Editorial: Who cares about boozed kids?

Photo / Janna Dixon

The thundering sound in the far distance this morning is the stampede of people ducking for cover.

In a story last Sunday, we detailed an early-morning raid in which police and liquor licensing inspectors had intercepted liquor delivered to an after-ball organised for students from Pakuranga College.

The team, led by Manukau District Licensing Agency inspector Paul Radich, had found out the address of an Onehunga warehouse where the party was to be held.

It was just the first of a series of after-ball parties worrying the licensing authorities. They hope their crackdown will force schools and parents to take better responsibility for the young lives in their care.

To say that our reports caused some consternation at Pakuranga College and in its community would be an understatement. But the concern was not about the impressionable youngsters, two years below the legal drinking age, being ferried to all-night warehouse parties to be plied with huge quantities of booze.

In the light of the death of King's College student James Webster we might have expected some expression of concern at the behaviour of some parents and students that was witnessed and documented by our reporter and photographer.

Instead the principal of the college, Michael Williams, resorted to an undignified display of semantic hair-splitting in an attempt to distance himself and the school from events at the warehouse.

He was at pains to say that there was no alcohol drunk at the after-ball. But that was no thanks to the school - or to the parents who organised the party or attempted to deliver alcohol to partygoers.

Left to their own devices, they would have facilitated alcohol-fuelled mayhem.

In any case, the ugly behaviour of the teenagers before the cameras of this newspaper and on the following evening's television news broadcasts - indeed, the admissions of one of those pictured, in a call to talkback radio - indicated that some had not waited for the after-ball before cracking open their first high-octane RTDs.

There is more than a whiff of hypocrisy about the responses of all involved.

Williams conspicuously avoids engaging with the central questions: what attitude does he take to students from his school organising, with the aid of parents and a private company, an after-ball function with the main objective, it appeared, of circumventing the liquor laws? Of being invited to an event for which their parents have signed permission slips acknowledging that the party is a private gathering and that alcohol "may or may not be served by parents".

Of having the buses to the party waiting outside the school ball at midnight, while he washed his hands of any further responsibility?

Even if the declaration of the function's private immunity were legally reliable - and it is not, says Radich, when tickets were sold at $55 - the adults organising the party are placing themselves in loco parentis for several hundred hormone- and alcohol-fuelled adolescents. Is that a state of affairs that Williams finds acceptable?

Principals routinely seek to absolve themselves of responsibility for events that are not school-organised. But we have long passed the time when that will do.

The country's biggest secondary school, Rangitoto College, cancelled this year's school balls after parents helped students to organise an after-ball function last year.

Principal David Hodge said the school had "a duty of care" towards his students - a phrase notably absent from this week's representations.

Professional event organisers who say they do not supply alcohol, or even organise after-balls - they simply "work with" organising committees of parents - are seeking to clamber through loopholes in the letter of the law.

The fact is that some firms help kids organise large drunken parties with impunity.

Clearly there is a market for such affairs but it does not make them right. Drunken teenagers already consume an unconscionable amount of police time.

If their parents will not rein them in, schools should take a stand. And the council and state agencies trying to stamp them out should be applauded.