t have the guts to reveal themselves.

Online forums, on the other hand, confer total anonymity. People can be as toxic, defamatory, abusive and splenetic as they like, cowering all the while behind pseudonyms. The blogosphere is God’s gift to people whose cowardice previously served to keep their rage in check.

It’s a form of free speech, I suppose, but a very inferior one. If an opinion is worth expressing, it’s surely worth putting your name to.

Captured by the New Wowsers

I don’t believe Sir Geoffrey Palmer is a wowser. I imagine he would bristle at the suggestion. Neither do I believe he’s a compulsive controller who knows what’s best for everyone. However I do believe that the Law Commission, in preparing its report Alcohol In Our Lives: Curbing the Harm, has allowed itself to be well and truly captured by neo-wowsers who don’t think New Zealanders can be trusted to make the right decisions about alcohol consumption. The wowsers’ fingerprints are all over the document.

Reading the report summary and an accompanying breakdown of the 2900-plus submissions, it’s clear that the commission’s report is an almost unqualified victory for those who want to see the liberalisation of the past few decades wound back. They have convinced Palmer and the commission that only a drastic retreat from past reforms can save us from our inability to control our alcohol intake.

The tone of the report is alarmist. Large chunks of it are written in the language of the anti-alcohol propagandists who have been blitzing the media in the weeks leading up to the report’s release. Their objective was to create a moral panic over alcohol abuse, and so far they have succeeded.

The commission has listened to the social scientists, health providers and medical researchers who urged a lifting of the minimum age of purchase, an increase in excise tax and a crackdown on liquor advertising and promotion, among other measures. Liquor industry interests didn’t get a look in. In fact the commission explicitly rejects the industry position that the majority of New Zealanders drink responsibly and shouldn’t be penalised because of the minority who don’t.

On this crucial point, the commission has adopted the alarmist contention that “excess drinking is not confined to an aberrant minority”. Exactly what constitutes “excess drinking” is not satisfactorily explained. Rather, the commission seems to accept without question the anti-alcohol lobby’s claims that 20 percent of us drink in a “potentially hazardous manner” and that 25 percent of us consume too much alcohol every time we drink – statements that hinge on the anti-alcohol propagandists’ arbitrary perception of what is “hazardous” or amounts to “too much”. Where there is a choice between an alarmist conclusion and a more cautious, conservative one, the commission seems unerringly to opt for the former. (I should note here that judged by the criteria of Professor Doug Sellman, one of the more shrill anti-alcohol propagandists, I am one of New Zealand’s 700,000 “heavy drinkers”. Perhaps you are too.)

What bothers me is not so much that the liquor industry position – which essentially favours the status quo – has been disregarded in favour of the restrictive regime favoured by the anti-alcohol lobby. The industry is big enough and ugly enough to look after itself (and you can bet it will be doing exactly that behind the scenes). No, what concerns me is that this whole elaborate process is dominated by organised and well-resourced pressure groups: the industry on one side, the control lobby (largely taxpayer funded, incidentally) on the other. Ironically, the people on whose behalf this review exercise is supposedly being undertaken – ordinary New Zealanders – are largely excluded. There is, as far as I know, no lobby group representing moderate drinkers. By its very nature, the commission’s review gives weight to the views of interest groups but largely fails to capture the views of the ordinary citizens who will have to bear whatever consequences flow from it, but who don’t have the time, the resources, the know-how or the motivation to prepare and make submissions. (This isn’t the fault of the commission, of course; it’s just the nature of the system.)

I haven’t tackled the full report – all 500 pages of it – but the 32-page summary condenses the commission’s recommendations and gives an idea of the report’s tone. One key point, already mentioned, is the commission’s dodgy assertion – based on the anti-alcohol lobbyists’ loaded statistics – that liquor abuse is not confined to a problematical minority.

Another is that alcohol should not be treated as a “normal” commodity – again, a central tenet of the New Wowser Manifesto. “The trend towards regarding alcohol as a normal food or beverage product needs to be reversed,” the commission pontificates. “In truth, alcohol is no ordinary commodity. Alcohol is a psychoactive drug that easily becomes addictive and that can produce dangerous behaviours in those who drink too much. New Zealanders are reluctant as a nation to face up to the facts.” (See what I mean about the language used? It’s straight from the New Wowsers’ Handbook.)

