I write this with chardonnay in hand.
Is the 2020 summit going to be a chance for every participant to push their own agenda? Will the suggestions that rise to the top, like bubbles in beer, be those which are the basest populism? Will they be the ones that make the front page of the metropolitan tabloids? Consider (as Paul Kelly might say), this intervention from The Reverend Tim Costello (which was duly splashed on the Courier-Mail’s front page today):
Mr Rudd indicated he was willing to consider Mr Costello’s comments that bars were too numerous and opening hours should be reduced.
Summit supremo (and PM) Kevin Rudd also says:
“I don’t have a whole lot of science to back it up.
“But let me tell you as I roll around the country, mums and dads are raising this with me in the supermarkets of the nation on a regular basis.
“What I see happening around the streets myself is a problem.”
Presumably our Kev isn’t rolling out the barrels. So much for “evidence-based policy”. As Richard Farmer pointed out in Crikey this week, “There has been virtually no increase in per capita alcohol income over the last decade”. But, as Bernard Keane remarked, “everyone loves a moral panic”. Guy Rundle nails the nature of the beast:
Jeff Sparrow pointed out here as well as anyone can the corporatist de-politicising thinking behind this initiative, but one really needs to hammer home how noxious this idea really is. It represents not a belief in the future, of bipartisan solutions blah blah blah, so much as it does a deep contempt for the Australian populace en masse, and not a little fear of them. When the Ruddslide was at its pre-election height, I suggested that we would quickly come to learn, as the British have, that it was in some aspects worse than the Howard era, which at least made the enemy clear and visible. But I am gobsmacked at how easily Rudd has outBlaired Blair, whose contempt for the rank and file of his own party was clear from a pretty early stage, and undisguised in his final years.
Blair’s version of “Christian socialism” was to surf along the media beach of out of control yoof beatups and respond with stern and preachy measures such as “anti-social behaviour orders”. Blair even considered at one stage legislating for different lanes on footpaths to ensure orderly walking and respond to that pressing social issue - pedestrian rage.
Should we expect the same from his Antipodean archetype? Do we need a double dash of nanny-statism with our watered down social democracy? Whatever happened to individual liberty and individual responsibility?
Kim referred to some of these debates on LP recently with her condemnation of “herbal tea socialism”. It’s a very real debate in the UK, because government in Britain has taken up and run with the “happiness” agenda big time. I have nothing against public health campaigns, for instance, but real and grave issues arise when the state tries to micro-manage our lives. As Richard Reeves puts it - succinctly - in The New Statesman - the question is:
Should the state force us to eat well, drink wisely and behave nicely on public transport, or should we leave people alone unless they are directly damaging others?
It’s pretty obvious how J. S. Mill would have answered that question. It should be fairly clear for social democrats and socialists too that we stand for maximising individual liberty in a genuine sense - by providing the preconditions for all to make mature and satisfying choices. It may well be that advertising, commodification, and so on, reduce the scope of those choices, and turn them down particular paths, but any version of the good society - apart from an authoritarian Stalinist or communitarian/conservative one - should understand that a very important principle is at stake when responsibility is transferred to a state that stands in loco parentis.
I, for one, want to be able to have a drink where I want to, and I’ll take the risk of yobs and bad behaviour on Oxford Street or in the Melbourne CBD or in The Valley if I have to. There are a huge range of practical things that can be done under the heading of harm minimisation and public safety, but quasi-prohibitionism isn’t one of them. A hundred years ago, Baptist preachers like Tim Costello succeeded in enforcing things like six o’clock closing. Did that stop drinking? No. It encouraged binge drinking. Did the restrictive licencing policy of that great Lutheran lay preacher, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, stop drinking? No - it encouraged a proliferation of illegal and unlicenced drinking venues.
Teenagers sometimes behave badly under the influence? Well, knock me down with a feather. It was never like that in the good old days of the 1980s when I was in my teens. What nonsense. Perhaps Tim Costello was enjoying a nice cup of tea at church socials, but a lot of us weren’t.
Well trained bar and security staff and well regulated bars are a public good. If people don’t like the choices other people make to take a drink from time to time, that’s their affair. But this sort of Krudd is anything but evidence-based policy or “fresh thinking”. It’s just tedious barrow pushing from a wowser of a cleric. And is this really the most pressing social issue facing Australia? Get real.
Cross-posted at PollieGraph.
If he wants to see fewer bars and pubs and bottleshops, he can take it up with the States’ relevant Ministers, as it’s not something the Federal Government has any business regulating.
There’s plenty of evidence that alcohol abuse is a huge, huge problem in this country - ask the police, the staff at hospitals, at women’s refuges etc. You might make a more valuable contribution to solving the problem than whingeing about any restriction on your right to drink.
You might think it’s cool to say that you don’t mind being out at night drinking, taking the risk of yobs and bad behaviour, but I guess there are lots of people too frightened to go out at night - and alcohol-fuelled violence is part of it. There are people too frightened to use public transport because of the bad behaviour of some of our fellow citizens. What about the rights of those people?
You might disagree with Tim Costello but you could use your intelligence to come up with something better than name-calling. What fresh thinking solutions do you have for what is certainly one of our most pressing social problems?
Make mine a double. What Russell said.
