Editorial: Drink and you'll miss it

OPINION: In Australia, at the farthest reaches of its sun-baked outback, distances are not measured in miles or kilometres but in the amount of beer consumed on the trip.

So the journey between one far-flung community and the next is measured by the slab of beer washed down with the wind-blown sand, rather than the few hundred kilometres of road travelled.

In New Zealand, we have a similar alcohol unit to identify our distant, rural communities. Although it is the community itself that is part of the measurement and not the distance between two points.

More and more, as our smaller towns and rural centres dwindle, wither and then die, the level of civilisation is quantified by the pub that traditionally marked the centre of its social and physical universe.

For many outposts, that tavern is now all that is left, the last remnant of civilisation; the post office is long gone, the bank and the school are either sold off or empty and an entire community can be summed up in the drinking hole that is now the remaining monument for what was once a thriving town or village.

Now when we drive through what were once proud, busy little spots and joke that "if you blink, you will miss it", it's the pub that is the only building captured in the shutter-speed of that rapid eye movement.

But for how much longer?

Rural publicans are right to be concerned that they may become collateral damage in the ongoing fight against drink-drivers.

Social attitudes and government legislation have changed forever the way most of us drink. That has been necessary to alter our previously appalling largesse towards drink-driving.

But it has also clearly hit the hospitality industry, with drinking spots now more concentrated around CBDs and more traditional regional or country pubs now out of bounds because of the transport needed to get to them.

That reluctance to pop along a dark, narrow country road for a drink and a natter down at the `local' will be even more prevalent if the Government decides to go ahead with cutting the drink-drive limit even further.

Some country pubs may have to follow other establishments and provide alternative transport for their over-the-limit punters, but no doubt many are already struggling financially as the farms get bigger and the countryside is bled of people and the services by urban drift and bureaucratic indifference.

It could be a case of one extra cost being one cost too many.

That would be a shame, and not just for the people left to mourn the loss of their beloved pub.

It could mean that for the rest of us, on those long journeys between one far-flung urban community and the next, there will be no need to blink because there will be nothing left to miss.

- © Fairfax NZ News