Why don’t you spend $53 million on something useful.
We've all read in the papers that Rudd's got a hankering for dealing with the massive problem of binge drinking. It's happening everywhere, in our parks, our pubs and our confessionals, louty lads are lusting lasciviously for liquor to loll languorusly and lap at lavishly, to Rudd's lament. Ruddkip believes that we can deal with any social problem through a combination of force of will and advertising. Unfortunately, that's just not the case.
Binge drinking in its current form really only affects adolescents and young adults, right? Binge drinking is a huge part of Australian culture because it's how we connect with other people. We go for beers, not coffee (Unless you live in Newtown, and if so, fuck off); we spend Australia day drinking beer by the pool and gorging ourselves on Lamb. We have piss ups and whip rounds. Drinking heavily allows men to become close friends with other men and share their innermost secrets and the like without feeling like a bunch of right flowery poofs. Drinking is both a very important form of entertainment and psychology.
Now it's fairly obvious that Government fails pretty hard trying to moderate any substance at any time, ever (Other than currency, woo monopolies, and even then we're in a recession, good job) and thus this whole "Harm Minimisation" strategy is a load of touchy-feely twaddle. Trying to enforce the whole 5% available alcohol thing really won't work, neither will advertising, purely because they're putting labels on bottles. In fact, they only need one label on the bottle "Warning: the more you drink the harder this will be to read" because that's about as effective as the labels are going to be.
Remember that amazing cigarette campaign where they put disgusting images on the cigarette packets? We all know what happened, right? People started swapping and trading and asking for particular side-effects when they went to buy the cigarette "Give me some B&H smooths, the ones that cause gangrene, not smoke, I don't have any feet". We essentially became desensitised to an ad campaign that people said was the most hard-hitting ever.
To be frank, I don't blame us. Australians do have a history of larrikinism and a strong and loveable anti-authoritarian streak. We resent the Government telling us what to do with our lives and how to feel. We resent being treated like a bunch of morons, and rightly so. These labels dumb the whole issue down to the lowest common denominator, making the entire concept useless. All of these newfangled attempts to 'jab at the psyche of modern youth' have failed miserably because they're all, let's face it, shit. Remember the "you've got a small penis if you drive your car fast" ads, they've had fuck all impact. Remember the new P plate laws, well, astoundingly, people are still dying on the roads? Ads for the Internet filter? Fuck all. Workchoices? Same again! All government ads seem to do is make us even less interested in trying to abide by the social rules they're attempting to enforce.
Bet most of you didn't know that Britain is facing a similar 'problem'. Oh, so is most of Europe, and so is America. Young people, when given easy access to booze, will slurp it up like a hobo at a gravy fountain. Hell, in Britain it's far easier to get Booze than in NSW, and they've still got the same problem with binge drinking that we have. So it's obviously not access that is the issue. (Though, making it fully illegal wouldn't help either, c.f prohibition in the states, good job baptist women!)
Here's where we get to the crux of the issue; other people have proposed moderating the taxation levels on the different beverages in order to make it harder for the young (of lesser means than the old) to get right messed up on those alcopops they seem so drawn to. They seek to make the booze that is cheap and nasty, expensive and nasty and thus make it not economically viable to be purchased by the youths. However, our kids are an inventive lot, and if you take away the pulses and the Smirnoff double black ices, you'll have a bunch of kids shoving Omni Magnums (1L Bottles of Omni Champagne, around $10 a bottle, averaging at 8 std drinks) into beer bongs and getting fucked up on bubbly. Damn our entrepreneurial spirit.
If you raise the fines for drinking underage (and if you fine someone for drinking underage you're a fucking moron because you're just fining their parents, so they really don't learn anything, I'm looking at you Victoria) or supplying to underage people, well you just increase the demand and the allure for the substance because kids are seriously fucking stupid. If Johnny Hero rocks up to a gaggle of 14 year olds with a bottle of vodka that he just blew a homeless guy for then are we really dealing with the problem effectively? I know this would be considered a rather extreme situation, but bear with me for a moment, as in the modern day we deal in extremes and only extremes.
So let me lay the pieces out for you. Targeting certain alcohol won't work because kids are inventive. Raising the fines won't work because you'll end up raising the stakes and targeting the wrong people. Modifying the taxation system won't work, because, again, kids are inventive. Banning kids from drinking won't work because you'll send it underground and thus you'll have kids chucking up in parks from cooking alcohol and dying from hypothermia.
Alcohol is seriously cool. Kids want to mess around with it, it's inevitable. It has a taboo status (like drugs) and kids want to play with it and get mashed on it and have a right old rollicking time with no inhibitions, and why is that such a big deal? If you get all caught up in statistics and all the rest of it you begin to see a picture that simply isn't there. A boogeyman that exists purely to get us to raise our moral hackles.
As with everything that messes us up, be it exercise, coffee, alcohol, drugs, or real-estate, you have the people that go too far and ruin the whole pie for everyone. Binge drinking is a greater percentage of the pie because of how our culture supports it and because, for the most part, of how harmless it is.
I know that anecdote is the singular form of data, and as such my own perspective of bingeing and the like really isn't that relevant, but here's the deal. If you are binge drinking quite a bit (getting fucked up most weekends) but it isn't really affecting your Monday to Friday 9-5, then what's the big deal? People will naturally move away from the equilibrium of absolute health because that's what the advances of modern medicine have allowed us to do.
We have a safety net, in that we know if we fuck up too badly we can probably beg a continue out of the man in the lab coat, and nine times out of ten we're told "look you fucked up this time but we've fixed these problems and now don't do it again". I know I've been in that situation. We humans are fairly resilient buggers and we're able to deal with pretty much most of the shit the world can fling at us, so I really don't see why it's that big a deal.
Mr Rudd, if you make binge drinking that big an issue, I assure you, the youth of Australia will move in lockstep to affirm that suspicion.
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