Editorial: Everyone pays cost of drinking

Opinion

Among the most striking of the many statistical tables in the Law Commission report discussing reform of our liquor laws is one that shows we're not drinking as much as we used to.

New Zealanders' alcohol consumption, which rose steadily after the end of World War II, peaked at over 12 litres of pure alcohol per head per annum in 1978, as the baby boomers moved through their late teens and 20s. In the years since, the figure has dropped steadily: by the turn of the century it was down more than 10 per cent to levels not seen since 1951 when those baby boomers were babies - and although it has started to rise again since, it's still well below the 70s highs.

It is one of the few rays of sunshine in the 280-page report, entitled Alcohol In Our Lives, by a team led by former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, which was released this week. That is not to say that it offers us any room for complacency, but on the other hand, it argues against a sense of hopelessness. For all the doomladen handwringers who wail that we are drowning in a sea of booze, the commission's readable and intelligent report makes it plain that many of the problems are around the behaviours of specific social groups and to do with specific aspects of licensing policy.

Few people would dispute that the liberalisation of liquor laws that took place in 1989 has led to enormous improvements in our drinking culture. That the number of liquor licences has more than doubled in that time, from 6295 in 1990 to 14,183 today may be seen as problematic by some. But as the report itself notes, it has not just meant more of the same. "In place of the vast booze barns ... marooned in sprawling car parks, we now have a plethora of bars, cafes and restaurants."

Meanwhile, the sale of wine in supermarkets has strengthened the association of civilised alcohol consumption with eating, and drinking volumes remain significantly lower than those of the late 1970s, before the liberalisation of liquor laws.

But if there is some evidence that the problems of our drinking culture are not wide, the report makes plain that they are deep. To some extent that is to do with the national psyche. The notion of a good Kiwi bloke, as sports broadcaster (and alcoholic in recovery) Murray Deaker told the commission is indissolubly bound up with the idea that "a man's ability to 'hold his piss' remains an important marker of Kiwi masculinity".

But the most serious and apparently intractable problems of public drunkenness, violence and other crime are among young drinkers, and young women in particular. It is no longer sufficient to regard our national drinking problem as part of the hard-living, hard man ethos.

As the slogan advanced by the Alcohol Advisory Council has it, "it's not the drinking, it's how we're drinking" that's the problem. Our total national alcohol consumption is within WHO guidelines and New Zealanders drink a lot less than most Europeans. But many of us, and in particular the young, tend to binge-drink and it is this that leads to the "scenes of chaos and disorder" in public that so shocked Sir Geoffrey and his four commission colleagues when they toured town and city centres in the small hours to see the problems first-hand.

The report sensibly makes the point that finding solutions is much more difficult than defining the problem, but in calling for public submissions (at www.talklaw.co.nz), it underlines the fact that the problem is one we all need to take ownership of. Drinking costs us as a nation billions of dollars per year in public health spending, crime, social welfare and lost productivity. That's money that could and should be spent making life better for everyone than cleaning up the mess made by drunks.

The commission report canvasses many areas of potential reform: controlling demand (by price hikes and differential prices for lower-alcohol drinks); limiting supply; shortening licensing hours; establishing and enforcing alcohol bans. Some, like the return of the legal drinking age to 20, make sense and others, like the issuing of infringement notices for public drunkenness, seem frankly silly. But it's plain that there is no single solution. And plainer still that we turn our back on the problems at our peril.