Russell and wbb, nothing that Mark said affects the “rights of those people”. If there’s genuinely criminal behaviour, then lock up the violent people. There are people who are frightened probably because if you watch the news or read the papers (sadly, not just the tabloids [Sunday Age, I’m looking at you]) you’d get the impression that the streets are teeming with gangs of thugs waiting to bash you senseless, kick you in the head when you’re on the ground, and then steal your wallet. This certainly does happen, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
Alcohol abuse is a problem. But how much of a problem, and is it worth returning to the six o’clock swill, and the problems that leads to? Will limiting the number of venues and their opening hours actually have a significant impact to make it worth the imposition?
The main point, it seems to me, is that good policy is based on evidence, and at least has a go at identifying the actual problem and proposing a solution. Rudd seems to not want to make good policy.
> there are lots of people too frightened to go out at night
So I guess that would explain why alcohol free Riyahd has such a thriving night life (not).
You’re proposing a false choice - night life versus alcohol. Melbourne’s night life (music venues, discos, restaurants, theatres etc) hardly existed at all until the introduction of the lounge bar dinner licence (you could drink up until 11pm if you bought a meal) during the early 1970’s.
Fact is, night life doesn’t exist without alcohol - perhaps not the most pleasant of thoughts but it is reality. And any number of Fred Niles or Tim Costoellos making pompous statements about “young people do not need the demon drink to have fun” isn’t going to change it. They’re *young*, they’re sexually driven and nervous as hell. Standing around the Espy, working up the courage to dance with that pretty blonde over there is going to get old pretty quickly without a liquid disinhibiter in hand. (And most young men won’t dance even if half pissed).
Proposing a fantasy world of soda pop fuelled partying won’t make it so.
The reason why all those teetotallers (how many?) are holed up in the suburbs at night is not because they are too scared to go out. It’s because they’re older (and have cut back on the drink) *and* they’ve got kids to look after.
It’s the kids that stop them going out, not drinking. There is no untapped market of alcohol free party goers. If there were, the existing alcohol free events run by the evangelicals would be packin’ ‘em in. Outside of their own sects, they ain’t.
The market speaks, not ideology.
Mark says:
Wrong. Mark’s thinking on cultural issues is out of touch with both the community and cutting edge science. This is a common enough flaw for intellectuals who had the misfortune to be educated during the high-tide of post-modern liberalism, when regular jobs, houses and kids still seemed like a distant prospect.
The idea of a “libertarian socialism” is one of the silliest in social theory. It was refuted in theory long ago by both libertarian capitalists (Friedman) and authoritarian statists (from Wells onwards). It is internally incoherent, never mind its external iniquity.
A comprehensive social welfarist program, whether culturally liberal or “corporal”, is inevitably drawn to regulate the citizen’s health-endangering behaviours. This flows from the principle of accountability.
The state pays the medical piper so it must calls the consumptive tune. (Also, try to imagine a serious tackling of the greenhouse problem without authoritarian social regulation. The only reason we are not all knee deep in Arctic melt now is because of China’s authoritarian one child policy.)
And the real world reflects this accountability constraint. At one extreme the US govt takes less responsibility for citizen health and consequently allows more liberty for citizen misbehaviour. At the other extreme the Scandanavian states, so beloved by our star-struck local Leftists, offer a cradle to grave welfare service at the cost of very intrusive regulation of the citizens personal life.
AUstralia’s civic philosophy, as usual, is more concerned with the bottome line. Intellectual or residential capital is not getting any cheaper. Obnoxiously public drinking, doping and pigging out accelerate the depreciation of very valuable assets.
Most people who own property in the cities and inner suburbs are holding down high-paying jobs paying off big mortgages and bringing up difficult kids. They are also most probably over-weight, tired and suffering from slightly soiled livers. Not exactly a good recipe for enjoying drunken high-jinks till all hours of the night.
The days are long-gone when you could turn up to work half-tanked and wing it through to five oclock. High-achieving people prefer to get drunk and stoned overseas, which at least has the benefit of reinforcing our ethnic stereotype and is away from prying eyes. Look at Mr Rudd.
More to the scientific point, we are none of us getting any younger. And it is obvious that most people are not biologically evolved to carry on the riotous habits of our youth into middle-age and beyond.
But to realise this fact one has to get to grips with socio-biology, a big no-no for most post-modern liberals. Which is why they tend to drag out Mill’s dusty old tome out for another beating.
Post-modern Left-liberalism is an exhausted ideological research program. To the Dustbin of History, consigned.
Excellent post, Mark!
Russell: “I guess there are lots of people too frightened to go out at night - and alcohol-fuelled violence is part of it.”
You guess, huh? Would you care to back up that guess with a statistic or two? E-v-i-d-e-n-c-e goes down even more smoothly than an aged single malt with apple finish, floral tones, and nutty malt flavours, a glass of which coincidentally happens to be sitting next to my keyboard.
Thanks for the clarification, Alister. I thought Mark was saying that we were facing prohibition - if it’s only 6pm closing that Tim Costello and Rudd are bringing in - then no need for all the panic. I can drink fast.
Shall we be seeing the rise of the Aussie speakeasy?
An important point - nicely sticking some earthly mud on the ethereal wings of ideology.
