The Mother Grundy authorities won't rest until we're frightened to drink anything at all

(First published in The Dominion Post, December 11.)

I wonder if this will be the summer when I get pinged for exceeding the drink-drive limit.

It’s bound to happen sometime. Like most New Zealanders I enjoy a drink, and we’re coming into the season of Christmas parties, barbecues and leisurely outdoor lunches.

Trouble is, the tougher drink-drive laws introduced last year make it far more difficult than before to judge whether you’re over the limit.

The old limit – 80 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood – allowed you to enjoy a social occasion without constantly fretting that you might fail a breath test.

This didn’t mean you felt free to get plastered. The central nervous system would start sending warning signals well before you reached the point at which it became unsafe to drive. Responsible drivers – which means most of us – knew when to stop.

The difference now is that you can be as sober as a Mormon bishop and still be over the legal limit.

This is clear from the latest Transport Agency TV advertisement in which a woman, thinking she’s doing the right thing, takes the wheel after a party rather than let her husband drive home.  

She appears unaffected by alcohol. She’s not giggly and her speech isn’t slurred. But a breath test at a police checkpoint says she’s intoxicated.

As her young son watches from the back seat (oh, the shame of it) she’s escorted to a booze bus and processed. The family gets a taxi home because she’s too mortified to phone her parents, even though they live nearby.

The message is that even responsible, law-abiding people risk social disgrace and humiliation by unwittingly exceeding the 50mg limit.

And make no mistake: disgrace and humiliation are crucial to the ad’s impact. Its tone is as primly moralistic as any sermon from a pulpit.

But the scenario is realistic. I know people who found themselves in exactly the same predicament as the woman in the ad after the new law came into effect a year ago.

Immediately the law changed kicked in, police launched a blitz that netted people who had probably never been a danger on the road in their lives. For some it was a traumatic experience, and one that changed their view of the police.

The other unmistakeable, if unstated, message conveyed by the TV ad is that the only way to ensure you don’t fall foul of the law is to avoid alcohol altogether. This is consistent with the alco-phobia promoted over the past decade by police, academics and health authorities.

Yet alcohol has been a central part of our culture for centuries. It’s how we celebrate, how we socialise, how we relax and how we reward ourselves after a hard day or a stressful year.

And here’s another thing. The law change was sold to us on the basis that it would reduce road deaths. Yet the road toll for the Christmas-New Year period immediately after the new limit came into force was more than double that of the previous year.

And that’s how it has continued. When I checked two days ago, the toll so far this year was 293 compared with 271 a year ago.

This presents a slight credibility problem for all those who supported the lower limit on the basis that it would result in safer roads.

Wellington alcohol counsellor Roger Brooking admitted in a recent interview with Tim Fookes on NewstalkZB that the biggest impact of the law change appeared to have been on responsible drivers, who were now being even more careful about their alcohol intake. Serious binge drinkers, on the other hand, appear to be still offending at the same rate.

In other words, the law makers missed their target – just as they so often do (think Sue Bradford's anti-smacking law), and just as critics predicted they would.

This hasn’t stopped the police from continuing to enforce the law with moralistic zeal. Over the summer period, every driver they pull over, for whatever reason and at whatever time of day or night, is likely to be breath tested.

This is oppressive. It will turn more people against the police.

Now ask yourself: Would the woman in the TV commercial have risked an accident had she not been stopped? There’s nothing in the ad to indicate her driving is hazardous or irresponsible, and I suspect that’s true of many drivers who have been fined as a result of the law change.

But this doesn’t matter to the finger-wagging, Mother Grundy authorities, who won’t rest until ordinary New Zealanders are so cowed that they become frightened to drink anything at all.

So much for the Licensed Building Practitioner scheme ...

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, July 29.)

The house I live in was built in 1916. My wife and I plan a party next year to celebrate its centenary.

Of all the houses we’ve owned (this is number seven), it’s the one in which I've felt most at home.

It was built in what architectural historians call the transitional villa style, an intermediate stage between the traditional villa of the late 19^th century and the Californian bungalow that became fashionable after World War I.

It’s by no means grand, but the rooms are generously proportioned. It incorporates some lovely woodwork and leadlight glass.

Traditional materials were used (native timber weatherboard, matai flooring, corrugated iron roof), but the house has some unusual features, including charming round leadlight windows that my architectural draughtsman brother told me are known as aurioles.

And boy, was it strongly built. When a builder cut a hole between two rooms to put in French doors several years ago, he marvelled at how sturdy the interior walls were.

Two powerful earthquakes in 1942 – 7.2 and 6.8 respectively on the Richter scale – caused mayhem in Masterton, where we live, but the only damage suffered by our house was the loss of a brick chimney (one of thousands that toppled in the town).

Now here’s my point. You can be sure that whoever built our house had no formal training or qualifications. No one in the building trade did then. I’m not even sure that councils employed building inspectors.

But houses of that era were built to last. My own grandfather was a builder in Palmerston North whose proudest creation, a magnificent 1904 villa called Kaingahou, has a category II rating from Heritage New Zealand and is regarded as a showpiece.

Contrast this with the situation I heard described on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon programme last week. Complaints about substandard building work have risen by 30 per cent this year. In Auckland, one-third of building inspections result in a “fail”.

Some of the failings were detailed on the programme. They included fundamental stuff like concrete blocks not lining up, gaps and cracks in foundations and walls out of true. Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan described some of the photos she was shown as “shockers”.

Auckland Council’s manager of building control partly attributed the problem to the city’s building boom, which he says has created jobs for a lot of inexperienced people.

Same old, same old. The building industry has always been prone to boom-and-bust cycles.

I couldn’t help thinking that if standards are so poor now, how bad might they get when the promised increase in housing construction starts in Auckland?

