Alcohol

Can you hear a faint sort of teeth-grindy sound? No it’s not the rats in the roof gnawing the wires again, it’s just those thousands of lady drivers with the windows down as they motor past the bottle shop.

Even just four days into Febfast, the annual excruciating month of alcohol abstinence, the novelty will have well and truly worn off and we’re already down to the bare bones of resentment and “I know it’s for charity and all but what the feck was I thinking”.

All around Australia there are mild-mannered ladies cursing the leap year, too, as were it not for that stupid spare day, there would only be 24 grogless ones left. For many of us talented drinkers, when it comes to one’s consumption of alcohol there is the comfort of denial and “look over there, is that a rare orange-bellied parrot? (Yes waiter top me up)” for 11 months of the year, and then there is the long, hard look in the mirror that is horrendous February.

Continue reading "Working women need to escape the grog bog" »

Goodbye weekend, hello new working week. That’s just our way of saying happy Monday, Punchers! Did anyone overindulge this weekend? And by overindulge we mean, did anyone drink too much? Those who did might be interested in a big fat glass of Security Feel Better. What’s that, you ask?

It’s Europe’s latest hangover cure that promises results in just under 45 minutes. The French-made drink contains contained an “enzyme that helped break down alcohol in the liver five times faster than the body on its own.” 

The marketing company behind the product says it should only be used as a “hangover cure”. But we’re not so convinced. With such fast results, wouldn’t you be tempted to drink a little bit more, then take a big gulp of “Security” before driving home? Hmmmm.

To be or not to be truthful about Santa? This, for many concerned, Christmas-ing parents, is the question.

I’m always amazed at the number of fully grown humans who insist that the Santa lie preserves the “magic” and “innocence” of Christmas for children.

Ah, yes: a strangely attired man who obscures his identity with facial hair (and has a lap fetish and a naughtiness obsession) is about to break into your home via your chimney. How magic is that.

Continue reading "Plastered parents: Santa’s not the only festive fib" »

On cue, the league of self-appointed moral guardians is dutifully doing the rounds, making a lot of noise about Schoolies and the imminent decay of Good Society it will precipitate. They make arbitrary claims about what constitutes “fun” and play upon the tired moral panics over young girls, binge drinking and indiscriminate sex.

Why, they ask, must school-leavers celebrate the end of mandatory education by congregating near beaches and getting plastered? And why hasn’t someone – presumably the government – put a stop to all this and offered some more wholesome, healthier alternative for kids to let off steam?

Well, there are plenty of alternatives, none of them popular. Schoolies is a naturally developing phenomenon and nobody is forced to participate. Year after year, thousands of friendship groups independently make the decision to head north, or south as the case may be, and enjoy being away from home, with lots of booze and lots of sex.

Continue reading "Schoolies? Hell YEAH" »

It says a lot about Australia’s binge-drinking culture that an event such as Schoolies Week - where drunken violence, date rape and death by misadventure is relatively commonplace – is regarded as a routine rite of passage for young people who in most cases aren’t even old enough to drink legally.

I still have about eight years up my sleeve but as a parent I am dreading the day when my son or, especially, daughter comes to me and says: “Dad, can I go to Schoolies?”

It is a nightmarish scenario for parents. You want to strike a balance between making sure your kids are safe, but not wanting to keep them so swaddled in cotton wool that they become resentful and maladjusted introverts who miss the chance to socialise and have some fun at a landmark moment in their lives.

Continue reading "Schoolies? Yeah, pass" »

FARE is a small organisation with a dream. There is no denying that FARE has taken on a cause of epic proportions – a shape-shifting entity that is hard to define because its boundaries are constantly changing. Alcohol is a central part of Australian culture, and it crosses demographic, geographic and social divides in a way other cultural activities don’t.

Drinking alcohol is for the young and old, the high achievers and under achievers, the wealthy and the destitute. For most Australians, drinking alcohol is a choice that doesn’t devalue their lives. It is more likely to add entertainment, experiential or leisure value.

How do we view Australia’s drinking culture? Is it a glass half empty, or a glass half full?

Continue reading "Trust us, you’ll all drink less one day" »

Mineral water, sparkling wine, sauvignon banc, chardonnay or pinot noir. That was the dilemma I faced last Wednesday night as the guest of FARE, an independent and charitable foundation set up to ten years ago to help prevent the harmful use of alcohol in Australia. 

