Editorial: Police blitz welcome attempt to quell culture of binge drinking

OPINION: New Zealanders and Australians are the closest of mates. Our economies are intertwined, we holiday in each other's resorts, and there is a trans-Tasman love of sport.

These are all positive aspects of our relationship, but we also share a major negative element. This is the culture that equates binge drinking with having a good time, with the attendant problems of crime and ill health.

Police on both sides of the Tasman are understandably angry about the persistence of this culture. Their joint Operation Unite on December 11 and 12 will target booze-fuelled street crime and is intended to send a short but sharp message that being drunk and disorderly is unacceptable.

The operation will be mounted during the height of the pre-Christmas office party season, which is no coincidence. It might also be intended to send a sobering signal to revellers to moderate their behaviour on New Year's Eve.

In Australia, the blitz will come, depending on the state, just after or towards the end of "schoolie week", a rite of passage to mark the end of school exams. Tens of thousands of teenagers will descend on holiday resorts, where there has regularly been drunken anti-social behaviour. This year, the policing and ambulance costs of schoolie week will be more than $1 million in Queensland alone.

The Australian police campaign will be partly aimed at ensuring that those schoolies whose week of partying is over by December 11 behave responsibly on their return.

New Zealand does not have a post-exam event comparable to schoolie week, but it does have similar statistics on the harm and the costs of alcohol abuse.

Alcohol-related harm costs Australia almost $20 billion a year, while in New Zealand the figure is more than $5b, and in both countries, alcohol-linked crime is a massive drain on police resources. New Zealand police, for example, spent 18 per cent of their 2005-06 budget dealing with alcohol-related offending and half of the offenders or victims in serious crimes are affected by alcohol.

The battle to end the booze culture must continue to include public awareness campaigns about the harm done by alcohol, and sporting bodies have an important role to play. Australian sport, notably rugby league, has its ritual "mad Monday" at the end of the season, featuring all-day drinking and well-publicised cases of public drunkenness and violence.

Such occasions are not as institutionalised in New Zealand, but there have been instances aplenty of top sportspeople drunkenly disgracing themselves. Sports organisations must be vigilant about the drinking habits of players who are role models for younger people.

But the prevalence of binge drinking despite education campaigns means there must also be a strong focus on liquor laws and their enforcement.

Both New Zealand and Australian states such as Victoria are reviewing liquor legislation and it seems certain that the availability of alcohol will be tightened. In New Zealand, it is likely that off-licences will be more rigorously controlled in terms of opening hours and communities given a greater say over their location.

And in both nations there have been calls to raise the drinking age to 20 years, although in New Zealand this is more likely to occur with respect only to off-licences.

Such moves would be more in line with the stricter alcohol stance of the United States, where the drinking age is, with exceptions, 21 years, rather than the more relaxed drinking culture of continental western Europe, where alcohol use is normalised within the family.

If the binge culture does persist here, a question is whether communities, especially those already with alcohol-free zones, will press to go totally dry, as with the US dry counties.

A tough alcohol regulatory regime can only be as effective as the robustness of its policing. The forthcoming police blitz will only last two days, although in Canterbury there will be an emphasis on the various alcohol-related crimes in the preceding week.

But the blitz is still a welcome reassertion of the police's determination to crack down on the booze culture and its longer term impact will be, it is hoped, a strong reminder to New Zealanders that drunken disorder will not be tolerated.

- © Fairfax NZ News