But what I most wanted to know was how all this could happen just three and a half years after the government, amid much fanfare, launched the Licensed Building Practitioner (LBP) scheme.

It was introduced in response to the disastrous leaky homes crisis and was supposed to ensure, if I recall correctly, that shoddy building work would be a thing of the past.

The scheme imposed a cumbersome new bureaucracy on the building trade and required tradesmen to jump through all manner of hoops in order to demonstrate competence. A builder friend of mine was almost apoplectic at what he called suffocating control by meddling bureaucrats, which he argued would raise building costs, stifle innovation and create barriers to employment.

The supreme irony, to me, was that the scheme appeared to enhance the power of the very same bureaucracy that had presided over the leaky homes epidemic in the first place.

And what has been the result? More shoddy building work. Ryan got an admission out of the Auckland Council building control manager (who was commendably frank) that we were at risk of another leaky buildings catastrophe.

I waited for her to ask him the obvious question: how could this happen so soon after the introduction of an elaborate scheme expressly created to prevent it? She never did.

I was left to conclude that when you combine political pressure to “do something” about a problem (such as leaky homes) with a naïve faith in the power of regulations to change people’s behaviour, the results are rarely the ones desired.

We have recently seen another example of this. Parental smacking was banned in 2007, supposedly to reduce New Zealand’s shocking incidence of violence against children.

It has done nothing of the sort, just as critics of the anti-smacking law predicted. In fact reported child abuse rates increased by 83 per cent between 2008 and 2013.

All that has happened is that a lot of good parents have been subjected unnecessarily to the stigma and unpleasantness of police investigations for harmless acts of parental discipline.

Similarly, I confidently predict that this year’s reduction in the drink-driving limit will have minimal impact on the road toll. Responsible people have cut back their alcohol intake, even if their consumption was moderate to start with, but reckless drunks will continue to behave as they always have.

It seems there are some lessons we just never learn.

When idealism becomes control freakery

(First published in The Dominion Post, November 1.)

THE LEFT never gives up on its crusade to mould the perfect society. Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway’s Bill to lower the legal drink-driving limit is the latest phase in this idealistic mission.

Many on the Left are sincerely motivated by a vision of a world in which everyone is equal, no one experiences pain or disadvantage and everyone is nice to each other.

Of course, all this is highly commendable. The problem is that the Left persists in believing, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that this ideal society can be imposed by statute. The result is control-freak government that inevitably whittles away at individual choice and responsibility.

No one can be sure how many lives will be saved by lowering the blood alcohol limit from 80 to 50 mg. The government says it’s trying to find out – hence its reluctance to legislate.

One estimate by the Ministry of Transport suggests between 15 and 33 deaths a year could be avoided, but it’s just that: an estimate, not backed by hard data.

In any case, if we’re talking about saving lives, why stop there? Even more fatalities could be avoided at a stroke by cutting the speed limit from 100 kmh to 80, or ordering that all cars be fitted with governors to limit their speed. Not even the Left is naïve enough to suggest that.

The point is that most laws are a tradeoff. They involve striking a reasonable balance between personal freedom and the common good.

There comes a point at which laws intrude too far on people’s right to make their own responsible choices. That’s what Mr Lees-Galloway’s bill – currently languishing on the parliamentary order paper – would do.

And just as some people would continue to drive at 160 kmh even if the speed limit were reduced to 80, so the hard-core drinking drivers who cause mayhem on our roads will go on getting intoxicated regardless of what the law says.

That’s another weakness in the Left’s vision of the perfect society: it fails to take into account human cussedness.

How much easier things would be if only people knew what was good for them. But then idealistic politicians would run out of things to do.

* * *

DON’T EXPECT balanced discussion of such issues on Radio New Zealand, despite its charter obligation to present both sides of the story.

Sunday morning host Chris Laidlaw – himself a former Labour MP – recently devoted nearly an hour to Mr Lees-Galloway’s Bill but couldn’t find time, amid all the anti-liquor rhetoric, to squeeze in one person to put the case for the status quo.

Laidlaw’s programme often comes across as the secular equivalent of a Sunday morning sermon from the pulpit. On this occasion it seemed his primary purpose – and that of his guests – was to incite moral panic over New Zealanders’ supposedly booze-sodden “culture”.

In fact it’s a myth. No mention was made of the fact that our per capita alcohol consumption is moderate by international standards. In the most recent World Health Organisation statistics, we’re ranked 51^st in the world – well behind Britain (17), Germany (23), Switzerland (33) and Australia (44).

You won’t hear this mentioned by the anti-liquor propagandists, just as they avoid the inconvenient fact that we share the same drink-driving limit as Britain, Canada and the United States. They talk only about the countries that have lowered the limit to 50, thus seeking to create the impression that New Zealand alone is defying logic and common sense.

When I sent Laidlaw an email objecting to his one-sided treatment of the issue, he replied that you can’t please everyone. What a copout – and what a dismissive attitude from someone paid by the taxpayer to present a balanced picture.

* * *

IT WILL BE interesting to see whether the officially approved Maori names for the North and South Islands catch on.

I intend to give them a go. For one thing, Te Ika a Maui (the fish of Maui) and Te Wai Pounamu (the water of greenstone) have a rather more poetic ring than "North" and "South". They also tell a story.

Our colonial forebears could hardly have been less imaginative in the names they bestowed on places. North and South? Northland and Southland? Good grief. What a dull, stolid lot they must have been.

Some people grizzle that the Maori names are too much of a mouthful, but hang on a minute. Te Wai Pounamu consists of five syllables – the same number as California and South Carolina. Americans seem to manage those without too much trouble.

Te Ika a Maui is six syllables, but so what? No one balked at pronouncing Czechoslovakia when it existed as a country, and Papua-New Guinea presents no problems either. I say give them a chance.