A counter-argument to this is that by treating alcohol as a dangerous drug that must be carefully controlled, as New Zealand governments did for decades, you produce bizarre and contradictory outcomes like the six o’clock swill (wherein, I suspect, lie the origins of our binge drinking culture). I believe we’re still suffering the legacy of that prohibitionist tradition, which treated New Zealanders as helpless drunks unable to control their intake without the help of the state. The danger in turning the clock back on the liberal reforms of the last two decades, as the commission wants to do, is that alcohol will again attain the lure of forbidden fruit, attracting people (especially young people) because of its aura as something slightly risky and dangerous, rather than being treated as something to be enjoyed, like food, as part of everyday life. It strikes me as highly significant that countries where alcohol is treated as “normal”, and where children are introduced to it as an integral and unremarkable part of their culture, don’t generally share our binge-drinking problem.

It was inevitable that New Zealand would take time to adapt to the more liberal alcohol regime ushered in (albeit in a piecemeal and illogical manner) from the late 1960s onwards, but we were getting there. What the commission and the wowser lobby constantly overlook, because it doesn’t fit their agenda, is the many ways in which our drinking behaviour has improved. Not only is our per capita consumption down slightly on the late 1970s (it dipped very sharply in the 1990s, then crept back up), but we’re drinking differently. We’re doing it in more civilised surroundings, we’re doing it in mixed company rather than in the men-only domain of the old-style public bar, and we’re doing it more often over a meal rather than standing at the bar. We’re also more discerning about what we drink, choosing wine and “craft” beers over the mass-produced draught beer once dispensed through plastic hoses.

The commission notes with disapproval that the number of on-licences has more than trebled since the Sale of Liquor Act 1989, but doesn’t acknowledge that the size of the average bar has decreased enormously. The horrendous suburban booze barn of the 1960s and 70s, surrounded by acres of car parks, is extinct. The bars that have replaced them are much smaller, more intimate and more congenial. But apart from one brief token acknowledgment in the summary, the commission seems steadfastly to ignore these gains. It would rather dwell on binge drinking – a very real and ugly phenomenon, to be sure, but hardly “pervasive”, as the commission asserts, which suggests it has permeated every level of society when in fact it’s confined to a relatively small demographic group.

Not all the commission’s recommendations are extreme. There’s a good case to be made for reducing the proliferation of off-licence outlets and I personally wouldn’t argue too vigorously against the proposed reduction of opening hours. But the proposal to put the age of purchase back to 20, with no exceptions, is barmy and regressive. How humiliating for a 19-year-old to go to a bar or licensed restaurant with his or her parents and not be allowed to have a drink. How can we expect people to behave like adults when we treat them as children? This is precisely how our dysfunctional attitude toward alcohol developed in the first place.

So now it’s in the hands of the politicians. Given the fraught history of legislation relating to alcohol, we shouldn’t expect Parliament to make logical or consistent decisions – least of all if it’s down to a conscience vote (and I have some sympathy with Sir Geoffrey Palmer on that point). But at least the politicians, unlike the Law Commission, have constituents’ views to consider, which might lead to a more balanced position being struck than that taken by the commission. We should certainly hope so.

Let's ignore this one, chaps

Let it be noted that police breath-tested about 1000 drivers leaving Trentham racecourse after the Wellington Cup meeting on Saturday, according to the Dominion Post. Only two drivers were over the limit.

This inconvenient statistic will doubtless be ignored by the New Wowsers, since it undermines their conviction that we are a nation of helpless drunks who must be protected from ourselves.

One in the eye for the New Wowsers

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, December 22.)

I WAS DELIGHTED to read that more than 3000 motorists were stopped last Friday at a police checkpoint between Palmerston North and Wanganui and not one was over the legal alcohol limit.

This isn’t just good news for road safety – it’s also one in the eye for latter-day wowsers who want to convince us that New Zealand is a nation of helpless drunks, and that only a draconian rewriting of the liquor laws can save us from our own folly and fecklessness.

The New Wowsers have their tails up at the moment because they sense that the public, caught up in a moral panic over binge drinking and alcohol-related crime, will be receptive to a puritanical backlash against liquor consumption.

They are skilled in the selective use of statistics which paint a picture of a country gripped by alcohol addiction. One of their favourite claims is that 700,000 New Zealanders are “heavy drinkers”, based on World Health Organisation criteria.

