The huge drop in the number of victims of violent offending in recent years has been closely mirrored by a massive drop in violent crime where alcohol was involved, new Ministry of Justice data show.
This follows several years of New Zealanders drinking less, according to the Ministry of Health’s annual health survey, despite no change in national or government policy on reducing alcohol harm.
This is prompting alcohol law reform advocates to ask how much the drop in violent crime is attributable to the Government, and whether our changing drinking habits are having a bigger impact.
It also sharpens the focus on Associate Justice Minister Nicole McKee backtracking on tightening the hours that supermarkets and bottle stores can sell alcohol, despite Ministry of Justice analysis that it could lead to 2400 fewer violent victimisations a year.
The Government is already well ahead of its target to drop the number of victims of violent offending by 20,000 victims, according to the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey (NZCVS).
The latest quarterly results, based on thousands of face-to-face interviews, include violent offending (defined as sexual and non-sexual assaults, and robbery) where alcohol is and is not involved (regarding either the victim or the offender).
Since June 2024 (when the annual number of victims of violent crime peaked) and May 2025 (the latest data), the fall in alcohol-involved offending accounted for 65% of the total drop in violent offending.
The correlation is even stronger for the data from March 2024, when violent offending with alcohol involved peaked.
From then until February 2025, the drop in alcohol-involved offending (45,000 fewer victims) accounted for 94% of the total drop in violent offending (48,000 victims).
This falls to 88% with the latest figures, to May 2025.
Over this period, the prevalence rate – the proportion of adults who were victims of violent offending with alcohol involved – fell by 37%, more than three times the rate for violent offending with no alcohol involved (11%).
Lizzie Barratt, health promotion advisor for Alcohol Healthwatch, said the closely-tracking trends show “how strong that relationship is” between violent offending and alcohol-related violence.
She cited New Zealand research showing:
The Government should “absolutely” be putting alcohol harm reduction at the centre of its attempt to drive down violent crime, she said.
In reviewing alcohol laws, McKee initially wanted to restrict off-licences to selling alcohol between 9am and 9pm, instead of the current 7am to 11pm, according to a draft Cabinet paper in her name.
“I am focused on hazardous drinking, which can lead to violent crime. Evidence shows a strong correlation between later opening hours for off-licenses and violent crime,” the paper, leaked to RNZ, said.
This was later scrapped from her Cabinet-approved proposals, which include tougher measures targeting underage drinking, while making it easier for some small businesses to sell alcohol without a licence, and harder for non-locals to object to a licence application.
“The reality is that most New Zealanders who choose to drink do so responsibly, something becoming more apparent as drinking habits evolve and lower and zero-alcohol alternatives become popular,” McKee told the Herald in a statement.
The annual health survey shows drinking prevalence peaked in 2019-20, a period that included the first Covid lockdown, when 81.6% of adults (aged 15 and over) drank alcohol in the previous 12 months.
This dropped to 76% in 2023-24, the most recent data.
The proportion of drinkers who drink hazardously also peaked in 2019/20 (26.1%), before dropping to 21% three years later and then tracking up to 21.9% in 2023-24. The latest figure translates to about 695,000 people.
Hazardous drinking is defined by a score of at least eight after answering the questions in the Alcohol Use Disorder ID Test, such as whether you’ve had a drinking night where you don’t remember what happened the following morning.
The biggest drop in hazardous drinking has been for those aged between 18 and 24, though this is also the group where the rate is the highest (29% of drinkers in 2023-24, down from 42% in 2018-19).
“We still definitely have a massive binge drinking culture in Aotearoa, especially in our universities,” Barratt said.
Overall, there was a 6.9% drop over the past four years in the proportion of adults who drink. The drop in the proportion of drinkers who drink hazardously was more than double this, at 16.1%.
“We’re drinking less, but people choosing to still drink aren’t drinking as harmfully as they used to,” said Dylan Firth, deputy chair of the New Zealand Alcohol Beverages Council.
Less and less alcohol is also being produced, as measured by Stats NZ’s data on alcohol available for consumption (subject to the alcohol levy, which excludes home brew).
Firth said this measure was the best proxy for how much alcohol is consumed:
Fewer hazardous drinkers means less alcohol-related harm, which was estimated in a 2023 study at $9.1 billion a year.