Don’t be afraid to have a drink tonight, urged our generous host. But while I sipped self-consciously on my mineral water I did start to wonder where this night would end up.

After all, as their slogan proudly says, FARE are committed to “changing the way we drink”.

Continue reading "Between boozer and wowser is a sensible drinker" »

Few Australians navigate their teen years without heaving their guts up after a massive drinking binge. With Schoolies Week almost upon us, the focus will no doubt turn to dangerous levels of alcohol consumption in youngsters. 

I hardly touch the stuff now but as a teenager, mainly to fit in with my friends, I smuggled cheap wine cask bladders into pubs and guzzled them.

The aftermath was never pretty, and luckily it didn’t take long for me to realise blacking out and throwing up were not much fun. I’ve basically been a teetotaller since my early 20s.

Continue reading "Don’t hop on the booze bus this summer" »

In one of the songs on his famous Graceland album Paul Simon uses the tongue-in-cheek line “why don’t we get together and call ourselves an institute?”. The anti-alcohol lobby is obviously a big fan because it appears to be using this as the basis for its PR strategy.

Any time members get together to peddle their message they call it a summit or a forum or something similar that will offer the media promise of serious discussion and new ideas. There have been three such events quite recently.

On September 6 they held a “panel discussion” (comprising a group of people who share their views) to add gravitas to a media conference calling for changes to wine tax.

Continue reading "Anti booze narks are whining themselves to death" »

Most young women are not lying in the gutter with vomit in their hair.  Nor are they starving themselves so they can drink more booze, sleeping with everyone they meet or stuffing endless amounts of cocaine up their nose.

But you’d be forgiven for thinking so if you’d read a newspaper over the past month.

Three articles in just as many weeks have painted an extraordinarily dark and reckless picture of young Aussie women.

Continue reading "Young women have not gone to the dogs" »

There’s an awful lot of hand-wringing these days over the binge drinking epidemic. Well, here’s a really obvious thought. Maybe all those teenagers and 20-somethings are only living up to the example we’ve set them on all kinds of fronts.

Think about it. Society today is full of bingers. We’re all bingers. We consume anything and everything in ever-increasing proportions, usually to the point of excess and often to the point of vulgarity.

Forget the obvious cases of food and booze for a minute. Take entertainment. Remember the days when you’d passively sit back and wait for your weekly instalment of TV drama? That is sooo 2005.

Continue reading "FOOI #13: Young drinkers aren’t the only bingers" »

In the first episode of Mad Men, the deliciously complicated American drama set in a fictitious advertising agency in the 1960s, “new girl” Peggy Olson goes to a doctor to get a prescription for the contraceptive pill.

Fresh out of secretarial college, wide-eyed and eager to fit into her new and sophisticated surroundings, Peggy is encouraged by her colleague Joan to see Dr Emerson, a swaggering and leery middle-aged, male doctor in standard issue white coat and stethoscope.

Poised at the end of the examination table, cigarette in hand, Emerson is suggestive and familiar; a pompous fountain of abrasive, misogynistic and downright creepy “advice” that goes something like this: “There’s nothing wrong with being practical about the possibility of sexual activity… at the same time, we have to make sure that it’s not going to turn you into a strumpet. But the fact is, even in our modern times easy women don’t find themselves husbands.”

Continue reading "Hey Scipione, don’t lecture us on sex and booze" »

When done properly, a celebrity endorsement can literally make a company. The most famous example is when then third string sportswear company Nike (behind Adidas and Converse) signed first year NBA player Michael Jordan in 1984.

Jordan had just been picked third in the NBA draft after centers Hakeem Olajuwon and Sam Bowie, but Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight really liked the free-scoring Jordan and courted him personally.

When Jordan signed, Nike’s stock price was below 60 cents. When he finished his first three-peat in 1993, Nike’s stock price was $8.80 and now the biggest sportswear company in the world. When Jordan announced that he was retiring from basketball a few months later, Nike stock sunk to $5.20 and when he sent out his famous two-word “I’m back” press release, Nike stock surged again.

Continue reading "It’s a working class sham" »

A moral panic is facing the City of Churches - a bar and lounge has opened in the CBD and its patrons are that most frightening subset of youth culture – the Gamer.

The opening of the Pimp Pad Gamers Bar and Lounge next to Eynesbury Senior College, smack-bang in the centre of down-town Adelaide, has provoked the far too oft-heard wowsers clarion call ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ to be trumpeted by long-time Adelaide City Councillor, Ann Moran.