But they ignore inconvenient statistics that show we are drinking slightly less alcohol per head than we did 30 years ago, and that New Zealand is ranked only 28th out of 190 countries (many of which ban alcohol altogether) for per capita alcohol consumption – well behind Germany, Britain, France, Switzerland and Denmark.

Even using the New Wowsers’ own criteria, the percentage of “potentially hazardous” drinkers has remained stable since 1996, despite the recent teenage binge drinking phenomenon.

The New Wowsers don’t want to acknowledge that alcohol abuse is confined to a relatively small – if highly visible – minority, and that most New Zealanders are moderate and responsible drinkers. And they can’t see, or don’t want to see, that our social drinking habits are vastly more civilised than they were before the liberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s. Cheers.

* * *

THE RUCKUS over the Mary and Joseph billboard outside Auckland’s St Matthew in the City Church reflected little credit on anyone.

On the one hand, we had a liberal Anglican clergyman eager to appear edgy and provocative in an attempt to make his church seem relevant, even knowing (as he must have) that the image of Joseph and Mary naked in bed and the caption – “Poor Joseph. God was a hard act to follow” – was bound to antagonise countless devout Christians.

On the other, we had cranky, wrathful Christian extremists who responded as if on cue, taking it upon themselves to defend God’s honour by attacking the billboard, first with a paintbrush and then, when the paint-splattered one was replaced, with a knife.

In the background, meanwhile, lurked M and C Saatchi, the advertising agency that created the billboard and doubtless rejoiced at all the publicity. This is the sort of attention-getting mischief that ad agencies excel at, and Saatchis must have congratulated themselves on Christmas arriving a week early.

All this played out as predictably as if it had been scripted.

But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the controversy is that the righteous Christians who attacked the billboard apparently believed that a weak and vulnerable God needed their protection against such blasphemy. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to them that a religion that has withstood persecution and oppression from ancient Rome to communist China might be robust enough to withstand this latest slight without their help.

If I were God, I think I would have been more insulted by their intervention than by the billboard.

* * *

WHO IN their right mind would schedule a major outdoor event in New Zealand during spring? It’s the season of equinoctial gales, when the weather is at its most unsettled and much of the country takes a battering from relentless nor’westerlies.

Wellington, especially, is at its worst in spring, a season of blustering, energy-sapping winds and oppressive, leaden skies that hang around for weeks.

What’s more, as all New Zealanders know, spring usually lasts till January. It isn’t until February that we start to enjoy a proper summer, and the really settled weather comes later again, in March and April. Yet event organisers repeatedly gamble on getting fine weather when the odds are against it.

The vagaries of the New Zealand spring have been amply demonstrated over the past few weeks with a succession of events – cricket tests, air shows, wine festivals and outdoor concerts – disrupted or cancelled because of foul weather. All par for the course.

Why, then, was the 2011 Rugby World Cup scheduled for September – the month when the annual meteorological mayhem starts? If we wanted visitors to get the worst possible impression of New Zealand, we couldn’t have chosen a better time.

The only possible conclusion is that the timing, like everything else in rugby, was dictated by the all-powerful broadcasters.

Winding back the liquor laws

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, August 19.)

I clearly recall the subject of the first newspaper editorial I ever wrote.

It was in the mid-1980s. The Pizza Hut chain wanted to open a restaurant in sleepy, change-averse Nelson and its application for a liquor licence created an outcry. Upright citizens, most of whom seemed unfamiliar with the Pizza Hut brand, were convinced the sale of beer and wine in this inoffensive family-oriented restaurant would create mayhem in the streets.

At the time I was news editor of the Nelson Evening Mail, as it was then called (the Evening has since been dropped). My job description didn't say anything about writing editorials, but the hysterical opposition to Pizza Hut so irritated me that I asked the then editor, Rick Neville, if I could use the paper's editorial column to introduce some balance into the debate.

It seems quaint, looking back. These days the opening of a licensed family restaurant wouldn’t provoke so much as a raised eyebrow. We have come a long way.

Our liquor laws have been cautiously liberalised over several decades, starting with the granting of the first restaurant liquor licences in 1960 (prior to which only hotels were allowed to serve alcohol with meals).

Pub opening hours were extended to 10pm in 1967, ending the notorious six o’clock swill. In 1976 the government created the BYO licence, which greatly reduced the expense of drinking wine with restaurant meals and helped kick-start a dining-out revolution.

