...about the Wellington City Council’s efforts to “ban liquor consumption” in the city, but then I drank half a bottle of Rabbit Ranch’s Central Otago pinot noir. It was very nice indeed, but it has rather left me a little short on the word front.
There are three points that especially bug me around this, I guess:
- As Wellingtonista notes, this will most likely be open to abuse via “discretion”. I disagree with their proposed vector for abuse—I think it’s more likely to be “drinking while young” rather than “drinking while brown”, but the net effect will be the same. Near-middle-aged-me and my near-middle-aged friends will be able to quaff our favourite allegedly classy booze at picnics while our kids run riot in the Botannical Gardens. Twenty year olds will be getting a move-along with the threat of a night in the cells for doing exactly the same thing. This is the sort of thing that stinks on principle, and also undermines the police themselves.
- As they also note, there are ample, often very broad, easily enforcable laws about being drunk and a dickhead in a public place. Of course, they’re often ignored when it comes to socially sanctioned dickheadery (gigs, sports, etc), but it’s consistent with a trend of passing stupid, overbroad laws, usually explicitly intended to be used on “the youth” instead of enforcing existing ones.
- Finally, and this is one the Wellingtonista folks don’t have a hack at, but is the one that pisses me off the most, this doesn’t restrict “drinking in public” or “drunken behaviour” in Wellington one little bit. Is Cuba Mall private? Is Courtney Place private? Nope, but the council gives boozatoriums licenses to spill their shitfaced clientele all over these public spaces. And, of course, bars are all too happy to liquor patrons up and them kick them out when they become too much of a nuisance, leaving them to harass passers-by and make work for the cops later in the evening. If the council were serious about too much booze in the central city they might be asking why I can’t walk up Cuba Mall in the morning with my daughter without having to weave through winos propped up at pubs, puffing away and abusing random passers by for their entertainment. But, of course, those establishments have funnelled cash into the right pockets, unlike the aforementioned 20-somethings, so they’re Not Part Of The Problem.
(To add to my final point: in all the time I’ve lived in Wellington, I have yet—and I know I’m tempting fate by blogging this—yet to be bothered in the central city streets by aggressive drunks in any serious way; the near-punchups I’ve had to deal with have all happened in central city bars.)
