Help the Mangere community stop another lousy booze outlet

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There are times when there is only the option of street protest to change a disgraceful decision and this has come for the people of Mangere who are strongly opposed to yet another cheap booze outlet in their community – right across the road from a big local school – Southern Cross campus.

The decision to approve the outlet was made this week by the Auckland District Licensing Committee and it’s incomprehensible.

Why has community opposition been overruled in such a cavalier fashion by a trio of committee members who don’t live locally? They say the outlet has agreed not to sell alcohol between 3pm and 4pm each day as children leave the school. How pathetic is that? The local kids and their families will tell anyone that that will make no difference. The community doesn’t want another cheap booze outlet – full stop.

And just where have these well-paid, booze-approving people been in the last 10 years or so as strong community opposition has developed to the proliferation of alcohol outlets, pokie machines, loan sharks, fast-food joints, legal highs etc in low-income communities?

Opposition to these parasites on poverty has been led by local communities themselves who are sick of picking up the pieces from broken families. They are fightting back against National and Labour policies which have allowed them free rein to suck the lifeblood from whole areas of New Zealand.

Pokie machines reached their peak under Labour in 2003 when no less than 25,000 machines plundered communities. Community action since then has reduced these to under 20,000. It’s a start but still a long way to go.

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Labour refused to legislate against loan sharks during its nine long years in government despite the overwhelming evidence of their destructive impacts on families. National has promised to legislate but we are still waiting five years later. They don’t care.

The most important lesson in all this is that communities can’t rely on MPs or elected officials. They have to take action themselves and this is what is making the difference.

Where has any elected MP from a low-income community led the charge to close booze outlets, get rid of pokies, stop synthetic highs or close down loan sharking or oppose fast-food joints? Not a single one.

Communities have been on their own against these intrusions.

Last year the Mangere community under the leadership of ROCC (Respect our Community Campaign) fought and won an historic victory to stop Gerry Brownlee’s big motorway carving through the heart of their community.

It was a fantastic victory.

And remember it was grassroots community opposition around the country which got the ban on synthetic highs – not MPs.

It will be the same with this proposed new booze outlet outside Southern Cross campus.

The Mana Movement will be joining the Mangere community on Saturday morning to protest this decision. We hope Labour and the Greens will do the same.

See you all there on this Saturday at 10am on Wickman Way – across from Southern Cross campus.

It will be democracy in action when elected representatives have failed.

13 COMMENTS

  1. Well if the community does not want another cheap booze outlet then obviously they will have very few customers therefore they will go out of business, quite simple really. Unless that is you have evidence of members of that community being frog marched into a liquor store with a gun held to the head and have alcohol forced down their throats? Business does not force money out of people’s hand, only government does that.

    • Stephen, – you have no idea about the complexity of people’s decision making outcomes do you?

      It may seem simplistic to someone whose thinking is limited to a simple Rand equation, but it is not.

      This action is built on recognising vunerabilities, and the use of targeted business that provides detrimental services to the same. Communities seem to understand much more about the externalities carried by communities, families and individuals EVEN WHEN the business itself is successful, and in this case – the more successful the business – the more significant will be the adverse effects.

    • Next thing you will be saying that everybody can choose whether to buy coca cola and other fizzy drinks with its disgusting amount of sugar and obesity related problems. Tell that to a 13 year old kid. Every dairy is plastered with coca cola’s advertising and endless sporting events, not to mention Christmas in the park events has this as its sponsor. It is disgraceful and we need to stop it.

      Your take on people’s ‘choices’ as Molly says is very simplistic, you live in an ivory tower.

      • I actually live in the real world, deciding wether on not to go into a liquor store or any other business is an individual choice, it is not very hard. Nobody is forced against there will to purchase alcohol. You must be very weak and pathetic if can’t tell a 13 year old that they can’t have fizzy drink, maybe you should grow a spine?

        • If this real world you speak of exists with out propaganda – opps marketing, then please tell me. If advertising/propaganda didn’t work – why spend billions of dollars on it each and every day?

          Individualist ‘choice’ the mantra of the political pontificator, the lie of neo-liberalism, the rant of rand. Essentially, the same old bullshit spouted by white privilege, to make them feel better about being assholes.

          • Exactly.

            If it were all about individual choice then the advertising industry would not exist.

            Clearly peoples “choices” can be swayed by good advertising and marketing, and part of that is location location location of the sales point.

          • Marketing works because it informs potential consumers of a good or service. People who easily succumb to marketing and can’t exercise self restraint are weak willed people, like left wingers who want the state to nanny them, every body else to support them and are craven and sycophantic to big government.

            • I love when people make assumptions – you made an ass of yourself Stephen. Ask around I’m an anarchist, I don’t believe in big government or a nanny state. Nor have I ever advocated for either. But letting the corporations take the place of the state is FUBAR. It’s actually one of the most stupidest ideas that the individualist faction ever came up with – and they say a lot of bat crazy shit.

              So back to corporations…

              Big corporation, were our propaganda is for your own good. Big corporations were our propaganda makes you spout shit like the play ground bully and feel really good about yourself whilst doing it.

              Like the corporations give a rats ass about anything, except money. Running alongside this, the market is a failed mechanism and woolly thinking like yours Stephen just proves my point.

              • So this locally owned liquor store is now a “big corporation” ? That doesn’t leave much room for small corporations does it!

              • How has the market failed? If somebody wants to go to their local liquor shop to buy some alcohol, that is their choice. It is not up to you or I to stop them, it might be somebody who has a hard day at work, might be picking up the children at school and at home wants a nice cold beer to drink and unwind. Who are you to dictate to anybody else? I am not the bully as I am not doing anything to inhibit or get in anybody else’s way. People like you are the bullies as you put barriers up in people’s lives. Can you give me an example of where a corporation has forced money out of some bodies hand?

        • A bit silly, I said if a 13 year old goes into a dairy… I did not say accompanied by an adult!
          I have spine real spine, but as a 64 year old I also had a privileged up bringing in the land of plenty before the cake got sliced in favour of the 1%

  2. This booze outlet is selling drugs outside a school.

    The drug alcohol is pushed and targeted at our young via things like RTD’s and other cheap nasty strong lolly water.

    Alcohol is ‘crimenogenic’ which means increased consumption is DIRECTLY related to increased crime……. especially violent crime.

    Alcohol abuse and misuse costs our county hundreds of millions more in direct costs as opposed to what the government claws back in excise tax.

    This means tax payers are subsidizing the booze makers as they push their drug and rack up sales of $85 million …. per week.

    Good on Mana for standing up to these drug peddlers outside the friggin school gates.

    National is thick as thieves with the booze industry and puts their profits and kickbacks before the good of our country.

    Its a drug ……….. our number 1 drug.

  3. I don’t know if any of you people realize that the diary owner already has a licenses to sell alcohol. What he wants is the ability to make over a building adjacent and upstairs to his dairy into a full fledged liquor store.

    Given that fact that there are a number of liquor outlets in the nearby Mangere Town Centre which is about 1km away (less than 2 mins drive) this is a joke. This is not about marketing, big or little corporations, this is just about pure greed and the lack of the District Licensing Trust to have any sense whatsoever in allowing an outlet near sensitive areas such as Churches and Schools, both of which are opposite the site of the proposed outlet.

    I believe there would be howls of protest if a brothel was approved in the same location. However I bet it would have less adverse affects on the population and the community that a liquor outlet

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