Any day of any week you can open any newspaper, or watch any news bulletin, and the evidence is plain: Alcohol-fuelled violence. Alcohol-fuelled crime. A culture of binge drinking.

Stories like these…
* A brutal and baffling weekend attack which left a young couple critically injured in a west Auckland park has nearby residents fearing for their own safety

* A man walking his dog found the young man semi-conscious in the park at 7am on Sunday morning with a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain

* Six hours into her shift, Heretini had had no break. But she rallied to care for her last patient, a young man with head injuries and lacerations to most of his body. He had fallen out of the window of a moving car while hanging onto the coat hanger handle above the vehicle’s back door.

* The veteran of the Malayan campaign and the Vietnam war was shocked by the viciousness and callousness of the youths. His daughter Jillian was knocked unconscious and her boyfriend was stomped on the head when they arrived home in a taxi as he was being set upon by the mob.

* “She was drunk as a skunk”, he said. Mr McKenzie, who survived a serious heart attack two years ago, lost three teeth and received bruising and cuts to his head and body.

That’s just a sample of the sorts of headlines reflecting the every day reality of alcohol in New Zealand, and the results of our drinking culture.

On conservative figures prepared by the Ministry of Health the harm alcohol causes costs between $1.5 and $2.5 billion every year. Three out of five people who are arrested are under the influence of alcohol at the time they commit the offence for which they’re arrested.

If we want to reduce the level of crime in New Zealand, the fastest way we can make a difference, and the biggest difference we can make, would be to make alcohol less available. And conversely, in recent years when alcohol has been made more available, the harm caused by alcohol has risen as well.

Between half and three-quarters of all police work is associated in some way with alcohol abuse. Three quarters of adults arriving at emergency departments on Thursday, Friday or Saturday night have alcohol related injuries.

The Salvation Army says alcohol is present in four out of five domestic violence cases.

Here’s another statistic to make you think; according to a recent medical journal article, there are now 70,000 physical and sexual assaults a year in New Zealand that can be linked to alcohol. That’s 1350 a week.

I support changing the law to make alcohol less available.
I support raising the drinking age and restricting the number of outlets where alcohol is sold.
I support lowering the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit for drivers over 20 years of age from 0.08 to 0.05.
I would raise alcohol prices, reduce alcohol marketing and advertising and increase drink-driving measures.

If we made some of these changes then at least it wouldn’t be so easy for any teenager to walk into a corner shop and buy as much alcohol as they want for them and their friends.

The proliferation of outlets where teenagers can buy booze or alco-pops has to stop.

I want those who grant liquor licences to have greater scope to turn down licences.
If they can see that several dairies selling alcohol, and another off-licence on top of that, all in less than a few kilometres of each other, then licensing authorities need the ability to say - no, that’s only going to cause more social problems.

I’d like to give police more resources to monitor the way liquor outlets comply with the law and I would like to see the opening hours of all off-licences restricted, for example from 8.00 am to 10.00 pm. Who needs to buy beer or wine at 3am? Plenty of people are buying alcohol after midnight to continue a binge.

If we made some of these changes then there wouldn’t have been some of the horrific stories we have heard about in the news - such as the alcohol fuelled Auckland men who drove down to their local corner liquor store late at night to rob it and ended up shooting the owner.

It would make a difference, but on its own changing the law would be only one step. It would not be a miracle solution.

What is required is a change in our drinking culture. It is the cultural complexity of drinking that makes regulation of alcohol politically contentious.

We don’t take the steps that need to be taken because political decision-making runs head first into a culture of heavy drinking and of alcohol abuse.

I got attacked in the Dominion for being a wowser by a columnist who raved he simply wanted to just enjoy a glass or two of wine with his meal. That’s what happens when you try to deal with binge drinking and genuine harm.

There are a lot of people who use alcohol responsibly, and they feel that their lifestyle is being criticized and threatened. That’s what makes the issue politically contentious.

Those of us who want to promote responsible alcohol use have to deal with this issue. There is a crucial difference between alcohol and smoking - every cigarette is bad for you. Any use at all is harmful.

But the same is not true of a glass of wine with dinner or a beer at the cricket. Three glasses of wine a day, every day, over a long period, is classed as heavy drinking because over a long period it has harmful health effects.

But that is not the same as binge drinking that is fuelling violence and hospital admissions.

So we need to respond differently to different issues. That means targeted campaigns that raise awareness about the harmful health effects of heavy use on one hand; and targeted rule changes that actively reduce dangerous binge drinking on the other.

What both have in common is that there is a heavy drinking culture in New Zealand. And wanting to change our culture of abuse doesn’t make me a wowser or a party pooper; it makes me someone concerned to reduce crime, injuries and deaths as well as other serious harm to our nation’s health profile.