In 1989, a rewrite of the Sale of Liquor Act allowed wine to be sold in supermarkets (though not on Sundays – that didn’t come until 1999, along with provision for beer to be sold in supermarkets as well). And of course the legal purchasing age was lowered, first from 21 to 20 in 1969 and then to 18 in 1999.

There was much about these reforms that was unsatisfactory. Liquor legislation was subject to a conscience vote in Parliament, just as moral issues were, which meant that MPs were subjected to furious lobbying by pro- and anti-liquor factions. Awkward compromises were struck as a result, and anomalies and inconsistencies abounded.

The bizarre law that allowed wine to be sold in supermarkets from Monday to Saturday but required it to be hidden from sight on Sundays, much to the bemusement of overseas tourists, was a classic example. Even specialist lawyers scratched their heads trying to unscramble the intricacies of legislation passed by MPs who were impelled more by last-minute lobbying than by logic.

Still, we were generally moving in the right direction, and many people (including me) welcomed these reforms as steps toward a more civilised society.

In the 1990s, alcohol consumption declined – vindicating the optimism of those who believed that if the state trusted people to drink responsibly, they would respond accordingly.

People weren’t just drinking less, they were drinking differently. They were consuming less beer and more wine, they were drinking more often with meals, and men were deserting the all-male preserve of the traditional public bar (which, in larger cities at least, is now virtually extinct) in favour of mixed company in more congenial surroundings. In other words, everything was proceeding pretty much as the proponents of reform predicted.

But then something happened. From about 1998 on, consumption began to rise again.

In our inimitable New Zealand way, we had lurched from one extreme to another – from being ludicrously over-regulated to having one of the most wide-open licensing regimes in the world. Bars were open around the clock and liquor outlets proliferated to the point where every second corner dairy had a licence.

We began hearing about an ugly phenomenon called teenage binge drinking. Getting “trolleyed” or “shit-faced” on Friday and Saturday nights became a point of pride rather than one of shame and embarrassment.

Alarm began to mount over public drunkenness, which some of us hoped had been consigned to history along with the six o’clock swill. Hospitals struggled with burgeoning alcohol-related admissions and reports of alcohol-fuelled crime became a staple news item in the Monday papers.

Now the inevitable has happened: public anxiety over alcohol has translated into political action. At the former Labour government’s request, the Law Commission under Sir Geoffrey Palmer has produced for public discussion a set of options which include reduced licensing hours, tougher drink-drive laws, higher taxes on cheap alcohol and a “split” minimum purchasing age: 18 for drinking on licensed premises and 20 for buying liquor from an off-licence.

Geoff Palmer says the commission is not advocating a return to the anti-alcohol phobia known as wowserism and we have no reason to doubt him. But the fact remains that the suggested law changes represent a partial winding-back of the liquor laws after decades of liberalisation.

It’s also true that while Geoff Palmer is no wowser, there are wowserish elements in universities, non-governmental organisations and the health bureaucracy that have lobbied vigorously for a curtailment of people’s right to make their own choices about where, when and how they drink. They are not religiously motivated like the wowsers of old, but they are no less moralistic and censorious.

The irony is that if the latter-day wowsers prevail, elements of the liquor industry will have only themselves to blame. Because rather than adjusting to the more mature and sophisticated alcohol market that began to develop in the 1990s, they greedily sought to ramp up demand for their products.

Sweet-flavoured alcopops flooded the market, taking advantage of a new cohort of naive young female drinkers. Irresponsible publicans promoted a culture of excessive consumption, targeting immature drinkers such as students. And Dominion Breweries, in a consummate marketing exercise, turned its once-obscure Tui label into a national cult brand to which young men, in particular, seem in thrall.

But while the trends of the past few years may have caused advocates of liberalisation to shake their heads in dismay, some good may come of the Law Commission’s review.

As Justice Minister Simon Power has pointed out, it presents an opportunity for a comprehensive and coherent rewrite of the liquor laws – something always thwarted in the past by the idiosyncrasies of the conscience vote, which Geoff Palmer has suggested should be abolished.

The big challenge will be devising a set of laws that doesn’t punish the majority, who are perfectly capable of drinking responsibly, for the misdeeds of the relatively small minority who don’t or can’t. Can it be done? Watch this space, as they say.