Opinion & Commentary
Beer and a fag? Forget it: matron is watching you
Last Tuesday, New Zealand’s Law Commission produced a report arguing for the total overhaul and tightening of New Zealand’s liquor legislation. The next day, governments in Australia and New Zealand announced Draconian new taxes on cigarettes: both raising the excise dramatically and Australia introducing compulsory plain packaging. Goodbye nanny government, hello matron state.
Predictably, the justification for such restrictions and tax hikes comes under the increasingly applied and vacuous category of ‘social cost,’ the cost on society of producing and consuming these unhealthy products. This is a mixture of economic calculations designed to arrive at a headline figure of what these ‘dangerous’ goods ‘cost’ society.
Of course, a lot of these claims are nonsense, because what many public health economists and academics do is calculate the cost of an activity and either dismiss or discount the possible benefits arising from it. For example, you are assumed to get no benefit out of having a drink.
In a 2009 paper titled The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing, economists Dr Eric Crampton from the University of Canterbury and Matt Burgess from Victoria University of Wellington argued that public health academics and consultancies commissioned by government (and by extension do-gooder bureaucrats and politicians) make two fundamental errors: they only calculate the costs (not benefits) of an activity that is regarded as unhealthy, and they prioritise health above all other concerns. In other words, Crampton and Burgess argue these experts make the assumption that we should value our health over all other considerations.
Crampton has come up for a name for these people: healthists. He has argued in the New Zealand and Australian media, CIS Policy magazine, and on his excellent blog (http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com) that these experts are in fact just new paternalists who dress up paternalistic attitudes in the language of economics without applying any of its rigour. He argues and has demonstrated that in New Zealand, the alcohol excise amply covers all its ‘social costs.’ This includes police arresting teenagers, cirrhosis of the liver, domestic violence: the lot. In the case of tobacco, he (and many others, including the New Zealand Medical Journal) has shown that the total tax intake from fags exceeds the amount smokers use up in health costs. Indeed, a joint report put out by the Smokefree NZ and ASH NZ in 1987(!) argues that the tax exceeded the costs even then – and that was before smokers were socked 12 bucks for a pack of B&H 20’s.
The point is clear: drinkers and smokers already pay for their liabilities through the tax system, and increasingly they are being forced to pay for other people liabilities: Australia’s new cigarette tax will fund Kevin Rudd’s do-nothing health agreement. In New Zealand, it supports taxpayer funded quangos telling us not to drink and smoke. The rest goes into the general budget coffers to pay for rubbish like NZ’s Families Commission and Australia’s Board of Social Inclusion.
The facts are in: unhealthy and unapproved behaviours that do not harm other people are now fair game for the government to clamp down on.
The Alcohol in our Lives: Curbing the Harm report by New Zealand’s Law Commission, headed by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former Prime Minister and new wowser-in-chief, is a particularly interesting case study of this new paternalism. New Zealand has quite liberal alcohol laws, especially compared with NSW. The basic aim of the Sale of Liquor Act 1989 was ‘to establish a reasonable system of control over the sale and supply of liquor to the public with the aim of contributing to the reduction of liquor abuse so far as can be achieved by legislative means (author’s empahsis).’ This is realistic about what role legislation can play in curbing harm from booze.
Basically, liquor licences are cheap, easily available, and place responsibility on the host to behave in accordance with the guidelines laid down in the Act. You can buy beer and wine in the supermarket and the tenor of the Act is favourable for consumers – the people who pay money to enjoy alcohol. The effect has been magnificent: New Zealand’s per capita consumption has come down since the 1980s, there has been a proliferation of good wines (think Waipara Pinot Noir or Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc), micro breweries (Dunedin’s Emerson’s Brewery), and a cafe culture that has normalised responsible consumption of alcohol – a Melbourne type environment.
At a practical level, this has meant far greater consumer choice and variety of outlets providing for different tastes. In a New Zealand city, unlike Sydney, you would never consider meeting a pretty girl for a drink in a barnyard size pub, due to lack of alternatives.
No, no says Sir Geoffrey, and his healthist cheerleaders, due to the ‘unbridled commercialisation of alcohol’ we must replace this with the ‘Alcohol Harm Reduction Act,’ where the chief aim of alcohol legislation must be to discourage consumption and prevent harm. Bear in mind that a ‘harmful drinking’ session for men is a bit less than three pints of beer (unsurprisingly, a quarter of drinkers admit to this once per week). To remedy this, New Zealand must increase excise on alcohol by 50%, lower the excise on foul tasting light beers, institute a minimum price (which of course means windfall profit to liquor companies), move towards banning all advertising on liquor, institute a national bar closing hour of 4am (no entry after 2am), and prohibit off license liquor sales after 10pm.
This disregards all the evidence that heavy drinkers and alcoholics barely change their behaviour regardless of price, so the ban penalises the majority of normal drinkers.
What is worrying about all this is the passive attitude that Australians and New Zealanders take to these recommendations. People think it reasonable that smokers be hounded out of existence and drinkers confined to some awful homemade bars in a garage, simply because they enjoy something unhealthy that, let’s face it, an awful lot of people like to quietly indulge in. It also grates that for all its rhetoric about health, government doesn’t really care about stopping smoking and drinking at all, only raising revenue – otherwise it would raise excise by 600% and cut out both.
Given that the ‘social costs’ of these habits are totally met, whenever some expert or politician appears telling us how bad the habit is they are simply saying – that is bad for you, you shouldn’t do it, and even though it doesn’t harm anyone else, the government should force you to desist (and preferably fund some healthist pet-project from revenues gained).
This is sneaky new paternalism at its worst. Forget the gently cajoling nanny state, for our sweet nanny has now aged into a barking, bull-necked matron.
Luke Malpass is a Policy Analyst with the New Zealand Policy Unit at The Centre for Independent Studies