The fun police troopers are heeding the call and assembling their forces to clamp down hard on the Gamers venue, staunchly opposing its liquor license. Fuelled by Councillor Moran’s claims that an adult entertainment venue next door to a senior high school will act as a ‘honey trap for kids’. Portrayals of violent and sex-crazed patrons in a venue of sleaze and strippers’ poles abound.

Continue reading "Pimp.tv: Moral panic in the City of Churches" »

One of the many life lessons we have been taught by former South Australian treasurer Kevin Foley is that it is best to wear a disguise when buying hotpants for your girlfriend.

Earlier this year it was reported that Foley had bought some raunchy undergarments for his sheila du jour from an Adelaide boutique on his return from an overseas trip. The story emerged from the store where he made the purchase, proving that the bums who were happy to take the bloke’s money were equally happy to get straight on the telephone to a gossip columnist to peddle their invasive little story.

Despite being a very good treasurer and a likeable if flawed human being, it appears to be Kevin Foley’s lot in life that no form of ridicule or no level of rumour-mongering is off limits. His treatment by the public, sections of the media and his political opponents following his assault outside an Adelaide bar, even at the noteworthy hour of 4am, is something which we should reflect on now that the truth has emerged following the guilty plea by his assailant in the Magistrates Court this week.

Continue reading "One politician we’re all happy to belt around" »

Cider, the drink of choice for ‘70s uni students, is enjoying a resurgence, reports The Courier Mail.

Women and Gen Y men (some of you might call them the same thing, hardy har-har) as well as an increasing number of baby-boomers are jumping on the it’s-not-beer bandwagon. Booze mega-store Dan Murphys is said to be doubling its cider sales every year.

It’s Wednesday. It’s a bit too early in the week to be getting stuck into cider. It’s a bit too sweet for my taste anyway. But do you ever drink the stuff? And what else is on your mind?

So Todd Carney will still be a Sydney Rooster, despite about 183 indiscretions this year. In other unsurprising news, Bondi Beach has waves and airheads.

Carney is the troubled playmaker who last year won the NRL’s highest honour, the Dally M Medal. He won that award, and steered the Roosters from the wooden spoon to the grand final in his first year at the club, after a year out of the NRL due to numerous alcohol-related indiscretions.

Carney spent 2009 playing park footy at the Atherton Roosters in north Queensland. He lived and worked in a pub, which might sound crazy, but in truth it had the effect of rubbing a puppy’s nose in its own poo. For the first time, he saw drunks through sober eyes, and he said it was a genuine shock.

Continue reading "Roosters lash their star idiot with a feather – again" »

As the bingo wings kick in and the skin starts to thin and once-vibrant veins start to turn varicose, it’s easy to romanticise youth. When we were all beautiful and effortlessly thin and full of energy.

To muster the requisite morale to swing my creaky knees out of bed in the morning I sometimes have to remind myself that it wasn’t all spring and vim, that youth business. Being young meant being poor. Walking two miles to uni in second-hand, too-big Doc Martens with homemade Posca designs. And hoping for an entry-level position that paid marginally higher than the dole.

Not today, though, oh no. Now the trendy yoof are apparently snorting mountains of cocaine! Cocaine!

Continue reading "When I was young we couldn’t even afford cocaine" »

They’re calling it treason. Because it is.

Legendary Australian cricketer and beer drinker David Boon, who reportedly sank 52 cans en route to England in 1989, is now a whisky drinker. That’s like the Marlboro Man switching to Alpine Lights.

News of Boon’s starring role in a Canadian Club whisky ad broke yesterday amid much hullabaloo and flannelette shirt-rending, which is pretty much exactly the reaction Canadian Club would have been hoping for.

Continue reading "A hard earned thirst needs a big cold whisky" »

Alcohol. The anti-alcohol lobby say just one drink increases your risk of cancer, and news yesterday was that cigarette-warning-style labels will start appearing on bottles of booze. The social costs of alcohol are often cited as an additional reason to crack down on it. Here, Dr Eric Crampton casts a sceptical eye over how that social cost is measured.

If I told you that surfing cost the Australian economy a billion dollars and that we consequently should make life jackets compulsory, you could be forgiven for thinking that the number represented some real cost to the community; perhaps the cost of rescuing surfers caught in rips or medical care for those injured in accidents.

