High Sobriety (24 page)

I can honestly say that, while being drunk has contributed to some silly arguments with friends and the occasional spat with workmates, I've never found myself so plastered that I feel the urge to shove glassware in someone's face. But as a former bartender, I wonder how much I've contributed to the culture of antisocial drinking we're now witnessing. In my decade of bar work across three countries, I regularly served pissed people.I encouraged excessive drinking through ridiculously cheap happy-hour promotions and, in one pub, offered free drinks to anyone who could down a yard of ale. I served Guinness and Jameson to thirsty Irishmen at 7.00 a.m. on St Patrick's Day, and lined up shots on the bar for fresh-faced customers without checking their IDs. On both sides of the bar, I have been irresponsible.

But public-health experts argue that the problem goes beyond the actions of the bartender or the personal responsibility of the drinker. They blame the alcohol industry as a whole. These days, bottle-shop booze is so cheap that many people are drunk before they leave the house. Just like Beth and her friends, who ‘pre-drink until [they're] at a comfortable level of drunkenness', many young people are well on their way to being smashed by the time they head into Melbourne's entertainment precincts. The health lobby claims that systemic discounting, in tandem with aggressive marketing and a proliferation of liquor licences, have left our streets awash with booze. Rob Moodie describes this discounting as the ‘Bunningsisation of alcohol', where a bottle of wine can be sold for less than $3 in massive cut-price warehouses, and punters are encouraged to buy in bulk and load up shopping trolleys with grog. A 2009 analysis found that large liquor barns were responsible for 70 per cent of all Australian alcohol advertising, up from 30 per cent in 1989. Adverts for boutique stores fell from 29 per cent to just 5 per cent.

It probably doesn't help that Australia's leading supermarket chains control half of the country's liquor supply. Woolworths, which owns Dan Murphy's and BWS, and Coles, which owns Liquorland, First Choice, and Vintage Cellars, leverage their duopoly regularly to undercut competitors, using heavily discounted alcohol as a loss leader. In March 2011, Foster's was forced to withhold the supply of key brands, including VB and Carlton Draught, when it learned that the supermarket giants were planning to sell them for $28 a slab, well below cost. The brewer said the discounting undermined their brands.

Some of my friends have begged me to stop giving health experts a platform to condemn cheap, all-night booze as an inherently bad thing. They have read my stories about a blitz on late-night bottle shops, or calls for an end to discounting, and sent me half-joking text messages asking what I have against affordable, readily available grog. But while slashing the price of booze might be a boon for the average drinker, it's usually the community's most vulnerable who suffer. According to the World Health Organization, underage and heavy drinkers are the groups most likely to drink excessively when booze is cheap. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Australia's Indigenous communities, where alcohol abuse has ravaged towns, and the rate of drinking-related deaths is twice that of the general population, through chronic disease, accidents, violence, and suicide. In June 2011, in response to alcohol-fuelled violence in Alice Springs and to criticisms that its cheap booze was contributing to the problem, Coles announced that, from 1 July, it would stop selling two-litre casks of wine — a product that sold for less than 50 cents a standard drink. A minimum price of $8 was brought in for bottles of wine. Woolworths quickly followed suit. The retail giants ruled out extending the policy to the rest of Australia, but there may be changes ahead: the federal government has asked its National Preventive Health Agency to investigate the merits of a national floor price for alcohol, similar to the one being introduced in Scotland.

It's not just Indigenous communities that are hit hard by heavily discounted booze. A few years back, I reported that price wars had become so fierce, some smaller bottle shops were offering public-housing tenants credit and free home delivery, in a bid to compete with the big chains. Some customers on pensions had racked up massive debts and were being hounded by loan sharks. Research by Turning Point and VicHealth shows that disadvantaged areas are flooded with bottle shops, with up to six times as many outlets as wealthier neighbourhoods. Studies have consistently shown that areas with a high number of bottle shops have greater rates of chronic disease, risky drinking, assaults, and domestic violence. It raises the question: is the alcohol industry deliberately targeting poor people?

In 2007, I found out what happens when a local community tries to fight back against the proliferation of cheap grog. Preston, a traditionally working-class suburb in Melbourne's inner north, is part of the City of Darebin — a council area with the second-highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in Melbourne. The suburb was experiencing unprecedented levels of underage drinking, with kids buying cheap booze, and running amok in parks and at parties. Alcohol-related assaults, criminal damage, domestic violence, and health problems were also climbing rapidly. Police said that much of the trouble was originating near bottle shops, where drinking was much harder to control than in licensed venues. When an application for a small wine store was lodged with the liquor-licensing department, police and council lodged a joint objection, on the grounds that it would harm the community by encouraging more alcohol abuse. There were already 65 places in Preston to buy alcohol, including 11 bottle shops. That, they argued, was more than enough. In a landmark legal case, Victoria's then director of liquor licensing, Sue Maclellan, upheld the objection. It was the first time that a licence had been turned down on the grounds of social harm. Health experts lauded it as a major win in the fight to turn around our alcohol culture.

But the victory was short-lived. Six weeks later, Maclellan granted a licence for a Dan Murphy's superstore in Preston. The council and police objected, on the same basis as their previous complaint. Maclellan dismissed it. As Geoff Munro, a long-time alcohol campaigner from the Australian Drug Foundation, told me at the time, ‘It's hard to understand the logic of granting a licence to a mega-discount liquor store when a smaller discount liquor store was rejected on the grounds that it might exacerbate existing alcohol harms. It's just extraordinary. It's time we had a balanced liquor-licensing law that took account of people's health and not just the economic interests of liquor merchants.'

The following week, community frustration turned to fury when I discovered that the proposed Dan Murphy's store was to be less than 200 metres from a Salvation Army rehabilitation facility. Women battling alcoholism would have a perfect view of the liquor giant from their bedroom windows.

