BOTTOM’S UP?  BOTTOMED OUT.

There’s a report released today that will have parents shaking their heads and saying ‘isn’t that shocking’ before reaching for a beer or a glass of wine for lunch or across the dinner table.

It’s about teenage drinking. Specifically binge-drinking. And it leads to a screamer of a shock! Horror! Headline on Page One of  the Herald Sun.  ‘Binge Toll” it says. ‘Alcohol kills one young Victorian every week’.

It says young Victorians are dying of alcohol-induced violence and accidents at the rate of one a week and more than half of the state’s 16 to 24-year-olds put themselves in danger through binge drinking every month.

Health Minister Bronwyn Pike is quoted as saying ‘this is a real wake-up call’. Which prompts the question: How long has she been asleep? This didn’t suddenly start last weekend.

Pike says “I guess we hadn’t realised how significant the rates of binge drinking are for young people now’. Doesn’t she watch the news, read the newspapers, check the drunken carnage on the roads? Hasn’t she heard of the ‘School is over’ underage drinking on the banks of the Yarra? The boozefest called Schoolie’s Week? The drunken fights on the Peninsular.

What do you expect? Football drunks are heroes. The West Coast Eagles could fill a drying out centre. In Melbourne a Carlton star player is involved in an altercation after an all night session with his team-mates. His excuse for being out that late? None of them were wearing a watch.  And what does Carlton do? They make Lance Whitnall captain.

I am not being a hypocritical wowser here. Many of these kids parents drank under-age. I did. And they drink and drive. And often they drink every day. And many of them, many of us, have drunk too much and made fools of themselves.

And sadly, some of those kids see what booze has done to their families through domestic violence and a father’s drunken rages and rantings.

People will wring their hands over this report and do a bit of tut-tutting but nothing will happen. Nobody is going to increase the drinking age to 21. Nobody is cracking down on under-age drinkers with false IDs. No liquor chain is losing its licence for selling booze to them.

And what hope is there when another weekend report about that nobly named Federal-Government funded organisation called DrinkWise. It’s independent directors are quitting because DrinkWise is also funded heavily by the alcohol industry and its representatives make up half of the 12-member board.

With teenage drinkers I go back to the parents and ask that simple corny but effective question: ‘It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?’

Monday, February 26, 2007

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2007