But if you found out that the vast majority of that figure was the combination of surfers’ expenditures on their boards and the costs of holidays they took heading up to Yallingup, you might think twice about endorsing the policy recommendation. And you might wonder a bit why anybody would have thought those costs could matter for policy.

Continue reading "Don’t base policy on crapulous alcohol statistics" »

In sobering news just to hand, the anti-alcohol lobby has descended on Canberra this chilly morning. They bring an abstemious message: Every drink is doing you damage. According to the National Alliance for Action on Alcohol, there is no safe amount of boozing – one drink can increase your risk of cancer.

The NAAA (say it out loud, you’ll get the gist) wants to price alcohol out of the reach of ordinary mortals, ensuring carrot juice with wheatgerm shots becomes the drink of choice of middle Australia. They want restrictions and warnings on alcohol packaging similar to those on tobacco. This is a message that needs to be clinically and soberly assessed and challenged.

This is not a Nanny State rant, more an attempt by us to set the record shtraight. Alcohol is not pure evil.

Continue reading "Why teetotalling wowsers make me really pissed" »

Welcome to this week’s I Call Bullshit. One of the most stupid things I’ve ever done was to tell my boss exactly what I thought – after a bottle or three of shiraz. Was I obnoxious, insulting, and unprofessional? Undoubtedly. Did I mean what I said? Well, yeah, I did.

That twee-moustachioed, pint-sized fashion designer, John Galliano, has blamed drugs and booze for a 45 minute tirade in which he maintains a barely controlled wobble while declaring his love for Hitler, saying to a couple of chicks he thought were Jewish:

People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f****ng gassed.

Continue reading "ICB: Truth serum - is the veritas in the vino?" »

It can make you paranoid and irrational, prone to making stupid decisions with bad consequences, and can ultimately cause serious harm. Yes, it’s the moral panic over drugs.  The latest burning issue is synthetic dope.

Kronic (or Puff, or Voodoo, or Kaos) was happily crossing the counter of many a hippie herbal high store until the mining industry realised its employees were using it to rort their drug testing systems. Often sold as incense, it’s made from herbs sprayed with chemicals that mimic the effects of marijuana.

WA quickly moved to ban Kronic, so people in possession now face fines of up to $100,000 or 25 years in jail. Victoria is planning to follow suit. Then South Australian pollies, with a burst of speed so surprising it makes one suspect performance enhancement, managed to prohibit the drug the very day after The Advertiser published doctors’ calls to make it illegal.

Continue reading "Synthetic marijuana: Don’t believe the Kronic hype" »

Last week Penbo railed against Cancer Council advice that drinking any alcohol at all was a cancer risk. The Cancer Council responded, saying they were just relaying the science. Now, winemakers have their say.

Many of the posts in response to the article by the Cancer Council Australia’s chief lobbyist Paul Grogan picked up the basic flaw in his argument, but as winemakers are one of the targets of CCA’s latest media flurry I would like to add my two cents’ worth.

Grogan’s defensive cries that they “don’t make this stuff up”, but that is not what people are accusing them of. The Winemakers’ Federation of Australia acknowledges that a link has been found between alcohol and a level of cancer risk, just as there is a link between numerous other activities in life and cancer risk. That is not new news, despite recent headlines.

Continue reading "Debate about alcohol has turned cancerous" »

When Cancer Council Australia published its recent estimate of the number of cancer cases in Australia linked to alcohol consumption, we didn’t expect the message to be popular.

But we have a responsibility to provide independent, evidence-based information about cancer risk, enabling Australians to make informed choices.

Many people may not want to know that something as popular as alcohol consumption increases their cancer risk – but that’s what the evidence says. And we believe everyone has a right to know about that evidence, whether it’s a “good news” story or not.

Continue reading "We don’t make stuff up, alcohol is a proven killer" »

According to new research, by the year 2090 the principle cause of death in Australia will be boredom.

The cumulative effect of ten decades of social engineering will have turned us into a nation of risk-averse robots who enjoy brisk walks and pepitas and have never done anything foolish or dangerous.

We will be so permanently alive that we will wish we were dead. The days will merge into one, free of fortnightly hangovers, monthly food binges and occasional days spent entirely on the couch, nothing but clear-eyed wellness and crisp outside air.

Continue reading "Every teat-pipette of alcohol is doing you damage" »

Koreans make it salty, Mexicans like it spicy and Thais do an easily-digestible, boiled rice-style soup.