To this day, I've not received an answer from Maclellan about the inconsistency of her decisions. There's no suggestion that she did anything improper or was unduly influenced by the might of Dan Murphy's, but there's no doubt that the liquor giant has access to far greater legal resources than any small business fighting a licensing decision. The owner of the family-run chain of wine stores who had his licence application refused told me, ‘It all boils down to one thing: the big get bigger and the small get smaller. There's no way any independent will ever beat the chains.' The result of this stranglehold on competition is ever-cheaper alcohol.

Since I stopped drinking, I've begun to notice just how insidious this proliferation of cut-price booze has become. Much like dieters who see chocolate cake and pizza everywhere they look, I feel as if I'm under siege from dirt-cheap grog. And the more you buy, the cheaper it is. The full-page, and often double-page, adverts in the national press are so ubiquitous that I can't read my own paper without being bombarded by beer. I may have left bar work behind, but it seems that the alcohol industry is still keeping me in a job.

I'M HAVING LUNCH
with a man who's heard it all before. As a senior alcohol-industry executive, he's grown accustomed to being called names; he's had to develop a teflon exterior. Health experts have accused his industry of being disease vectors, of trying to lure children into a lifetime of binge drinking, and of putting profits ahead of people. He stopped getting angry a long time ago. Now, he just seems tired.

We meet in one of Melbourne's high-end restaurants — his choice, and on his tab. It's a shame that I can't join him in a glass of wine; the list of offerings is exquisite. Plus, I quite like the idea of getting sozzled with a corporate bigwig, whiling away the afternoon quaffing Moët & Chandon and Rémy Martin, safe in the knowledge that the bill is being picked up by the very industry charged with transforming me, and countless others, into binge-drinking reprobates. But my decadent fantasy will have to wait for another day. I order mineral water.

I've debated this man many times. He's engaging and whip-smart. His response to claims against the industry is always considered and fair. He often shows a healthy degree of wariness in answering my questions, but today he seems more apprehensive than usual. In fact, he tells me that he does not want to be named in my book.

I start by asking him what he thought when he read the article about my history of binge drinking. He says he was surprised that someone who, he had presumed from my reporting, had a dim view of alcohol abuse would drink so much. ‘It's a bit like a police reporter being caught shoplifting,' he says. I laugh, and he seems to relax a bit. ‘I wouldn't have said it changed the credibility of what you wrote because you've always been reasonably fair.'

It's a generous concession from a man whose industry I have repeatedly hammered in the pages of
The Age
and
The
Sunday Age
. While he's in such a mood, I ask him to be completely frank. I know that he's paid to represent the alcohol industry's best interests, but just quietly, there must be times when he thinks, hang on, maybe my industry does fuel harmful drinking?

He doesn't hesitate. ‘I don't think it does now, and I don't think it has done ever. The public-health lobby, like so many social-justice groups, see the industry as vastly more powerful and controlling than it actually is. We're actually led by our customers far more than us leading them. We might bring out a new product, and if people like it, well, that's great; it's not some sort of Machiavellian plan to find new ways that people can drink more and more. We see what people want and we provide it for them. It's not like we have magical means of saying, “Here, everyone drink more and drink quicker.”'

But drinking more we are. If market forces have played no part in our current binge-drinking culture, how did we get here? He puts it down to rapid social changes. Young people are reaching independence at an earlier age, and are having a longer period of freedom before taking on ‘marriage, mortgage, and maternity'. This, along with a long economic boom in which jobs have been fairly easy to come by, has made it a golden time for young Australians. ‘When people are confident about their jobs and things are going well, they celebrate,' he says. But he also blames a ‘me culture', where the rise of bigger cities means that people can be more anonymous, and social norms have moved from self-restraint to excess. In essence, public standards have slipped; drunkenness and drunken notoriety are now seen as socially acceptable.

I suggest, respectfully, that the industry, culpable or not, must be happy with a society where excessive drinking is the norm. Isn't the bottom line to increase sales? He disagrees. ‘We're led by our consumers. If our consumers want to drink less, well, we'll sell them less, because we'd have no option and we'd just have to cope with that change, which would happen over a long period of time. The industry will adapt. We will sell them better. We will move them on to more heavily branded items, higher quality products, and at higher prices. If everybody was limited to having half a bottle of wine a week, people wouldn't spend that much less on wine, but they'd be drinking better wine.'

I find it hard to believe that multinational alcohol companies beholden to their shareholders would be quite so philosophical if, as a nation, we suddenly decided to drink like the parish vicar. If it doesn't matter how much people drink, why does the industry fight any form of intervention that might lead to a reduction in consumption? ‘What the industry objects to most strongly is a group of people with fairly strong agendas coming in and saying, “We think we know best for the rest of you.” We don't actually lead or control how much people drink. It's up to people, and the industry's there to fill that need. The industry works very hard to try and control it, in the main. Bottle stores clamp down really hard on underage drinkers, we try and persuade parents not to buy alcohol for their children, hotels try and do a good job around violence and bad behaviour, but there's a lot of young adults saying, “I want to have a drink. How can you say that you know me better than I know me?”'

I didn't think he'd invoke the nanny-state defence this early on, but there it is: the alcohol-regulation equivalent to Charlton Heston's ‘guns don't kill people, people kill people' argument. It reminds me of a billboard erected recently near Richmond Station, in the shadow of the MCG. It reads, ‘Alcohol doesn't cause violence. Blame and punish the individual.' Financed through an odd alliance of the Nightclub Owners Forum and the Australian Sex Party, the billboard is designed to promote the notion of individual responsibility and to stop ‘unfounded attacks' on the hospitality industry.