If we’re going to make an impact, we have to start with binge drinking and dangerous misuse, and we have to address the culture that makes those things acceptable.

Many people who use alcohol don’t abuse it, and therefore changing the culture has to focus where the harm is greatest: If we are going to make an impact on binge drinking and the harm alcohol causes then we have to be prepared to front up to drinking that is risky.
And we have to acknowledge that heavy drinking and binge drinking is widespread.

It’s rare for anyone today to be demonised for wanting to restrict smoking.

But twenty years ago Helen Clark was called every name under the sun for doing so as Minister of Health. A generation ago, people would go to parties and then brag about driving home drunk.

Today, it’s become socially unacceptable. People still do it, but not many people laugh about it any more.

The culture around drink driving has changed, but we have to be clear that it’s a much bigger process than simply changing the law. It takes decades to change social attitudes.
Teenagers are drinking to excess more often and in greater numbers.

And one of the reasons teenagers are getting boozed in harmful ways, and so often, is that the culture of drinking is promoting heavy alcohol use. We are sending out confusing messages to young people.

All-Black’s games and the summer cricket series drip in alcohol promotion. But we act surprised when Black Cap Jesse Ryder or All Black Jimmy Cowan get into trouble when they’re out on the booze.

The community vilifies them, rather than vilifying the alcohol companies who sponsor the games and encourage young New Zealanders to go out and drink to excess.

That’s why I believe one of the most effective changes we could make is to reduce or ban alcohol advertising, particularly at sports games.

The alcohol industry actively markets alcohol to young people. They make their profits by encouraging heavy drinking, and ‘growing’ new drinkers. Currently, $200,000 per day is spent on marketing and advertising alcohol. About half the marketing is spent on sponsorship.

Remember the tobacco industry’s sponsorship of big sporting events like tennis?
Now it is alcohol brands linked alongside major sporting events, for example, the Heineken Tennis Open and any poster of the All Blacks meant for display in a child’s bedroom or school classroom has the Steinlager logo prominently displayed.

The alcohol industry is extremely well resourced and determined to resist any changes that would dent its profits. In my view, all donations to politicians by liquor (or tobacco) companies should be banned, including sponsoring functions.

The liquor industry used to sponsor the annual press gallery party in Parliament House. Journalists themselves found this policy an uncomfortable fit and to their credit now pay for the function themselves or seek their newspaper or media outlet’s support for it.

But you still get bad press by taking on a lot of the alcohol issues like binge drinking. I’ll give you one example.

Six years ago, MPs who are now in government bitterly attacked me because I took steps to increase the excise rate charged on so-called light spirits. These were alcoholic drinks in the range 14 – 23% alcohol by volume.

The evidence showed plainly that the people who were buying them were kids, who bought bottles of cheap liquor on which to get smashed.

It was huge factor in binge drinking. One of principle manufacturers immediately reduced the alcoholic content of his product from 23% to 13.9% - to stay inside the law!
There was, however, a very large decline in the quantities of ‘light alcohol’ drinks sold for sale of around 80 percent. Overall alcohol consumption went down by half a million litres after the excise was increased. I would call that a huge success.

But I am under no illusions about the political cost of the measure. It ran headlong into the booze lobby, and the sneering about nanny state from people who don’t care how many kids kill themselves, until it’s one of their own.

We shouldn’t be under any illusions that changing the law about where to buy alcohol, how you can promote it, who can buy it, and how much it costs, is going to be hard.

Voting on alcohol law in parliament is still seen as a conscience vote. Historically this is because the issue split the major parties, at the time of the prohibition debate and created explosive tensions between prohibitionists and others.

Today, there are no votes in parliament for prohibition.

But everyone professes to be for responsible alcohol consumption. In that case, there should be responsible alcohol laws. Conscience voting in parliament has made alcohol laws incoherent.

Laws get amended in chaos, debates border on the irrational and law-making doesn’t fully take account of health-based interventions, education, and public campaigns to change the way people behave.

The spread of diseases, waiting lists for elective surgery, unemployment or even climate change aren’t treated as conscience votes. Yet alcohol still is. Clearly there needs to be changes in the law surrounding alcohol sale and consumption. But we will only be successful when it is accompanied by a long and targeted marketing campaign.

Alcohol is an addictive drug. It reduces the health status of some of its users. It contributes to premature deaths. We’ve got a long way to go to get people to see alcohol abuse as a public health issue. And therefore we are all affected by the abuse of alcohol.

Alcohol is by far the most damaging drug in the country. The good news is that people who enjoy the many positive features that come with drinking in moderation - enjoying friendships, socialising and having fun - are starting to see that alcohol abuse is a big problem in our communities. Most people understand that we need to change our attitude to heavy drinking.

The fact that we are all here today is a sign that change is already happening.

ENDS

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