The British inhale beans on toast, a full English breakfast (hold the sausage, thanks) or a deliciously greasy bacon buttie;  the Turks, a generous plate of organ meat. Organ meat? Yes, really, organ meat.

Personally, it’s a toss up between peanut butter on toast, or a packet of plain Smiths crinkle cut chips. It must be crinkle cut. All washed down with a gallon of soda water and several peppermint teas.  Coffee is an absolute no, no and hair of the dog is acceptable from about midday.

We’ve shared a few more of our faves below. Please add yours in too. There are mornings when we’ll need to try them, believe us!

Continue reading "Pass the bacon milkshake: our foolproof hangover cures" »

It was when the Captain Matchbox Whoopie Band let fly with its dated fart joke interlude that I started thinking about drinking. Overcome by nostalgia, I went to see the Captain and his mates (they had amused many of us back in the 70s) in a far-flung tent at this year’s Byron Bay Bluesfest, which is now held on an old Tea Tree farm at Tyagarah near Mullumbimby.

It had been a very good Bluesfest, although a few standout disappointments (a clearly past it B.B. King, a headed towards past it Blind Boys of Alabama and Bob Dylan and his band sounding like week-old soup) took some shine off the event. But there was enough really great music – hunt down Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and his band, Avenue Orleans for starters – to make the five day a revelation and confirmation of the power of music.

Back to drinking. Sad Song Junkie, a new album by Boston singer-songwriter Dan Baker is a delight, bringing together a superb collection of tunes, including a love song to the martini – “When I was young/Just a boy/I’d eat my cereal/Juts for the toy/Not much has changed/For my little treat’s the olive/Way down at the bottom/Of my favourite drink”. It’s such a louche, sweet surrender that I found it hard to stop playing it, despite the power and beauty of the other sad and sorry songs.

Drinking has been a constant theme of song writing, sitting proudly next to love, lust and loss. So, with this new entrant at hand, let’s dive in and nominate the top 25 drinking/drunk songs.

25: Little Old Wine Drinker, Me by Dean Martin is for the devotee of wine (“I’m praying for rain in California/So the grapes can grow and they can make more wine”) by a man with a big reputation as a drinking enthusiast – helped no doubt by his vanity number plate DRUNKY. Martin also had a fabulous crooning voice.

Continue reading "Here’s to drinking songs, they’re true blue…" »

So the ACCC has allowed another acquisition that over time will be detrimental to competition and consumers.

If you were not otherwise distracted by the upcoming extended long Easter/ANZAC day weekend, you would have noticed that last Thursday the ACCC put out a media release stating that it will not be opposing the Woolworths acquisition of the Cellarmasters Liquor Group.

Now apart from sending out the release just before a long weekend where for obvious reasons less media attention would be given to the ACCC failure to act, the ACCC’s decision not to oppose the Woolworths acquisition is not surprising. In fact, the ACCC only opposes a tiny number of mergers and acquisitions under our existing competition laws.

Continue reading "Woolworths the fresh booze people" »

VB doesn’t strike you as a brand that needs protecting from being viewed as overtly cheap piss. This isn’t to bag VB, but there’s probably a reason it chose David Boon and not David Marr as a mascot.

News yesterday that Foster’s stopped supply of its beers to Coles and Woolworths for a short period this month, after it emerged the warring retail giants were planning to sell VB (and possibly other brands) for as low $28 a case. Carlton & United, Foster’s beer division, have said that they stopped supply to the supermarkets out of fear their beer brands were being undervalued; according to CUB it was done to protect “the brand equity – the image of our brands”.

Now you might be asking yourself how it’s possible to undervalue the Australian gold standard of cheap beer? Well you can, and it’s got something to do with the amount of beer we’re drinking - or more accurately, not drinking.

Continue reading "When a hard earned thirst needs a big cheap beer" »

Stoners Australia-wide may have got excited by the idea that the Government is considering legalising dope cookies, but most people realised they were not going to get a Home Brand high.

Food Standards Australia and New Zealand is looking at whether ‘hemp foods’ should become part of the national diet. They’d have negligible amounts of THC, but plenty of other good stuff. Like boring old protein, Omega 3s and dietary fibre.

But Andrew Southcott, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Parliamentary Healthcare, immediately touched base with his inner wowser.

