The minor issue of social supply

The Law Commission says its latest report proides government with a bluprint for reducing both the short - and long-term effects of alcohol misuse on society. The Commission's review has been comprehensive and its recommendations numerous at 153. It has encouraged the government to institute its recommendations a package, but how many will actually make it into law? Proposed changes to social supply laws, for example, are a little bit 'touch and go' - and for many, this is a concern.

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If implemented, the 153 recommendations in Alcohol in Our Lives: Curbing the Harm would amount to a sweeping and radical overhaul of New Zealand’s liquor laws.

Always with its finger on what it believes to be the nation’s pulse, the popular National government was initially quick to reassure ordinary New Zealanders who like a drink. Prime Minister John Key said he didn’t believe the public was in the mood for wholesale change, and the Commission’s report had barely been released before Justice Minister Simon Power said it was “extremely unlikely” the government would act on the proposal to raise the excise tax on alcohol.

One recommendation down; 152 to go.

While the government has indicated there will be legislative change in response to the report, it has been a little non-committal in the face of widespread calls for law reform from the public and from numerous health experts. When an organised coterie of 14 prominent New Zealanders, led by former Governor-General Sir Paul Reeves, publicly backed the Law Commission’s recommendations, Power said he would “respect their views along with the views of other New Zealanders”.

This guarded approach, and the probability that the alcohol industry is vigorously asserting itself behind the scenes, leaves one wondering just how many of the remaining recommendations have a chance.

The Law Commission’s suggested changes to social supply laws, for example, have received a mixed response from government.

On the one hand, Power told the New Zealand Herald, “This is a really delicate balance because National is not in the business of getting into people’s homes on issues like this and telling them how to run their lives.”

But later he told the Dominion Post he was having a “hard look” at present laws governing supply of alcohol to minors, especially in the light of media attention around after-ball parties for high school students.

This apparent softening of National’s non-interference stance will be welcomed by those who argue that, by failing to act on the Law Commission’s recommendations around social supply, the government would be failing to protect parents’ sole rights – in their own homes – to decide when and how their children are introduced to alcohol.

Under the current Sale of Liquor Act, it is an offence to purchase alcohol with the intent to supply it to a person under 18 years of age. Clearly, then, one can’t go into a bottle store and buy alcohol at the request of the under-age wags hanging around outside. But apart from a clearcut situation like that, what ‘intent to supply’ means becomes a little murky, and the Act fails to provide a definition.

Of course, there are exemptions: if the supplier is the parent or guardian of the minor or if the minor is attending a private social gathering. Again, the Act fails to define at what sorts of private social gatherings one can give minors alcohol. In fact, it fails to define private social gatherings at all.

Currently, there are no restrictions on supplying alcohol to minors at private functions, in private homes or on unlicensed premises. What that means is that anyone at all at any non-public ‘get-together’, such as a party or a sleepover, can give your child alcohol. As things stand, the right of parents to choose how their children are introduced to alcohol is poorly protected in law.

This is a tad troubling. The Ministry of Health’s Alcohol and Drug Use Survey 2007/08 reported that a majority of 16–17-year-olds say they have consumed large amounts of alcohol at someone else’s home; away from parents who, you would expect, would implement rules around drinking and help shape responsible attitudes towards alcohol in their children.

Surprisingly, however, it would appear that, for some parents, alcohol has become the new babysitter.

According to Paul Radich, a Liquor Licensing Inspector with the Manukau District Licensing Agency, parents acting as a restraining influence on their children’s drinking is no longer the norm.

He describes a series of recent events in Manukau involving large public gatherings of drunk 15–17-year-olds where, in 90 percent of cases, the kids were given the alcohol by their parents.At one recent event, up to 500 young people had gathered at a car park where Radich described the scene as absolute chaos, with fights and kids passing out in alcoholic stupors. Nevertheless, a steady stream of parents drove in and dropped their kids off with RTDs in hand.

At another, police had to close a street after an end-of-term party got completely out of hand. Again, there was violence including throwing bottles at Police cars.

“For some reason, we’ve got it into our heads as a society that this is now a ‘rite of passage’ for young people. Once you turn 16, you have the right to drink and get completely off your face in an uncontrolled environment,” he says.

He’d like to see the introduction of a legal drinking age, rather than just a purchasing age.

“If kids are going to drink, then they need to be that certain age – whatever parliament decides that age to be.”

Currently, it is an infringement offence for anyone under 18 to drink in public unless they are accompanied by a parent or guardian. The Law Commission is recommending that it should become a full offence for anyone under the age of 20 to drink or possess alcohol in a public place, even if accompanied by a parent or guardian.

This may remove some of the grey areas for authorities who have to deal with young people drinking in public and help force the problem back into the home – or at least out of the car parks.

One cannot write about social supply laws in New Zealand in 2010 without mentioning student after-ball parties. These have featured heavily in the news this year because the school ball season started just weeks after a 16-year-old King’s College student downed a bottle of vodka and subsequently died in his sleep.