The NZCVS regional breakdown shows violent offending falling the least in Waikato, Bay of Plenty and Wellington, and falling the most in Auckland, Canterbury and the rest of the country.
In Canterbury’s case, the number of annual victims rose in the latest quarter after falling steeply over consecutive periods.
A direct regional comparison with our changing hazardous drinking habits is not possible.
The data in the annual health survey uses four health regions: Northern, Midland, Central and the South Island.
Hazardous drinking rose most sharply last year in the Midland region, which includes Waikato and Bay of Plenty, as well as Lakes, Taranaki and Tairāwhiti.
Central (Whanganui, Hawke’s Bay, MidCentral, Wairarapa, Hutt Valley, Capital and Coast) is the only region where the hazardous drinking rate has continually fallen since 2020-21.
Several studies across multiple countries show how alcohol use disorder can make you more likely to be emotional and risk-taking, and less concerned about consequences.
“Therefore, if alcohol consumption continues to fall in New Zealand [as suggested in the annual health survey], that may have beneficial impacts on violent crime,” Rebecca Parish, Ministry of Justice sector insights general manager, said.
“However, we would not expect a simple one-to-one relationship between overall alcohol consumption and the number of victims of violent crime.”
This is explored in a 2023 academic paper, which asked whether alcohol alone is enough to trigger violent or aggressive behaviour.
“It is evident that several individual and environmental factors determine the likelihood of an intoxicated person engaging in an aggressive or violent act,” said the paper, titled Alcohol, aggression and violence: From public health to neuroscience.
Among the biggest factors are childhood adversity, genetic disposition, “emotional dysregulation and impulsivity”, and “environmental stressors”.
This makes alcohol a more likely trigger for violence in socially disadvantaged households, including gang homes. Alcohol-associated acts of violence in these settings are also much more likely to be family violence.
A hazardous drinker, according to the annual health survey data, is more likely to be male, aged 18 to 55, and socially disadvantaged.
Family and non-family violence have dropped significantly since the number of annual victims peaked for the year to June 2024, the NZCVS shows.
But the proportion of adults suffering from violent offending has fallen more sharply for family violence (47%) than for non-family violence (35%) over that period.
The number of annual family violence victims continued to drop in the latest data, from February to May this year, but the annual number of non-family violence victims rose.
Last year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a review of alcohol laws to help prevent gender-based violence and violence against children.
The rationale for this was reinforced in August with the findings of the South Australian Royal Commission into Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence, which said alcohol was a key factor in violence towards women and children.
Alcohol Healthwatch said addressing the alcohol industry’s influence would have a major impact on reducing crime and violence, including family violence.
“If we’re looking at the alcohol industry’s impacts, it really ties into the social norms, the overlaps between financial insecurity, violence and trauma, and then the industry strategies like clustering bottle stores in highly deprived areas, targeting heavier drinkers with more alcohol advertising, and targeting youth with more alcohol advertising,” Barratt said.
The Alcohol Beverages Council rejected these as industry tactics.
“The claims are simply not supported by evidence. The overwhelming majority of producers, retailers and advertisers operate within strict laws that already prohibit marketing to minors, and impose significant restrictions on advertising content and placement,” Firth said.
“Sweeping statements about ‘targeting youth’ or ‘clustering stores’ risk distracting from the real evidence that New Zealanders are moving towards much better behaviours around alcohol, and the real work underway across industry, community, and government to reduce harmful drinking.”
He cited as an example the council’s support for Smashed, a programme that educates Year 9 and 10 students on the dangers of underage drinking.
“Identifying groups that are harmful in areas more likely to cause harm, that’s where the education can be really beneficial.”
McKee said she was also targeting harm reduction where it was most effective.
“We are strengthening safeguards where they make a real difference, like improving age verification and ensuring rapid alcohol delivery services cannot supply to minors or intoxicated people.”
Her proposals were about “restoring fairness and practicality to the system without compromising public safety”.
She was also cutting ineffective red tape, she added.
“To grow the economy, we need to ensure responsible operators have a regulatory environment that allows them to grow, create jobs and contribute to their local economies.”
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.