The government has accepted all 130 substantive changes that the Justice Select Committee made to the Alcohol Reform Bill.
Critics say that’s not going far enough.
But it doesn’t matter how far law changes go, a cultural change is what’s needed and that will take decades.
The anti-smoking message started more than 40 years ago. It took at least 20 before it started being accepted that smoking was an unhealthy habit and smokers didn’t have a right to impose their habit on others.
Law changes and price rises helped. But the change in attitude of non-smokers who stopped tolerating smoke-filled air and smokers who realised it wasn’t a good habit and definitely wasn’t okay to smoke wherever they liked was at least as important.
Posters saying Nosmo King is Cool were collectors’ items when I was student (possibly as much for the cartoon character of a good looking bloke as the smoke-free message).
Nodrin King is cool doesn’t have quite the same ring and the message doesn’t have to be no drinking.
The ads that say it’s not the drinking it’s how we’re drinking are right, moderation rather than abstinence is what’s needed.
Alcohol has a place as a social lubricant and an accompaniment to food.
But drunkenness and the bad behaviour which some try to excuse because of it are far from cool.
Changes in law might go someway towards addressing some problems with alcohol. But ultimately it’s attitude changes not legislative ones that will get rid of our anti-social and immature drinking culture.
You mean like stopping people like this guy taking a leak in a hotel corridor?
I’ll tell you a story, make of it what you will.
A girl i know, a women really, she’s in her thirties is a schizophrenic, Diagnosed when she was about 14. Her name is Raylene
This is a cruel fate – no happy memories of collecting anti-smoking posters during university days for her. no holidays in the USA in her past nor in her future.
She smokes skinny roll up cigarettes and because the do gooders in Parliament think she shouldn’t smoke she pays a huge excise on her tobacco which she can’t afford.
Anyway last week we are in the supermarket and she is in front of us in the checkout. With a loaf of bread and a bottle of sherry?something anyway that was $7:50 on special.
And there she is opening her purse and counting out the coins to make up the $9.40 her purchase added up to and there was just 20c left. That’s all.
I could cry
I know her we were chatting with this tormented soul in the line. Passing the time of day.
We had a couple of jars of jam in our trolley – we gave her one,
What else can you do?
But color me unimpressed with the snotty people up in Wellington who come up with these policies and then go out an celebrate their acceptance in fancy restaurants drinking fancy wines that cost more per bottle than Raylene lives on in a week.
They could address the “culture” of drinking with one simply law change instead of 130. SImply make it an offence again to be drunk in a public place. Then encourage judges to view intoxication as an aggravating factor in any offending rather than a mitigating one and sentence accordingly.
Andrei, I so agree with you. It’s really easy for people who have never walked on the dark side, financially or psychologically (and this certainly isn’t directed at you hp), to dictate to others how they should live their lives. Raylene’s smokes and bottle of sherry would be the little things that would offer her some relief from a pretty tough existence. If she wants to blot out, for just a little time, some of her unhappiness, why shouldn’t she? I’ve been puzzling for a while now why it is that the voices of a privileged minority so utterly dominate public alcohol policy.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/5509870/Wikileaks-Key-said-Kiwis-have-socialist-streak
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