John MacDonald: Limiting booze sales - Auckland has but Christchurch shouldn't

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

With some ideas, they sound better than they actually are.

Which is how I’m feeling about this idea that Christchurch should do what Auckland has just done and ban supermarkets and bottle stores from selling alcohol after 9 o’clock at night.

I don’t think it’s a good idea. Because I just don’t think it would make people buy less alcohol, they’d just buy it at different times if they couldn’t buy it after 9 o’clock.

And what about people who do buy alcohol at night and don’t cause any problems? Why should they be punished? So that’s where I’m at on this.

As an aside, I can’t actually remember the last time I bought alcohol after 9pm.

I buy alcohol just like a lot of other people, but I cannot remember buying it late at night from the supermarket or a bottle store.

Nevertheless, even though I probably wouldn’t personally be affected by a 9pm shutdown of booze sales in shops and supermarkets, I still can’t support the call that’s coming today from community board leader Paul McMahon.

Paul is the chairperson of the Waitai-Coastal-Burwood-Linwood Community Board, in Christchurch.

Now I’m not saying he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because, as well as being a community board member, he works in alcohol harm prevention. He’s a local advocate for alcohol reform.

He says about 75 percent of alcohol is purchased from off-licence premises. And he says, from his experience, most harm comes from alcohol purchased after 9pm - and, the later it gets, the worse it gets.

Now I would say that, generally, that’s the case with all alcohol consumption.

What’s that saying? “Nothing good ever happens after midnight”? It might even be earlier. But you get what I mean, the later people drink, the more likely they are to find themselves in trouble.

And so what Paul McMahon is saying today is that nothing good ever happens after 9pm, which is when he wants bottle stores and supermarkets to have to stop selling the beers and the wines and RTDs and the spirits.

On a practical level, I reckon most supermarkets in Christchurch are closed by 9 or 10, anyway. So why bother with a one-hour ban for the ones that stay open later than 9?

Christchurch city councillor Sam MacDonald is saying that he doesn’t think anything needs to be done with bars and restaurants, because he thinks they’re doing a pretty good job of keeping people under control, but he’s open to looking at tighter restrictions on off-licence alcohol sales.

The thing is though, is what is it exactly we’re trying to find an answer to? If it’s an answer to the problem of people drinking way more than they should and causing problems for themselves and trouble for other people, then I don’t think reducing the hours when bottle stores and supermarkets can sell alcohol is the answer.

Because, if people are going to get off their trolleys, they’ll do it. Irrespective of when the bottle store closes.

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