Continue reading "Oh Mr Southcott - what a dope!" »

A mate of mine went to the Big Day Out in Adelaide on Friday. It was a regular kind of day – plenty of good music, a few beers, just the one brawl where a young guy was king-hit from behind and left lying unconscious on the bitumen, his motionless head propped up with a bundle of T-shirts as his friends waited for medical staff to arrive.

The organisers and media declared the day “relatively incident-free”. And so it was, in a relative sense, as in Australia these days there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about someone being knocked out cold, being left with a permanent brain injury or even being killed, in a random fight with a stranger.

I spoke to my mate yesterday and he said he was so rattled by what he saw that he decided not to go out for beers with his friends on the weekend. He didn’t feel like drinking and he couldn’t stop thinking about the guy who’d been knocked out, and checked the papers that morning in vain for any reference to the incident. There was none.

Continue reading "A tale of two punches" »

I have a terrible drug and alcohol problem. For decades now, it has resulted in shame, lies and the devastation (or, at least, slight irritation) of my loved ones.

No, I don’t have an exciting, out-of-control addiction a la Christopher in The Sopranos or Nurse Jackie in Nurse Jackie.

My drug and alcohol issue is actually that I’ve never much liked taking them.

Continue reading "Sometimes, abstinence is the biggest taboo" »

I would like to propose a toast.

Here’s to the jerks that stabbed a Sydney bouncer in the neck and the partygoers who bashed four police who were just trying to do their jobs.

Here’s to the arsehole back in 2005 that chipped my tooth and broke my hand while I was out trying to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

Continue reading "Drunken idiots: here’s a toast to the douchebags" »

On a simple buzz-for-bucks basis, booze on sale at the wildly popular Summafieldayze festival is the most expensive drug on the Australian market.

Single cans of mid-strength Smirnoff vodka and lemonade were going for the ridiculous sum of $10.50; a captive market of 30,000 punters (each shelling out $140 for a ticket) was caught in the net.

For the cost of three or four festival drinks and a couple of phone calls, any half-connected ticketholder could instead score himself a measure of illicit drugs sure to get them far closer to “the happy place” place than a few pre-mixed cans ever could.

Continue reading "Festival booze: Australia’s most expensive drug" »

This Christmas do yourself, your friends, your colleagues and your family a favour – don’t tweet drunk!

With 2.5 million Australians now using Twitter, the fastest growing social networking site, the ability to embarrass yourself is only a click away.

Over 85 per cent of Twitter usage is via mobile devices such as iPhones and Blackberries. In turn, most tweets are done on the run, in public and often in a hurry.

Unlike drunk texting, which is one-to-one, tweeting is one-to-many, with your indiscriminate remark about your inappropriate boss now potentially going to hundreds. Worse still, despite the anonymity that Twitter allows through profiles, you may be being ‘followed’ by an ex flame, an unfriendly colleague and even your creepy uncle.

Continue reading "If you’re over 0.05 step away from the Twitter machine" »

There was a single sentence in the news coverage of this weekend’s Byron Bay schoolies brawl which was buried at the bottom of the story, but could have been a story in its own right. “The schoolies congregated in the park because the lines to get into Byron’s four main pubs and clubs were 100m-plus long.”

The decision to get drunk and act like a jerk is a personal decision. But without excising personal responsibility from the debate, it is also worth examining the environment in which young people make the sort of choices which end up with them sleeping in their own spew in a park, sleeping with someone for the first time while bordering on comatose, sleeping in a police cell because they’ve punched someone for looking at them the wrong way.

It’s an environment which has been created by adults who have a massive commercial interest in Australia’s youth drinking culture.

Continue reading "Doling out drinks to the 100m long queue" »

There are several truths about the ritual of the Friday night drink.

They’ll never make you healthy or help you stick to your holiday or household budget, you’ll always stay later than you say you will and you’ll never, ever, just have one.

And if you’re not among those lucky handful of people whose employer wheels out a trolley of drinks at 5pm every Friday afternoon, then you’ll join the thirsty pilgrimage of office workers making a beeline to the nearest local for a “quiet” drink to kiss the week goodbye. Unless that is, you live in Sydney.

Continue reading "Ten reasons pubs will always be better than bars" »

It is not the done thing for one reporter to quote vast slabs of another reporter’s work. There’s one’s own ego to think of, not to mention copyright.

But Darwin ABC’s morning presenter, Julia Christensen, has given her blessing to The Punch to reproduce great slabs of her interview with the Country Liberals’ member for Port Darwin, John Elferink, conducted on local radio yesterday morning.