Just think what a Strocchi comment would be like if he’d had a wee dram or two. But, then, that would be culturally wet wouldn’t it?
I won’t make any comment about the Melbourne CBD as I’m not familiar with it, but let me say this about the Valley or Oxford St on a Friday night. There are a lot of drunk young people there. Now I don’t know anything about what policing/regulatory strategies are in place in Sydney, but the Valley isn’t that dangerous - because of things like licencing and training for bouncers, cleaning out the organised crime/club ownership link, good policing and stuff like the 3am lockout - which in practice means not everyone pours out of the bars all at once - people leave the venuie they’re in at various times when they want, and then they have to go home. Night time trains, buses, and security staff at taxi ranks are all good things too.
And most of the time it’s just people having fun.
The whole point of varying the sorts of licences and the sorts of bars available is to encourage different and more responsible drinking choices. That’s why the “small bars” thing is a good idea. What does Costello want? Huge drinking barns, but a limited number?
The real problems in metropolitan Queensland with teens, grog and violence come from drinking in non-licenced premises - ie at parties!
Oh and public health issues should be considered completely separately from public safety issues as the measures that need to be taken and the problems are quite distinct - if interlinked to some degree. If this is the sort of expertise we’re gonna get from the 2020 summit - headling grabbing from wowsers - I despair of it.
Want.
Right, I’m outa here! Alibi Room up the road is open for another half hour I think!
Jack: “the Scandanavian states, so beloved by our star-struck local Leftists, offer a cradle to grave welfare service at the cost of very intrusive regulation of the citizens personal life.”
What regulation, Jack? I’m well aware they have monstrously high tax rates, but apart from that, how do they intrude into citizens’ lives in ways the Australian government doesn’t?
In at least one important public policy area, they’ve embraced a liberalism that our Australian Liberal Party has never dared propose. Sweden has [avert your eyes, LP lefties, lest ye be struck blind with horror] “a voucher system at primary and secondary school level, enabling free choice among public and independent schools (friskolor)”.
[link]
wbb: “if it’s only 6pm closing that Tim Costello and Rudd are bringing in - then no need for all the panic. I can drink fast.”
That’s easy for you to say, wbb. I’ve rarely gotten out of bed by 6pm!
Sweden used to be culturally dry! Up until the 80s they had a quota of how much grog you could drink per year - differentiated according to married and unmarried, male and female. And records were kept because all liqor stores were state owned.
More bloody wowsers! Lutherans in this case.
In fact, one of the problems with accession to the EU was having to deregulate alchohol sales.
Try having a beer in a hotel in Denmark too. “Sin taxes” are out of this world in the Scandinavian countries.
Jack should move there or something.
No, other way round. It’s the new CBD beer barns that are the cause of the current panic. The Hotel Assoc is muddying the waters here. They’d like to see the little bars cut back and are using the discussion to cleverly push their own barrow.
Costello is not that stupid.
What is he saying then? He says too many bars is the problem. So presumably he wants fewer licences.
Among all the weirdnesses in Jack’s comment, this one seems to represent a theme:
I didn’t think anyone was proposing compulsory carousing for the over 30s, over 40s, over 50s, etc.
Mostly it’s going to be young people out on the town at midnight, sure. Hence the ability to play the moral panic card. But actually a proliferation of venue types gives those of us in our 30s or whatever a choice of places to go which are more to our tastes.
Not everyone spends every night saving the world from Cultural Wets on the Intertubes. Those who want to can do so. Or can go to Baptist dances. The whole point is choice.
Ladeez and gentlemen I give you… the 6 o’clock swill. Children making their way home at twilight from playing in parks confronted with drunks sprawled in the gutter in their own vomit, publicans hosing the same out of their public bars, women living in fear at home for when the key turned in the lock…
Add to that factor strict drink driving rules.
So where’s all the drinking happening and who are the drinkers? Most likely the 18-25 year olds…the same group that has the highest number of road accidents and the highest number of victims of street crime (muggings and assaults).
Most of them are male, but women in this age group are drinking more than before, and more than women in older age groups.
So what’s the solution? Blanket bans and US-style wowserism, where if you live in one dry county you drive to the next to get your liquor?
Or targeted education and advertising.
Big Kev (& everybody else in parliament) is elected by the Ozzi people to go to Canberra and talk about stuff which they hope will improve our lot.
The elected parliamentarians can even vote on & (depending upon outcome of the vote) legislate the stuff they talk about.
So why do we need a wankfest of a thousand cuts (”N” deleted)?
There is already a way for us to get our ideas to Canberra, it is called “writing to your local member”.
Lap-dance boy is the one elected to run the country, what will a gathering of the chatterati & the squeaky wheels achieve that our ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES cannot?
“There has been virtually no increase in per capita alcohol income over the last decade�
Yair, since they started paying me with beer, the number of slabs hasn’t changed.
Sorry
18 Kim Feb 28th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Kim, my point is very simple and concerns the intellectual bankruptcy of yours & Marks world view, which is post-modern liberalism. And its manifest inadequacy to deal with the central moral problem in the contemporary era: how to reconcile our pre-modern biological legacies with our post-modern sociological opportunities.
