Page 1810 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 June 1993
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MRS GRASSBY (8.14): I would like to say, being the deputy chair of the Drugs Committee, that it was a very interesting committee to be on, particularly that aspect relating to under-age drinking, which really is a problem, in spite of what we would like to believe. One of the greatest parts of this committee was being able to go to schools and speak to students and hear their ideas. These students were 18; we did not speak to a lot of students who were under 18. Interestingly, most of them said that yes, they had participated in binge drinking before they were 18, but they felt that once you turn 18 there is no reason for it because you are able to drink legally and you become part of the norm. They did say that there were students who did not quite get over that and that became a problem. I think we have to look at the people who fail to get through that stage Mr Moore was talking about, what he and others went through as students; at the age of 18, when it became the norm to be able to drink, they did not think it was such a smart thing to binge drink. However, there are those people who go on doing it.
Visiting the schools was very good, and we are very grateful to the Minister for Education for allowing us to do this. We visited, I think it was, three colleges and one Catholic private school. Grammar would not allow us to come and talk to them; I do not know why. We got both sides of the fence - a private school and state schools. They both said that binge drinking was something that was done before you were 18 because you should not do it; you were not allowed to do it, so you did it. When we asked them how they got hold of it, they said that it was very easy. One of the things we asked was whether they thought we should lower the drinking age from, say, 18 to 16 or 15? They said, no, that if you lower the age to 15 they will start binge drinking at 12. We also asked them whether they thought we should raise the age to 21 and they said no, that 18 was correct.
We then came to the subject of a pubcard and what was important about a pubcard or an identification card. Most of the people we spoke to who were under age and who drank said that they got most of their alcohol from supermarkets. Although they were asked for proof of age to buy cigarettes, they were never asked for proof to buy alcohol, which is a bit of a worry. If they were, they said that you could always get somebody else to buy it for you. So it came to the point of whether a pubcard was the answer, if you can get somebody else to buy it for you. When I was doing the tour of the clubs, one of the people said that often somebody would come to the bar and order five or six drinks - tequila sunrises and odd drinks like that. You would ask for their identification because you were not sure that they were really 18 and they would say, "Oh, just a moment; I will go back and get it". He said that they would not come back, but somebody else would come back and order exactly the same drinks, which meant that the person was under 18.
The point is that the pubcard will not do the job to stop under-age drinking. It will be there to help the people who own the outlets; it will make it easier for them, so that they do not get fined. They are the ones who are going to welcome it. That is the impression we got when we spoke to the people who own the liquor outlets. They were the ones who really wanted the pubcard because it would make it easier for them, and I can see their point. I owned a hotel once. The young ones would be very cute and would bring birth certificates with other people's names on them. They would know the birth date off by heart, so you could not catch them. I learnt a way to catch them. I used to ask them what their star sign was, and they would always give their own star sign and not what was on the birth certificate, so you would know that it was not their birth certificate.
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