KEY POINTS:
Saturday Morning, for many of us, is traditionally a time devoted to ameliorating the excesses of the Friday night before.
Many will be entombed in a piteous state of hangover reading this, ruing one too many as attempting to self-medicate with coffee or powerade.
In spite of alcohol
awareness campaigns, a great number of us will still insist on tying one on every weekend. Too many of us are still drinking too much. Almost 48 per cent of New Zealand workers are classified as "binge" drinkers according to contemporary guidelines.
Plainly put, our drinking is costing productivity and profits but we don't seem to be in any hurry to cut down, irrespective of how many ads depict the car crashes, sexual assault and family violence.
I'm not convinced these sorts of ads are the most efficacious way of tackling our tendency to drink to the point of disaster anyway. Sure, they're hard-hitting, graphic and confrontational.
Drunkenly flinging a child into a bookcase, waking up in a blood-spattered toilet and being raped in an alleyway certainly illustrate what health professionals coyly describe as the negative effects of drinking too much. But how many otherwise happy, normal, productive, middle-class drinkers can relate to the scenarios these ads portray?
The people I'm talking about are the ones I know; creative people, hard-working people who love their jobs but like getting on it as well.
The sort of men and women who routinely put away a bottle and a half of wine on a night out, who earn enough money to pay restaurant prices for it, and who turn up to work on time the next morning. (None of them are surgeons or pilots, I feel I should clarify.)
They aren't just my friends, they're probably yours as well, and they're probably the very people who these campaigns are targeting, people whose drinking hasn't got them into any trouble. Yet.
The problem with these ads is they display absolute worst-case scenarios, and as anyone who has ever woken up safe in their own bed with absolutely no idea of how they got there will tell you, drunks have great luck. The heavily incapacitated routinely enjoy good fortune bordering on miraculous. It's as though the universe bends slightly to accommodate a staggering shamble.
How else to explain how so many of us avoid serious injury or even death as we weave home, senseless, in the early hours of Saturday morning, after a bender that has started, as all the best ones do, oh-so-innocently after a few wines at work?
Just because I have escaped a tumble or a hiding while I've been legless doesn't mean everybody else has been so lucky. A paper released by the National Committee for Addiction Treatment stated 70 per cent of all emergency ward admissions are caused by alcohol abuse.
The last time I had the misfortune to be in Auckland Hospital after midnight on a Saturday night would bear this out. The place looked like a war zone and stank like a brewery. Who'd
be a nurse or an ED doctor working under those conditions? Ministering to people so out of it as to be incapable of speech, drunk or drugged to the point of no return. The comatose, the bloodied, the pants-wetting, the violent. It's all a long way from that first glass of pinot at SPQR.
It doesn't always take a physical injury to make one regret one's intemperance. It's usually the social fallout that gives rise to an attack of the horrors the morning after the night before.
Who among us hasn't said or done something while drunk that you would never have considered if you were sober? We know the cliches: telling the boss what you really think of him, blabbing secrets - yours and other people's, pashing mingers.
Drunk-dialling has haunted society for some time but new advances in information technology mean it is now possible to disgrace yourself via text, email or the social networking site of your choice once you're up to your eyeballs in drink. In vino veritas, goes the saying. In vino foolishness, more like.
All of this occurred to me this week while considering the plight of sacked Australian politician Matt Brown.
The former Police Minister in Nathan Rees' New South Wales administration got the shove this week for lying to his boss about what may or may not have transpired at a post-Budget party held in his office when he was Housing Minister three months ago.
Various accounts in the Aussie papers detail different scenarios but Mr Brown's denials of lewd carry-on notwithstanding, there's no doubt Room 803 of Parliament House played host to an out-and-out hootenanny on that night.
"Oxford St techo" was the soundtrack of choice, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which also quotes a source describing Mr Brown as "excitable". That's one way to describe a man dancing on a green leather chesterfield, wearing nothing but his "very brief" briefs, I suppose.
It's the "very brief" qualification that bothers me here. It conjures the impression of something rather more copacabana than your average boxers or briefs, lending the whole affair the unfortunate whisper of a thong.
Following the virtuous example of the Morning Herald, I too shall be coy and not attempt to describe the lewd act Mr Brown is said to have performed on Ms Noreen Hays, the member for Woolongong, or tell you what he shouted to her daughter who may or may not have been watching while he was doing it. Party time indeed.
The fact that Ms Hays is a middle-aged mother of four would seem to militate against this particular incident actually occurring but we must be open to the possibility.
These are drunken politicians thatwe are talking about, after all.
The story of the party is in itself, a fascinating insight into how Australian pollies roll, and given the choice between having their lot and our lot at a Christmas do, I know which ones I'd choose.
The problem for the Premier though, (and I'm sure Helen Clark will find much to sympathise with here) isn't so much what Matt Brown did as the fact that he didn't front up about doing it.
The parallels between the Brown situation and the one bedevilling Helen Clark are obvious. Writhing half-naked on sofas is a bad look for a police minister. Much as raking in money hand over fist from a variety of donors and then funnelling it through a secret trust is not a great look for the leader of a political party who happens to be Foreign Minister in a Labour-led Government.
It's arguable that it's not so much the acts themselves as the attempts to obfuscate and cover up the facts of the matter in both cases.
Matt Brown's hangover came with a three-month time delay.
We saw him trying to put it to bed this week but fronting up, finally, to his boss, issuing the standard mea culpa and attempting to restore at least some of his past reputation as a hard-working, family values type MP by holding a press conference while kissing and cuddling his young niece Ruby.
The overall impression was a million miles away from the grubby goings-on on the ministerial lounge suite.
Whether we'll get a similar apology from Winston Peters remains to be seen. But it's going to take more than the company of a toddler in a fairy skirt to make the former member for Tauranga palatable to New Zealand voters before the coming election.
Brown got drunk and made an ass of himself; it is becoming increasingly obvious that Winston Peters, whilst sober, tried to make an ass of all of us. It's clear which is the bigger infraction.
As human failings go, mendacity trumps incontinence every time.