Our innate special nature(s) is now at odds with our acquired social structure, not to mention modish cultural scriptures (like we really need another dose of Abby Hoffman!). The perennial conflict between the instinctual and the intellectual, now inadequately regulated by the institutional.
Post-modern liberalsim is to be distinguished from modern liberalism of the kind put about from Locke through Mill to say Rawls. Modern liberalism attempted to reconcile individual liberty with institutional legality in society still characterised by material scarcity for the majority populace. And where the minority elite still at least played lip service to traditional virtues.
IN those days a totally vicious life was economicly constrained, excepting for access to cheap beer and bad gin. (Which explains why the radicals were so opposed to liberal alcohol laws.)
But post-modern liberalism is a philosophy which has been fashioned to indulge society where many are not compelled to work to live and which can cater for every civilized vice - gluttony, lust, envy to name an unholy trinity - with great technological facility.
Its pretty obvious that we are not biologically designed to have the whole society uninhibited access to all the temptations and goodies available at a moments notice. Not unless we want to risk large swathes of the population turning into drug-addled, lard-assed chronic-masturbating couch potatoes.
Its also obvious that drugs and food are only going to get stronger and cheaper. Institutional authority do not want to blowing a large part of the lawfare and healthfare budget on dealing with problems associated with self-indulgence.
And the smarter individual autonomies work hard at limiting excess to riots overseas or occasional dirty weekending road trips. You cant live like a bohemian day-in-day out and still expect to accumulate capital at an acceptable bourgeois rate.
The AIDS, obesity and infertility tragedies prove we can have too much freedom “for our own damn good and [we] dont know what it could mean”. (H. Devoto)
And the problem is amplified with emancipation and globalisation where many minorties, even less adapted to deal with loads of strong free stuff, are exposed to temptation. The Aboriginal cultural crisis is only the sharp end of this problem. But way to many women are out there on the streets, clearly unable to hold there drink. Most unlady like.
A sophisticated form of sultural authoritarianism is indicated.
As someone who would be referred to as a member of the Left (whatever that means) myself, I am also perturbed by the moral crusading on poker machines.
Again, this seems to be born largely out of misunderstanding of the average pokie user, a certain contempt for them and an exaggeration of the harmful consequences.
So you get people like Catherine Deveny in the Age writing that she looked around a pokie venue and thought that noone there had come there expecting to lose.
In fact, the pokie users I know (all working class types, mostly elderly) do just that - they budget a certain amount of money each week which they expect to lose. A win is an unexpected consequence.
For the average pokie user, the $20 they spend provides a (relatively) cheap afternoon’s entertainment.
I don’t understand the attraction myself, but that doesn’t mean I should
run around trying to get pokies banned on moral grounds.
It’s the same with alcohol - yes, it causes social problems and is one of our biggest killers, but you deal with that not through prohibition but through education and regulation.
Ohh and dont get me started on gambling, another splendid form of “individual choice”. Organized duplicity exploiting stupidity, now amplified by gaming technology. A regressive tax on the LHS of the Bell Curve to enrich the RHS of the Lorenz Curve. Kerry Packer laughing all the way to the grave.
A curse on the North East Asians and traditional pub culture.
[If iit was later in the day I’d be writing this with beer in hand, instead of cigarette (yeah, yeah, I know) and coffee]
<p
The main probem I’ve got with the idea is that it’s dumb, misguided and won’t work. But …”deep contempt for the Australian populace..”, “…in some respects worse than the Howard era, which at least made the enemy clear and visible…” , and the rest, is slipping into hyperbolic overdrive, a bit, isn’t it? Get real indeed. What if the suggestion under consideration was that pokies be reduced in pubs / clubs? Check whether your response would be different, and why.
18 Kim Feb 28th, 2008 at 12:09 am
Kim if I sound patronising or old-fashioned its only because you come accross as a silly, immature little girl. The fact that you are still able to talk jauntily about “choice” as if ways of life are like cereal brands tells me you know next-to nothing of the dark side of post-modern life.
Trust me when I tell you that you dont want to go there. Too many of the all-to human never come back. I speak of one who has been in the “your funeral, my trial” state more than I am prepared to own.
Oh lord forgive her, she knows not what-of she speaks.
“Its also obvious that drugs and food are only going to get stronger and cheaper.”
Jack are you sure you’re not already using some pretty strong drugs? Food is going to get stronger? WTF is that supposed to mean? And cheaper? The Reserve Bank will be pleased … not to mention the starving billions.
I love the way people write that something is ‘obvious’ when they haven’t the faintest evidence to support their point.
Thanks for the clarification, Alister. I thought Mark was saying that we were facing prohibition - if it’s only 6pm closing that Tim Costello and Rudd are bringing in - then no need for all the panic. I can drink fast.
But WBB, as you know, 6 pm is the usual starting time for Melbourne grogblogs.
But way to many women are out there on the streets, clearly unable to hold there drink. Most unlady like.
When the actual physical harm caused by these women drinkers, including injuries, threats and damage to property, start to remotely approximate the harm caused by their young male counterparts, then you may begin to have a point. Until then, the annoying sight of these people is your karmic payback for the annoyance you cause here.
BTW, it’s “too”, and “their”.
