Page 1811 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 June 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
However, they soon found that out and they tried another way. A pubcard is just another type of ID card. It is virtually a catch-22 situation: If you can prove that you can get a pubcard, you can prove that you can get a drink. I could not see how a pubcard was going to fix this. Many of the workers in the liquor industry felt the pressure on them to serve drinks when they knew that the person was drunk, and this was a problem.
A lot of things came out of this inquiry, other than the problem of under-age drinking, and I think we need to look at these things. We cannot just say that there is binge drinking and it is a problem. It boils down to education, and I think places such as the Life Education Centre are very good. We have to look at ways of teaching in the schools, with cooperation from all the schools. We have to involve the unions. After all, in the liquor business you have a lot of people working who belong to the liquor trades union, although we did not get around to asking what they thought should be done. I think there should be more training for the people who are serving alcohol - not only the owners but also the people who work in the industry. We should be working with these people to look at this problem.
When I was overseas, and I have mentioned this before, I looked at a program at Stanford University called Desire. It did not look just at binge drinking and drugs and things like that; it looked at a child from day one at school to find out whether that child might be one who would fall through the net. The child could have a problem at home with a parent who drinks or a father who beats the child too much. It might be a child who is a slow learner and is never going to quite make it at school. These are the children we are going to have problems with. If they fall through the net and do not get help when they are young, these are the ones who will become the alcoholics, these are the ones who will go on to drugs, these are the ones we will have problems with.
Instead of looking only at the problem now, as we did on this committee, by going and talking to students in college who are already 18 and able to drink, talking to teachers, to people who own liquor outlets, to a few of the people who serve the liquor, we have to look at children at a very young age. We have to find out what makes children do this and what leads them into it. Some of them do it for a bit of fun and they get over it and it is all right. Some of them do not, and they are the ones who end up costing us a lot of money in hospitals. They are the ones who have problems later on in life with drinking, drugs and so on.
We need a lot more counselling in schools. We need to spend money on centres that teach young people about alcohol and drugs. We looked at the 18-year-olds, and I am very glad that we did. Having done the tour of the clubs with the police and looked at what goes on after 2.00 am, I agree with the committee that there should be some hours when the outlets, the nightclubs, are closed, so that people have to go home, instead of their being open 24 hours a day, with people able to drink from sun-up to sundown.
We need to look at the question of hours, and in that regard one of the very positive recommendations in the report relates to liquor outlets. It is important to say that there needs to be a time when they are closed. As the police told us, most of the problems start after 2 o'clock at night. Up until then, people act responsibly and do not get into a lot of trouble; the trouble starts after 2 o'clock. I am well known for going home from a party at 2 o'clock, and I think that for most people who enjoy themselves, that is about the time they decide to call an end to it.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .