Actually Democratic Conversation Around What Recreational Drug We Want Available Is The REAL NZ Value

Er … they want to do what? Potentially deport people for, among other things, not being in favour of recreational access to alcohol?

Now, before I continue, I should probably clarify that I was nowhere near this year’s NZ First Convention – so I am simply relying upon the several media pieces mentioning it. If this rather curious statement that the apparently sacrosanct legal availability of alcohol be declared an inviolable New Zealand value did *not* in fact take place, then I of course withdraw and apologize.

And with that out of the way … a brief lesson in history.

Opposition to the sale of alcohol, and campaigning against its manifest harms is, if not a “New Zealand value”, then certainly something which has been part and parcel of the New Zealand way of life since before there even *was* such a thing as New Zealand. Ever since Kororareka gained its unenviable sobriquet as the “Hellhole of the Pacific” in the early 1800s, there have been people here – migrants, mostly, but of British stock so presumably ‘they don’t count’ – who have been vigorously opposed to the easy availability of alcohol on these shores.

It was not simply a relic of our early-Colonial past, either. Laws introduced in the late 1800s gave the power over to the New Zealand voting public on an electorate by electorate basis to decide for their own communities whether they wanted alcohol sold there or not. A not insignificant number voted to go “dry” – and, as a point of interest, some (including my own (former) electorate of Eden, since incorporated into Epsom) did not get rid of their ‘dry’ status until just shy of a century later, in the late 1990s.

This set the stage for a ‘solidification’ of our national liquor licensing laws in the early 1900s – where, as a result of powerful support for the Temperance cause up and down the country, New Zealanders now gained the right to vote on whether to outlaw alcohol sale on a national level.

It may seem rather surprising to us now, but in the first referendum in 1911 a majority of voters – 55.8% – supported instituting prohibition here. It only didn’t pass due to the 60% threshold required for victory. Successive further referendums in each of April and December 1919, actually brought us even *closer* to prohibition – with 49% and 49.7% respectively, and a new lowered 50% threshold to win.

The former of these two referendums also gives us one of the ‘great stories’ of New Zealand politics – as initially, it had seemed that the Prohibition camp had won the vote … up until the ballots of thousands of military personnel still overseas due to the First World War arrived in the country and narrowly tipped the scales back towards ‘continuance’. (A situation not entirely unlike, funnily enough, the Green Party in some previous Elections nervously nail-biting waiting for Overseas Votes and Specials to eke them over the 5% threshold following Election Night)

Amidst a spate of other legislative measures designed to control or otherwise significantly curb the commercial consumption of alcohol (such as the much-maligned ‘early closing’ and accompanying ‘Six O’Clock Swill’; as well as the still in force legislation prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Easter etc., and the Portage Licensing regimen you currently see out West), the referendums continued right the way up until 1987; and while there had been a steady decline in the proportion of support for prohibition over the preceding few decades (albeit, a trend that was starting to show signs of reversal following the end of the 1960s), in the last-ever national referendum on the subject in that year, fully 20% of the vote was for prohibition.

Given the significant changes to our immigration system were only instituted starting in that very same year, it seems awfully unlikely that the one in five voters who opposed the recreational sale of alcohol were substantively immigrants. Although perhaps the suggestion is that even twenty percent of the population in opposition to something may not necessarily vitiate its stance as a “New Zealand value”.

But what is it, exactly, that makes the legal sale and consumption of alcohol a sacrosanct “New Zealand value”? Is it because it’s something we’ve always done? That doesn’t seem an especially good reason – not least because we kept nearly *not* allowing it to be done, either on a local or a national basis.

Is it because it’s something that we seem to do an awful lot of? This is, perhaps, closer to the mark; and you could certainly mount a compelling argument that drinking – often to deleterious excess – is a pretty embedded part of the dominant New Zealand culture.

Although if that is the case, might I point out that seriously high cannabis consumption rates are *also* therefore intrinsic to New Zealand? We regularly rank in the top countries in the world for it; and its broad-spanning prevalence and cultural salience (who remembers Jason’s Tinny House?) would surely qualify it as ‘important’ to our National Identity in a similar way to, presumably, the argument for alcohol to be so?

Yet I can’t quite put my finger on it, but for some reason I don’t think I’ll be seeing New Zealand First vigorously campaigning for (recreational) cannabis legalization, or threatening to deport people who oppose it, any time soon.

Indeed, the population-prevalence of something is occasionally cause for New Zealand First to move to legislate *against* it – as we have previously seen with the party’s calls to raise the drinking age back to 21, in an effort to combat underage drinking. Does this move to further restrict the availability of alcohol *also* violate “New Zealand values”?

Anyway, I’ve digressed.

To bring it back to this curious pronouncement allegedly from NZ First’s Convention, I do not wish to speculate too deeply about which migrant demographics the utterer may have had in mind when he or she suggested deportation as a deterrent against advocacy here for prohibition of alcohol.

But I’m not sure whether blocking the citizenship of Salvation Army members, or teetotaller Methodists, was *quite* what they had in mind.

On a personal note, I don’t drink. Not anymore, at any rate. I’ve concluded, as a result of occasionally regrettably voluminous youthful experimentation that,as a drug, alcohol is not for me. But, then, I’m not about to start vigorously campaigning to outlaw the consumption of alcohol for others – although I have occasionally suggested to people they may perhaps wish to take a look at how much they’re consuming and maybe ease off accordingly.

My Father, the Reverend Rolinson, also does not drink – although in his case, he has the additional reason to abstain of religious dictate (the Methodists, you see, famously avoiding alcohol as a ‘scourge of the working classes’ – to the point that they’ve replaced the communion wine with grape juice).

I recall him mentioning how, as a younger man, his choice not to drink lead to him being regarded as seriously ‘strange’ and with suspicion. Indeed, it caused implicit issues with his father in law [i.e. my maternal grandfather, who worked for many years at DB Breweries], who basically seemed to regard such a thing as downright unpatriotic. (I can somewhat empathize here – I don’t eat beef, also for religious reasons, and in an ecownomy like New Zealand, this can occasionally get regarded likewise)

The danger inherent in elevating the sale of alcohol to something approaching a constitutional right, is that it really does run the risk of marginalizing or even outright disenfranchising/deporting, apparently, not just those who are actually against the sale of alcohol nationwide (or, for that matter, in their own local communities) – but via a creeping implication, perhaps one day rendering ‘strangers in our own land’ (or at least, ‘conspicuously out of step with what it means to be a New Zealander, apparently’) those of us who just don’t drink, for whatever reason.

The Rev. Rolinson’s Father before him was in much the same category of alcohol-abstinence – both religiously, but also in no small measure as well due to having seen first hand the damage that alcoholism could do to a family and to a community, down in Bluff.

I cannot state for certain which way either of my Father or my Grandfather voted in the litany of previous national referendums on prohibition which we have had here in New Zealand, or whether either have ‘actively campaigned’ against alcohol-sale in the sense perhaps envisaged by the speaker referenced in the screencap above.

But the implication that, had they done so, that they would have been “attacking New Zealand values”, strikes me as a most worrisome one indeed.

And not least because it’s clearly manifestly a-historical hogwash; or because it would smack of almost Mccarthyist sentiment against men with demonstrable and stirling records of service unto nation (even while sober the whole time).

Opposition to the sale of alcohol has very much been a ‘homebrew’ movement here in New Zealand, for nearly two hundred years.

I am, once again, not seeking to change – myself, anyway … although I’m not quite sure where I’d be deported if I *were* – the fact that alcohol is legally available for purchase and ensuing recreational use here.

But if we *must* have a conversation around ‘New Zealand values’, which are to be declared inviolable and above any form of serious abrogation … I’d have thought that with the list starting at “Democracy”, this would automatically entail the right to have and to hold and to share a ‘political’ opinion, even on something as seemingly simple as “which recreational drugs do we wish to have legally available in this country”. Without necessarily affearing ejection from the country and the stripping of one’s citizenship for so doing.

Perhaps it is I who am ‘out of step’ with “New Zealand values”.