A number of after-ball parties were shut down or cancelled after a Manukau District Licensing Authority and Police crackdown in Auckland. Their legality is questionable because they only loosely fit the definition of a private social gathering, and the fact that students pay to get in and then drink for free means they may technically be selling alcohol to minors.

A group of King’s College parents came under heavy fire in the media for attempting to organise a supervised after-ball party for the school’s students. To gain entry, kids under 18 would have had to front up with a parent. If over 18, a signed permission slip from parents would have been required.

It is not hard to understand what these people were thinking. Many parents are probably resigned to the fact their kids are going to go out and get trashed after their school ball and there’s little they can do to stop it. Surely it’s better to provide them with a venue where they can drink with supervising adults present, including bouncers to keep the gate crashers out and paramedics to revive the ones who managed not to be so well supervised. The alternative is to have them heading into town where all sorts of trouble awaits in the early hours of the morning.

But Radich says this sort of thinking is a mistake and that parents should not see after-balls, at which alcohol is served to minors, as the ‘lesser of two evils’.

“After-balls have been a real eye-opener for me. I didn’t understand the extent of the problem until I became involved with them over the last three years.”

He told the Howick and Pakuranga Times, “When you get a large group of people together, not just teenagers, who are consuming alcohol, the risk always increases in terms of those alcoholrelated harms. Students are at more risk with these after-balls. It’s a pointless argument to say, ‘Well, if we don’t get booze at after-balls, we’ll go to town’.”

He described a statement by two Auckland teenagers that having alcohol banned at their after-ball party had “crushed everybody’s dreams” as deeply worrying.

“It’s a real concern when underage kids feel it’s the end of their dreams if they’re denied alcohol. By organising parties for them where they can drink, we’re sending them all the wrong messages and reinforcing their belief that you can’t have a good time without alcohol.”

Auckland Mayor John Banks has also weighed in with similar sentiments. In a New Zealand Herald article, he wrote that organising after-balls with alcohol for students sends all the wrong signals around moderation and responsible parenting and that he couldn’t understand why kids need to be out drinking early in the morning.

Well, here’s why, perhaps.

Anna Kenna is a Kapiti Coast writer and mother to two daughters who have only recently left school.

She says parents have a real battle fighting the normalisation of alcohol to teenagers and that she’s blown away by the wide range of alcoholic products that seem to have been developed just for them.

“What says ‘normal’ to our kids more than a range of products all their own? There’s even pastel pink cranberry stuff that seems especially for the girls,” she says.

“On the one hand, we’re putting this stuff out there for them and then we’re turning around and trying to tell them not to drink too much. This sort of pressure wasn’t around when we were their age.”

She says it’s hard for parents to compete with the way alcohol is glamorised and describes a full page advertisement in a women’s magazine featuring a slim and seductive woman and associating a pre-mixed alcohol product with female empowerment.

“I immediately thought what a contrast this image is from the reality of where a lot of young girls who see it will end up – spread-eagled and unconscious on Courtenay Place, lying in their own vomit, or locked up in a police van. There’s a real contrast between the glamour and the reality for many young people who drink.

“Somehow we need to get the message out that drunkenness isn’t cool, but you feel helpless against the power of marketing. It’s so incredibly pervasive: magazines, television, the internet, alcohol-sponsored ads and events popping up on Facebook. Everywhere they look, alcohol is waved in front of them like some sort of ticket to a good time.

“How do we tell our kids this is wrong when we do the same thing? As adults, we speak with a forked tongue.”

Through its consultation with parents, principals and young people, the Law Commission has been made well aware of the extreme pressure there is on young people to drink. In May, Cate Brett, a Senior Researcher and Policy Adviser with the Law Commission, told the New Zealand Herald parents were looking to the law to help relieve this pressure and to re-establish some parameters around their kids’ use of alcohol.

The Law Commission is proposing a raft of changes to help address problematic youth drinking including raising the purchase age back to 20 and banning advertising that especially appeals to people under 20.

In terms of social supply, it is recommending “it become an offence for any person to supply alcohol to a minor on private property unless that person is the minor’s parent or guardian or is a responsible adult who has the approval of the minor’s parent or guardian.”

But it would also go one step further by requiring both parents and those to whom they give their approval to ensure alcohol is supplied in a responsible manner. Its proposed test for ‘responsible supply’ would include adequacy of adult supervision, quantity supplied, duration of supply, presence of intoxication and availability of food.

Such regulations would make it an offence for parents (or other authorised adults) to supply under-age high school students with alcohol at parties, including after-balls where there is not adequate supervision of its consumption. Anyone who supplied alcohol to under-age high school students would commit an offence unless they had the clear authority of each student’s parent or guardian.