We do this as a public service. Chances are that never in your life will you have heard such a bizarre set of admissions from a public figure. Unless you were listening when the Elf, as he is known up here in the Northern Territory, last turned up on radio.

Continue reading "An extraordinary story about personal responsibility" »

When “they” finally get around to writing the how-to-be-an-adult guide book it must include a chapter on how to be a good friend because it’s fast becoming the first casualty of being a “grown-up”.

I’m not talking about how impossible it is to see anyone that a) you don’t live with or b) you don’t work with anymore or how challenging it can be to make friends when you move to a new place or suffer through a divorce or break-up; but what happens when you hit a certain age and so many of us decide that it’s OK to just stop caring about each other anymore.

Continue reading "Why’s it so hard to be an adult and a good friend?" »

Growing up we used to call it the “Cadbury” – just one glass and a half of an alcoholic beverage and you’d be gone, but now science has an explanation for why some people get drunk faster than others.

And just like good looks, great hair and natural sporting ability, it seems being good at drinking is something you’re born with.

Continue reading "Hiccup … have you got the tipsy gene?" »

The Lindsay Lohan story is not a cautionary tale about sexuality: to present the media coverage which has surrounded Lohan’s sentencing to 90 days behind bars as an example of flagrant misogyny is a misreading of the cultural mores underlying this particularly sad episode.

This story is really about the economy of fame, the paparazzi and media consumption; not about a male/female double standard that harks back to first year Gender Studies.

The reporting of Lohan’s legal travails cannot be read as simply being the crucifixion of a young woman who dares flout conventional female norms of propriety and hem lines. The entertainment industry has been built, since movies were black and white and daring swimsuits went to the knee, on young creatures who transgress fairly standard bounds of decency and behaviour.

Continue reading "The rise of the hot mess" »

Am I the only one a little queasy over the underlying public gloat at the jailing of master criminal Lindsay Lohan?

There it is, just beneath the surface – unspoken and insidious. It’s the patriarchal desire to see a wanton woman tamed.

Disagree? Replay the Lohan case with buttoned-down Katie Holmes in the dock and picture the reaction. See what I mean? But a boozing bisexual rootrat with a spoiled tabloid reputation and cash in the bank must be brought to heel.

Continue reading "Lohan stitched up by patriarchal virgin worship" »

The simple act of having a quiet beer with friends, or even a slightly loud one, has now become a fraught operation.

Not that long ago you could ring a mate with confidence and suggest a relaxed catch-up in a licensed setting. Now you have to check the calendar to make sure it isn’t Dry July or Febfast or Ocsober or Just Say No-vember, and that your once-entertaining companion hasn’t signed on for a month of sobriety to raise money for kiddies who are suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome.

As the kiddies themselves might say, bollocks to that.

Continue reading "Driven to drink by Dry July" »

In the video over the jump, as the judge orders a prison term, Lindsay Lohan appears to mouth the words “She’s jailing me?” to her lawyer and then the lip goes a-quiver in disbelief.

What did Lohan think was going to happen when she had a drink while wearing a court-ordered alcohol monitoring bracelet? A bracelet which, if you remember, she was ordered to wear after breaching probation - on charges of drink-driving and cocaine possession.

Surely she couldn’t have thought the judge would roll with another story like she told in May when she failed to turn up for a court appearance, which was basically that she had been stuck in France because a dog at the Cannes Film Festival ate her passport.

Continue reading "Yes Lilo, jail tends to follow violations of court orders" »

Gaining a reputation as a successful host is about to get even easier.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States have discovered that when it comes to impressing dinner guests, it’s not the quality of wine on your table but the type of label on the bottle that has the most impact. 

“Forget bouquet, the colour and the aromas,” said Adam Sage in today’s Australian, “The American Association of Wine Economists, [suggest] smart vintners should spend more time designing labels than pressing grapes.”

And while that’s great news for anyone who harbours a secret collection of clean skins in their pantry, before you rush home with some masking tape and a pair of scissors, you might also want to consider what type of label works best.

Sage advises consumers steer clear of any bottle of wine that bears an animal on its label or describes its contents as “fruity” or “good with chicken and steak”.

While the best choices are found in bottles displaying abstract art or landscape designs that use more “highbrow terms” like “elegant”, “supple” or “intense” in their descriptions.

