Off the Piss

The better part of a decade back I was chatting to a bike mechanic about the way Yamaha and Subaru’s use of security dot systems - which spray scannable microdots into the undercoats that cover almost every metal part of a car or motobike - had apparently reduced the rate of theft in their newer model bikes and cars from “most stolen” to “barely ever”; he explained to me that this was simply that most thefts are by professional thieves; he could tell you off the top of the head which wreckers were fencing, in whole or in part, parts from stolen cars and bikes, and that’s where the money was. If you worked in the industry any length of time, apparently, you got a good feel for how many “second hand” spares had more to do with five-finger discounts.

The microdots killed the market for Impreza parts protected with them, not because the police would track the thieves - fat chance! - but because the resellers who were making the real money converting stolen goods into “legitimate” goods were now easy targets.

Which brings me to the booze industry. Whenever evidence emerges of fucked-up drinking patterns - pupils dying at school ball related events being the most recent example - there comes a suggestion that the drinking age might be raised (vote, police, soldier, but don’t have beer, apparently), thereby eliminating the scourge of underage drinking. As someone who cheerfully drank at 17 while the age was 20, I suspect this seems unlikely to make much of a change; indeed, it seems unlikely anything is going to make a chunk of 17 year olds think getting fucked up on booze is a great idea so long as their elders largely demonstrate exactly that behaviour.

But to the degree that getting fucked up on booze can be hurt by legislative fiat and enforcement it seems odd to me that so much effort is directed at 17 year olds, and so little at their suppliers. Let us be clear: there is a profit to be make based around selling booze to under-age drinkers. The chances of getting caught are small. The law is structured such that the drinker and employees are easier targets that the people making money from it. Any real attempts at enforcement - police trawling clubs and pubs, fishing expeditions with underage assistants on dairies and bottle shops - are as likely to be bemoaned as entrapment or the fun police by a press no doubt well-primed by HANZ.

Low risk, high reward, what could go wrong?

If we were serious about cracking down on sales of booze to minors, we could make that equation stack up very differently, very quickly. It’s fairly simple: we’re a near-cashless society. EFTPOS is an impulse. Any outlet selling booze needs to send its sales records for liquor through to a black-box data-matching service which compares purchases to the corresponding transaction records of minors. Matches get routed to the police and local liquor authority for prosecution of the business’ owner and the reconsideration of their liquor license. I will cheerfully bet a day’s salary that in very short time a large number of business currently happily tanking up underage drinkers and then leaving the rest of us to foot the bill for puke, punch-ups, sexual assaults, and deaths would evaporate as quickly as those parts dealers flogging Impreza bits.

Of course, this could also be the sort of thing that gets one’s civil liberties sense tingling. Fair enough. But we’ve been doing inter-departmentmental datamatching between IRD and whichever department runs benefits for a few decades now. Your cash transactions over a fairly low threshold are flagged by your bank and flicked on to relevant government departments, and we signed up to monitor and/or block donations to UN-blacklisted terrorist organisations.

(You know the UN. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are on the Human Rights Council.)

So one could insist such a move was a civil liberties concern, but not from a position of being an MP for more-or-less any political party involved in the government of New Zealand since sometime in the 80s.

Of course, such a proposal, or anything that might meangingfully harm a business model of tanking up people, children and adults alike, until they think puking, fighting, pissing in the streets, vandalism, rape and the like is a more-than-usually splendid idea isn’t going to go very far in New Zealand, so long as HANZ continue to to lavish advertising lobbying dollars to the press and politicians.

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