The crowd who want the state to regulate our Responsible Behaviour should be careful what they wish for: Given the much-touted medical benefits of moderate drinking for those with the gene necessary to metabolise alcohol, I foresee Compulsory Chardonnay laws being passed by Easter. Or maybe it’ll be rations of Victory Gin.
Citizens! You Must Drink to the good health of the nation or pay the heart-attack surcharge! Have one for yourself, one for your wife, and one for the country!
Costello, Strocchi - This Means You!
“Trust me when I tell you that you dont want to go there. Too many of the all-to human never come back. I speak of one who has been in the “your funeral, my trialâ€? state more than I am prepared to own.”
Take his word for it, ladies, he knows. Mr strocchi’s been into the heart of darkness, and he survived, and now he’s back to bring you the good news about ‘cultural authoritarianism.’
Those of you here asking for ‘evidence’ ain’t seen the things he’s seen.
Wow, there is some real ignorance on display in this thread.
I’m an opponent of 6pm closing as much as anyone here, however to conflate 6pm closing with “Australia doesn’t have a huge alcohol problem” is, frankly, gob-smacking. And to then claim the pokies - the pokies! - are just a bit o’ good fun for pensioners is… well, I just don’t have the words.
For some education on gambling, so that you don’t sound like such an idiot in the future, McKenzie, see here: [link]
here: [link]
and here: [link]
When the vast amount of gambling review comes from chronic and problem gamblers - a whopping around $900 bucks per capita it really puts paid to ideas about $20 punts for the heck of it.
I have no patience for these kind of distortions.
For alcohol usage see here: [link]
here: [link]
and here: [link]
Make no mistake, alcohol abuse is a significant public health problem in Australia, and it’s getting worse.
That should be revenue, not review. A heh…
Ignoring Jack’s ramblings, there’s an important debate to be had here, which is more complex than just moral panic. It is certainly true that per-capita alcohol consumption hasn’t changed a great deal in the last twenty years, but there are also undeniable increases in rates of alcohol-related harm - the rates of young people turning up at emergency departments and in hospitals with diagnoses of ‘intoxication’ have doubled or tripled in Victoria in the last 7 years. There’s also a growing literature finding fairly significant links between number of alcohol outlets and rates of violence. Ditto later trading hours.
So while there’s good reason to be sceptical of some of the more hysterical commentary that turns up in the papers every few weeks, it’s pretty clear that there is a real problem here (at least in Victoria - I’m not aware of stats in other states), and one that requires some sort of public health response and there’s no obvious reason that numbers of premises or opening hours should be taken off the table as policy considerations.
No idea what the answer is, but I for one avoid the city on weekend nights because of the toxic atmosphere, which has been fueled by drunken and/or drugged-up people of both genders (although it’s probably mostly blokes the sight of young woman in pretty frocks puking in the gutter is growing).
“Ladeez and gentlemen I give you… the 6 o’clock swill. Children making their way home at twilight from playing in parks confronted with drunks sprawled in the gutter in their own vomit, publicans hosing the same out of their public bars, women living in fear at home for when the key turned in the lock…”
Mmmm, still think this is happening, it’s just that now the women living in fear have to live in fear till later in the night.
When the number of small bars are scaled back to solve this problem, what will happen next?
The AHA will be happy, with the new closed shop liquor arrangements.
Apart from several licencees having been hounded and some out of business nothing will have changed.
The rot will still be going on. What will lap-dance boy & his favourite bible bashing baptist preacher do then? Who will be the next scapegoat hounded out of business because they are “causing” street violence in Melbourne CBD?
Strocchers reminds me of the devout Methodist who was utterly opposed to pre-marital sex because it might lead to … dancing.
Surely there is at least a little aerobic benefit in serial wanking. But perhaps not. I’ll accede to Stroccher’s more developed insights on these matters.
Early February, 1788. When Governor Phillip finally let all the convicts off the ships in Sydney Harbour. They got blind roaring drunk and nobody’s been able to conterol us since. Give up Rudd! Keep your Xanity to yourself!!! The rest of us don’t want it! If this is how the little bloody wowser is going to carr5y on, next Federal election, you go down the bottom of the ballot paper with the Libs, Nats, FF and Xtan Democrats. Keep your moral beliefs out of my life. (And, incidentally, I hardly ever drink alcohol nowadays.)
Rudd is starting to look like as much of a wowser as Anna Bligh has turned out to be.
If Anna keeps on the way she is, she & her party can go to the bottom of the ballot paper also.
You say it like it’s such a bad thing, Jack.
I suppose it’s true, the modern quarters are pretty full of chundering bravoes vertically recycling their Carlton Draught. So where the fuck is Batman with his Bat-Bucket and Bat-Mop? Who’ll keep the streets safe from stomach chunks?
Way too many Strokeys are writing garbage on message boards and unable to spell it.
A lady is a bloke in a frock. Haven’t seen too many of them around.
Jerk Strokey to a “T”
Jeff Sparrow pointed out here as well as anyone can the corporatist de-politicising thinking behind this initiative, but one really needs to hammer home how noxious this idea really is.
What on earth is ‘corporatist de-politicising thinking’ when it’s at home? I can’t make head nor tail of that Rundle passage.
I did some research on this issue for some Op-Ed pieces I wrote last year.