Changes the Law Commission is proposing to licensing laws would clarify the illegality of after-ball parties. Attendees having to produce a ticket or voucher to gain entry would mean these were public events requiring a special licence.

Its proposals also address the concerns the Law Commission says it heard from parents who were angry about their inability to prevent other people supplying their child with alcohol without their permission and often with little or no adult supervision.

Parents may also find that stricter and clearer laws around supplying alcohol to minors would alleviate a lot of the pressure they feel from their children to supply them – or their friends – with alcohol.

There are three states in Australia that have introduced social supply laws akin to what the Law Commission is recommending here: New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania. Examining the differences in each state’s laws helps illustrate how important it will be for New Zealand to get its legal wording right.

Section 117 of the New South Wales Liquor Act states a person cannot sell or supply liquor to anyone under 18 years of age unless they are that person’s parent, guardian or spouse. There is, however, no requirement for that parent, guardian or spouse to supply the alcohol in a responsible manner and no clear definition of what constitutes a guardian. The regulation has been in force since 1982, but Sarah Jaggard, the Australian Drug Foundation’s Community Mobilisation Policy Officer, says not many people know about it, and no studies have been done into its effectiveness in preventing harm.

In Queensland and Tasmania, the introduction of social supply legislation has been more recent, with both states bringing in new regulations in 2009.

The Queensland Liquor Act requires that an adult not supply alcohol to a minor at a private place unless the adult is the “responsible adult for the minor”. As Jaggard points out, however, the law doesn’t address whether approval can be transferred to someone else by the responsible party. It would be reasonable to assume that any an adult who has formal charge over a young person on a specific occasion is acting in loco parentis. So when your child ‘stays over’ at the home of a friend, he or she is subject to supervision by the parent (or equivalent) of the friend and may be given alcohol by that person.

Queensland does have a second offence of irresponsible supply, which occurs when an adult, including a parent or guardian, does not ensure minors consume alcohol safely and in reasonable quantities.

Tasmania’s laws are similar but have the added requirement that a person supplying alcohol to a minor must also have the permission of the responsible adult.

The host of a private party would therefore have to gain prior approval from the responsible adult of each young person who attends the event before they could be supplied with alcohol. The approval may be in verbal, written or electronic in form, but the onus is on the host to ensure the approval is legitimate.

Jaggard says that, while these laws are too new for there to have been any significant studies into their effectiveness, the Tasmanian version is the best legislative model of the three, providing the greatest clarity in terms of how and by whom kids are introduced to alcohol. Clearly, New Zealand’s Law Commission would agree.

However, parents wanting a set of laws such as these to help protect their sole right to introduce their children to alcohol may face another dilemma – whether they should be doing so at all.

The Australian Drug Foundation recommends that not only should parents and their equivalents be required to introduce alcohol responsibly, they should also be required to do so in accordance with the guidelines of Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council. These guidelines say that, due to alcohol’s harmful effects upon the young, the best option for people under 18 is not to drink at all.

Jaggard says the idea that parents can prevent alcohol misuse and related problems in their children by teaching them to drink responsibly at home – the so-called European model – is popular but not well supported in reality.

“Recent evidence is pretty clear that drinking with your children in adolescence actually increases the likelihood that they will also drink outside the home.”

She cites a recent Dutch study of 428 families that found that teenagers who drank with their parents were at greater risk of developing alcohol-related problems including trouble with school work, missed school days and getting into fights with others.

A recent Australian study, which tracked young people and their drinking patterns from 14–21 years, showed drinking is linked to higher risks of alcohol-related problems in young adulthood, even when at low-risk levels.

“Of most concern,” she says, “is that the brain is likely to be more sensitive to damage from alcohol in childhood and adolescence as it is still developing – leading to learning difficulties, memory problems and reduced attention spans.” For Jaggard, there is an upside to these findings.

“This body of research now supports parents and other adults who don’t want to encourage under-age drinking and gives them concrete reasons to deny their children alcohol.”

But for many, this will only be one more cause for worry. Parents like Anna Kenna will tell you that encouraging your children not to drink is an uphill battle when alcohol is associated with sophistication and joy everywhere young people look. For 20 years, New Zealand has enjoyed some of the most liberal liquor laws in the world, and the moderation horse has long since bolted.

And if we have a significant number of parents who aren’t concerned about their kids’ drinking, or don’t yet understand that they should be – and it appears we do – then strengthening social supply laws will do little on its own.

But as Cate Brett says, while the law can’t stop people drinking harmfully by itself, it can help wake society up to the risks associated with alcohol, particularly for adolescents.

The Law Commission has warned each of its recommendations must be taken seriously for they will only be truly effective if implemented as a whole.

Its four recommendations around social supply may help curb some of the harms around youth drinking. Its hope is that the remaining 148 will help the rest of society take a long hard look at itself as well – and perhaps make a start on getting the genie back into the bottle.

• Rob Zorn is a Wellington-based writer.