Scapegoating The Young For Alcohol's Harm

Have you all got a note from your parents? Eighteen to twenty-year-old New Zealanders are being scapegoated for their society's problems with alcohol - allowing the real culprits to escape the sort of regulation that would make a real difference.

THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE DEBATE on "What should we do about our drinking problem?" one very important issue has been consistently overlooked.

The constitutional, political and moral objections to "down-sizing" the rights of 18 to 20-year-olds.

Though the Age of Majority Act (1970) sets 20 years as the age at which a New Zealander acquires all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, over the course of the past four decades Parliament has effectively lowered the Age of Majority to 18 years.

Eighteen and nineteen-year-olds have the right to vote in local and general elections, perform jury service, join the armed forces, make a will, sign a contract, and purchase alcohol. About the only important thing 18 and 19-year-olds can’t do is marry each other without parental consent.

When it comes to the other rights, responsibilities and duties of citizenship, however, 18 and 19-year-old New Zealanders are legally recognised as responsible adults.

This raises a couple of very serious question. Having admitted 18 and 19-year-olds to the ranks of adult New Zealanders, is it constitutionally, politically and morally justifiable to cast them back into the ranks of non-adults when it comes to purchasing alcohol?

How can prohibiting their participation in a social activity in which all other New Zealand adults are free to engage without legal sanction possibly be right?

I would argue that it is neither right nor justifiable. Once specific political and social rights (like the right to vote or the right to purchase alcohol) have been given to a group of citizens they cannot be taken back without placing the rights of every other citizen in jeopardy.

Were the White Americans living in the Deep South justified in stripping their Black neighbours of their civil and political rights in the latter half of the 19th Century? Did the Nazi Government of Germany have the right to strip German Jews of their citizenship in the 1930s?

Both of these cases involved the persecution of a politically friendless minority whose morals, capabilities and behaviour were openly despised and derided by the majority.

It is surely no accident that the alleged failings of young people loom large in the alcohol debate, or that an aggressive rolling-back of their rights is being advanced as the best means of solving the problem. They, too, constitute a vulnerable minority. They, too, have the dubious historical distinction of being their society’s whipping-boy. They, too, have enormous difficulty in mounting an audible defence.

Never mind the glaring absence of hard statistical evidence suggesting that young people are disproportionately responsible for the problems caused by alcohol. And let’s just forget the fact that alcoholism and the damage it causes New Zealand society is a phenomenon more commonly associated with people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

If the Justice Minister, Simon Power, had been guided by the facts he would have been obliged to fashion an alcohol reform package that struck not at the young and the vulnerable but at the rich and the powerful.

Had Mr Power really wanted to "reduce harm" he’d have gone after the Booze Barons, who market "Ready-to-Drink" lolly-water directly to young women in their late teens and early 20s; the advertisers, whose deadly equation "alcohol = fun" leads so many youngsters astray; and the supermarket owners, whose heavily discounted bottles of plonk are used to "loss-lead" their shoppers into the more profitable aisles.

Raising the excise duty, banning alcohol advertising, restricting the number of outlets and lowering the permissible blood-alcohol level for drivers would have produced an immediate and dramatic reduction in the harm alcohol causes.

But a package which stripped businesses of their economic power would only embroil the National-led Government in a politically counter-productive struggle with its own supporters. As a solution, turning young people into scapegoats has so much more to recommend it.

After all, blacks stay black, and Jews remain Jews, but young people eventually turn into old people who, in their turn, can be persuaded to project all the failings of their own generation on to the next.

That’s why making young people the focus of the alcohol debate is so important. Like all campaigns to restrict the rights of a vulnerable minority, its purpose is to hide the much greater harm done to all of us by an invulnerable minority.

The people who profit by it.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday, 27 August 2010.