The number of licensed premises has no impact on alcohol consumption. Victoria has around 5 times WA’s number of outlets and far more restrictive trading hours, yet according to the ABS actually has worse stats for alcohol consumption and alcohol-related violence than Victoria.
There is some evidence that the sorts of licensed establishments you have will affect alcohol-harm patterns. A NSW study found that the majority of alcohol-related assaults clustered around a very small number of large drinking establishments in recognised nightlife districts … your George Streets, Fortitude Valleys and the like.
There is overwhelming public health evidence for the effect of alcohol taxes on alcohol consumption. Put simply, higher grog prices mean less consumption. The effect is probably due to heavy drinkers and alcoholics simply not being able to purchase as much with higher prices.
If we want to reduce alcohol-related harm, we should raise the excise on take-away liquor. Grog at the bottle-shop should be as expensive as it is in a pub or local bar. This would not only reduce alcohol consumption, it would force more drinkers to drink in licensed establishments where there is at least some duty of care to prevent excessive consumption.
But won’t that have the effect of raising liquor store prices across the board, including wine prices?
Most drinkers consume alcohol at home anyway, and I don’t see too many over 35s causing alcohol-fuelled problems in public. So will people who like a glass or two with their meal, whether at a BYO restaurant or in their homes, be penalised for the activities of a bunch of yobbos?
The government could always try penalising the yobbos directly. i.e. arresting them & delivering a custodial sentence. The urge to brawl fades fast when it is likely bring on a stretch in the pokey.
This would get straight to the source of the problem, and avoid causing collateral damage to innocent 35+ wine drinkers.
This is muddling up a bunch of socio-cultural issues with licensing - a better question would be: what’s happening to consumption and harms in particular areas as the number of licensed premises increase/decrease? This kind of question has been studied in the US and pretty clear links between changes in outlet numbers and changes in violence rates have been found. Also: it’s not clear that the density of outlets needs to increase consumption overall to increase harm - it’s possible that increasing the number of pubs/bars in an area increases violence rates just by bringing drunk people into contact with larger numbers of other drunk people. This kind of effect isn’t going to show up in per-capita consumption stats. Again: this is similar with changes to opening hours - it may not change the amount people drink overall, instead changing the context in which they’re drinking (and thus the risk of harm). This has been studied in WA and it’s pretty clear that opening pubs later into the night causes higher rates of problems.
Taxes are the most obvious way to reduce overall consumption levels, which will undoubtedly flow through to reduced harm rates. The increasing of off-premise prices is a good place to start - particularly with evidence (from overseas) that the most problematic drinkers are getting liquored up before hitting the town.
Basically, the field is complex and writing off reasonable (if simplistic) policy ideas as “wowserism” is not really very helpful.
patrickg, there are two points to be made about the stats you cite:
(1) The evidence shows that “young” people aren’t the biggest problem drinkers:
(2) The most significant shift has been increased drinking and binge drinking among women and girls. As Helen suggested, that’s actually not associated with violence, but as Jack Strocchi demonstrates, some people apparently don’t think it’s properly demure and ladylike. That’s their problem, I’d suggest.
As Kim suggested, there’s a difference between the public health issues and licensing issues. Ben’s research and the comparison between WA and Vic shows that shorter hours and fewer licences is not correlated with reduced drinking and violence.
On the public health issues, I’m by no means an expert in this area (though I suspect I know more than Tim Costello), though I did do some work a long time ago for Qld Health on an education campaign (about cancer). As the proliferation of anti-drink driving and anti-drug ads probably intimates, changing behaviour is very difficult indeed. That is - if you’re going against the social grain. Anti-smoking campaigns aren’t necessarily “working” - it’s just that the long term trend anyway is for fewer people to smoke.
A more effective point of intervention is probably to treat the consequences of binge drinking as a public safety issue, and an issue of responsible service of alchohol, rather than as a public health issue. Kim enumerated some of the measures taken in Queensland at 11. There are also strict restrictions on drink promotions, advertising and happy hours, etc.
As Ben said, people are going to drink heavily anyway. It’s better that people are doing so in a relatively controlled environment rather than getting shitfaced at a party or on the beach or whatever. There just isn’t that much the state can do to shift people’s choices, and it shouldn’t try when to act would be ineffectual or counterproductive.
That goes to my two big problems with this:
(1) The potential for the summit to be dominated by people with an agenda pre-formed that results from prejudice or religious or ideological conviction;
(2) Chasing headlines rather than evidence-based policy.
TimT, if you’re not clear on Rundle’s point, try the article he cites by Sparrow:
[link]
Or for that matter, mine in New Matilda:
[link]
Jack Strocchi, interesting that you can perceive better than I that I’m a devotee of “post-modern liberalism”. I had no idea!
I think the motivation is wowserism, and I don’t think what’s being proposed by Costello has been thought through at all.
Incidentally, I’m also disappointed that the debate on “social inclusion” which is the area he’s meant to be overseeing has been pre-empted by all this to the exclusion of issues I suspect are much more important. That’s where we get the Blairite analogy - make lots of noise about social justice, and deliver… “law and order”.
