If drinkers don’t know when to call it a night, at what point should the rules force them to? For Wellington, tackling mainly young people’s drinking could mean no-one can buy a bottle of wine from a store after 9pm, Katie Chapman reports. Continue reading
And According to Nick Cater, a visiting lecturer insights@nzinitiative.org.nz, The wowsers are back on a futile mission to enforce public morality through statute.
In Australia, as in New Zealand, a new temperance movement is testing the boundaries of prohibition to encourage better manners. It advocates restricting the sale of alcohol and increasing the price to control excess consumption.
As with earlier temperance movements, however, a laudable social objective is muddled by a moral crusade. The early twentieth-century temperance movement attempted to impose their version of morality by preaching sobriety; today’s moral enforcers want to set the boundaries of appropriate behaviour.
Their justification is an apparent increase in public drunkenness in cities and towns, particularly among the young, and reported incidents of alcohol-fuelled violence. Continue reading