Mark - I agree with most of that. The problem I have with your initial post is that there is some evidence that later trading hours and numbers of premises are directly related to alcohol-related problems. So it sounded like you were coming with your own ideological convictions. E.g. there’s a lot better evidence that closing hours matter than that lock-outs actually reduce problems (although this is at least in part because lock-outs have rarely been evaluated well).
As you said, education campaigns have never really been shown to prodcue behavioural change around alcohol - people can recite back risks etc better than they could before the education campaign, but there’s no real behavioural change.
Instead, one of the ways that has produced some behavioural change has been regulation: look at smoking - banning cigarettes in a variety of public venues has reduced the amount people smoke. While regulation is a blunt instrument, there’s good evidence that it can reduce problems. It’s a matter of balancing the positive effects (e.g. reduced violence) with the negative ones (reduced choice, potential shifting of problems to less supervised areas).
Finally, and I really didn’t mean to spend so much time on all of this, there’s at least a suggestion in a couple of US studies that increasing the number of outlets reduces rates of responsible service - competition at work. There’s only so much booze that can be sold to responsible drinekrs - with enough premises in a small area it’s not going to be in their business interests to stop serving drunk people.
So Guy Rundle has decided that Labor is worse than the Coalition? Remember how David Williamson and Frank Moorhouse were recruited for Peter Coleman’s late-Keating diatribe against political correctness, very embarrassing in retrospect.
AS for Jeff Sparrow he regards 1919 war Communism as a model, from this standpoint all other political systems do look the same.
I’m no great fan of Blair but New Labour did more for freedom and democracy in the UK than any govt before it.
Fines of $12500 for bar staff and $200 000 for licencees (approximately - got to dash and don’t have time to get the exact figures) tend to concentrate the mind, Michaell.
As does the willingness to suspend and review licences - currently hanging over the Normanby Hotel in Brisbane - which is incidentally nowhere near other drinking venues but where it’s alleged there have been a lot of assaults (denied by the publican, I should note).
I don’t know what the licencing laws are in Melbourne, or how rigorously they’re enforced, but Queensland appears to have got the mix about as right as it can get.
It will be interesting to see whether $3000 fines for parents and others buying kids booze have any effect. A lot of the offences against persons and property related to youth drinking have been committed by under age kids with no connection whatever to licenced venues.
Geoff, I don’t agree with Sparrow and Rundle generally, but there’s some crossover in their opinion of the summit and mine. But nor do I think as highly of Blair as you do.
Sorry not to be able to elaborate more, got work to do.
Mark - you’re probably right. In Victoria premises are almost never fined for breaches of responsible service (I’m pretty sure this is also true in NSW - see here for details) and very few places have licences suspended or cancelled (maybe 1 in the last five years).
Also, Victoria’s licensing system as a whole is much more deregulated than Queensland’s - it’s almost impossible to prevent new premises opening up, even if the local council and the director of liquor licensing think they’re problematic. So perhaps I’m arguing from a Vic-centric perspective.
I’ve despaired of sensible reasoned advice about social problems connected with drink, drugs and sex from people with a religious agenda for years.A long time ago I was one of the people behind an AIDS education programme for very active heterosexual youth.The advice proposed by a local pastor was the highly impractical one of don’t have sex.He’d hardly begun his spiel when the kids started chatting with each other (we were in a bistro) . While they were prepared to put up with condoms on carrots, demonstrations on how to clean hypodermic syringes, and delighted to listen to a woman from the Prostitutes’ Collective, they were not remotely interested in the religious message of abstinence. I meantion this, because I think its a lesson for all wowsers, especially Rudd and Costello, that prohibition in any shape or form just doesn’t work. Not that I expect the blinkered idiots to wake up to themselves. When it comes to social inclusion, I’d much rather they were examining the provision of health services, the excesses of Centrelink, various forms of racism, sexism etc and how to counter it, than wasting their time telling us yoof drink too much and behave badly. Shucks! Wake up, Kev, this is Australia.
@2 “at women’s refuges etc”. If men are violent towards their wives alcohol is a catalyst not the cause and anyway what’s to stop these men buying takeaway alcohol and becoming violently drunk at home. It’s as though you didn’t read the original post, prohibition hasn’t worked and won’t work. It has probably already been pointed out that countries with far less restrictions on the sale of alcohol (Greece for instance) have fewer problems with alcohol related violence. Thus there is no causal link.
Excellent post Mark.
We need a balanced approach based on real evidence, not hunches, that deal with problem behaviour, whilst having as little impact on civil liberties as possible.
It’s funny. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain and Portugal. You can’t move for bars. There is literally one on every corner in most towns. Lots of mixed-age, mixed-gender crowds from early in the morning (on innumerable occasions, I saw office workers having a belt of brandy on the way to work in the morning). And yet it’s pretty rare to see someone totally pissed; if they are, they’re usually (a) a British tourist or (b) singing merrily. I’m not idealising these places, but I think they might show that prohibition is not the answer - rather, it’s giving a culture time to adjust to the availability of alcohol and drinking places.
The Ruddster is making a populist play because, at the moment, there is some concern about drunken violence, particularly in Melbourne if the Age’s website is anything to go by. He wants to look authoritative, and he may well be a bit of a wowser, despite the Scores interlude. What needs to be pointed out is that, even if the stories are accurate, it’s all about young men in gigantic boozebarns. (There’s been some concern about the Normanby Hotel up here along these lines) It’s actually a very specific problem that you might argue could be solved with some equally specific measures. Meanwhile, diversifying the night-time economy with smaller bars, neighbourhood bars etc. actually improves the situation by making sure that going out for a few drinks is not the exclusive preserve of the young, bolshie, rumpigs.
In conclusion - Jack, you’re a clown. Your appeal to tradition is actually taking a very specific, quite recent history in Australia and probably the UK as normative, and there are very strong arguments in both cases that the imposition of tight controls on drinking in both cases (actually born of a fear or distrust of the working-class “crowd”, and misplaced Protestant reformism) has done more than anything to encourage binges. In southern Europe, where there have never been such concerns with restricting the flow of booze, people are much better practiced with moderating their own intake of alcohol.
The Age is currently running a strong anti-booze campaign which Costello, hence Rudd, is tapping into. I think Jason has it right. The problem, I suspect, lies with the huge booze barns, nor the local ittle, pubs, bars and clubs. I can think of four such places in my local shopping strip. All of them have long hours, but none of them seen to be trouble spots at all.
Costello can be a wowser. I’m more sympathetic towards his anti-pokies agenda, but generally he doesn’t like people to have too much fun.
Hi Mark,
I wasn’t responding to you so much as others. Licensing certainly is an issue, but Ben highlights the real issue (and why Victoria has much worse problem than say, NSW):
“If we want to reduce alcohol-related harm, we should raise the excise on take-away liquor. Grog at the bottle-shop should be as expensive as it is in a pub or local bar. This would not only reduce alcohol consumption, it would force more drinkers to drink in licensed establishments where there is at least some duty of care to prevent excessive consumption.”
Being able to go into the 24 hour Woolies, buy a six pack, and drink it on the street whilst waiting at a tram stop is a huge factor in Melbourne’s drunk on the streets problem.
Everyone is right in thinking that wine bars don’t promote a lot of violence - public health issues, maaaaaayyyyybbbbeeeee, but not violence.
What fuels the social costs of alcohol is - and this is backed up by the evidence - availability of alcohol, and the price of alcohol (which is really just a factor of the former).
If you can address these things, you can address many of the problems.
Opening hours - like it or not - form a small part of this. I personally think it’s putting the cart before the horse - let’s shoot for midnight, not 6pm say, and let’s get the liquor out of Coles first - but it is an undeniable part of our alcohol problems.
I would also be hesitate drawing such a clean line between the social and health costs of alcohol; they are often linked.
Is Jack Strocchi advocating some sort of 17th century puritanism? He seems to lurch from a libertarian POV to chastising current mores for being too libertarian. I thought a true libertarian couldn’t get enough if it. Perhaps he’s just a stream of consciousness beat poet?
As someone else pointed out, public binge drinking tends to be very localised geographically; the best solution is simply to enforce the existing law. If the coppers catch someone who is out of it on crystal meth, they try and find out who illegally supplied them. If they pick up a violent drunk in a hotel district, they should similarly find out who served them that much grog, and inform the licensing authority appropriately.
And as other have pointed out most of the trouble comes from consumption in private premises anyway. Licensing laws have little effect there - if anything tighter ones increase it.
But in the end you can’t put old heads on young shoulders. Mind you, if we were sensible enough to legalise pot the young fools would do a lot less harm to themselves and (especially) others.
Jason, that’s not entirely true about Spanish drinking culture. I give you el botellón.
(BTW, have a look at #5. OMG Fully sick subwoofer.)
True, and they do. In this instance the root problem is the violence, not the alcohol.
Alcohol abuse, like other substance abuse, is a symptom, not a cause. Alcohol is often used as self-medication, because it is relatively cheap, freely available and you do not need a prescription. Nor do you need to face a medical practitioner and uncover your issues. It is often used as self-medication in conjunction with drugs, both the illicit kind and prescription drugs.
The link between alcohol abuse and mental illness among the homeless is well-known
There have also been extensive studies of war veterans, such as this DVA publication which looks at the link between PTSD and drug and alcohol usage and abuse.
Of course the number of veterans of recent wars in the Australian population is relatively small, but because of the amount of data we have both from war veterans and the homeless, it does illustrate the need for more proper research as to why alcohol alone or in conjunction with other drugs is being abused in other population cohorts.
Therefore Tim Costello needs to get off the “moral panic” high horse and seriously address this problem.
“If they pick up a violent drunk in a hotel district, they should similarly find out who served them that much grog, and inform the licensing authority appropriately.”
Derrida Derida, when a perfect stranger fronts the bar in a sober & well behaved manner, how do I pick if this stranger is going to turn violent after departure? And why should I be blamed in his stead for the conduct of this stranger?
Mark
So much for evidence-based policy.
This was one of your howlers from your ‘fabled cultural elite’ article I was going to point out, but I let it go through to the keeper.
But let me tell you as I roll around the country, mums and dads are raising this with me in the supermarkets of the nation on a regular basis.
“What I see happening around the streets myself is a problem”
Bullshit.
I reckon you could count on one hand the number of supermarkets Rudd has been inside this last year. If he was in a supermarket then mums and dads would be whinging about the price of food and the fact that no de