Cheers!

Around a third of Australian road fatalities are the direct result of drink-driving. Add to that the millions of random breath tests that occur across the country every year and you’re looking at some fairly good reasons not to drink-drive.

Not that you’d know that from the statistics; the percentage of alcohol-fuelled road fatalities has remained constant in the past two decades. In fact, our collective apathy toward the separation of alcohol consumption and motor vehicle control is so great as to warrant its own show on the Nine Network.

Premiering last Sunday, RBT is Nine’s attempt at discouraging drink-driving or, depending on your point of view, an attempt to capitalise on the inability of Australian drivers to understand that driving home after six beers is probably a bad idea.

Continue reading "When you watch RBT you better be drunk" »

It’s customary to denounce government ministers for being ineffective but for something different today I’m going to attack the Health Minister Nicole Roxon for being far too effective.

More so than any other frontbencher in this government Roxon appears to have got her way on pretty much everything and, as a result, life has becoming increasingly more irritating for those of us who choose to treat our bodies like a science experiment.

Early last year, when cigarettes cost a paltry $12 a packet, as opposed to the new price of $286 a packet, I had the pleasure of bumping into Ms Roxon in the gardens outside the House of Representatives chamber at Federal Parliament, where I happened to be stubbing out a cigarette in the ashtray. “You don’t have to put that out because of me,” she joked, although there was a vaguely maniacal glint in her eye, as if she was going to finish the sentence by saying: “Yet.”

Continue reading "Roxon, you don’t have to put on the red light" »

Our national enthusiasm for deifying and excusing flawed sports stars was demonstrated again this week with Ben Cousins being afforded hero status for manfully accepting a one-week ban over his role in a fracas with a group of Richmond teammates at a Sydney hotel last weekend.

The discussion surrounding the incident – in which Cousins’ role was very limited and, up to a point, defensible – reveals a major problem with the way this troubled footballing champion’s battle with drugs and alcohol is being addressed.

It is this – the people who are ostensibly supporting Cousins still seem more worried about keeping him on the park, than keeping him away from the very environment which could drag him back into the world of drug abuse.

Continue reading "A footy club is the worst possible place for Cousins" »

Police officers are called a lot of names, but when the NSW Premier Kristina Keneally this week called us ‘wowsers’ for launching a campaign to close pubs at 3am, we were left scratching our heads.

Maybe something got lost in the translation to ocker for our Premier, but according to my research

  the term originally referred to annoying and disruptive people – the sort of people an alcohol lock-out would attempt to manage.

In more recent times, the term evolved to refer to the ‘pious’, a fair description of the hotel lobby who seems to run NSW, who (with a straight face) attempted to argue that thousands of jobs would be lost
if people were told to go home before the sun comes up.

Continue reading "Who are you calling a wowser Kristina" »

During the last six months I’ve had to stop drinking. Pregnancy and alcohol are a “no-no,” and I haven’t felt like it anyway.

Enforced “dryness” has been interesting. It’s made me think twice about who I want to socialise with and also made me reflect on the drinking habits I’ve established over the last few years.

When you’re not drinking and hanging out with people who are, and “getting on it,” the scene quickly becomes intensely boring.

Continue reading "I’m pregnant, sober, and seeing booze in a new light" »

Food producers love a good study, particularly one that finds that some ingredient or trace element in their product has some miraculous property found to cure cancer in rats.

Such studies are guaranteed to make headlines around the world and lead to an aura being cast over their product. The wine industry in particular is the master of the self-serving study, with red wine being attributed all sorts of miraculous properties that should see it treated like the waters at Lourdes.

The chocolate industry has also discovered the value of good publicity and the media has recently reported chocolate manufacturing giants Mars and Barry Callebaut AG have announced a cross-industry partnership to promote the health benefits of cocoa flavanols.

Continue reading "Beer and red wine can cure everything, except cirrhosis" »

Dear Mr Rudd, can I just say this that while there are no silver bullets to the problem could you take some decisive action, when it comes to your use of cliché; as working families would prefer you take whatever action is necessary to end your use of the phrase “course of action”? 

Phew – the top seven Rudd clichés all in one sentence. I think I might just need a drink, in due season…

As parliament resumes today, The Punch decided it might be worthwhile to use the Parliamentary Hansard take a look at Prime Minister’s favourite parliamentary clichés of 2009.

Continue reading "Introducing the Kevin Rudd cliché drinking game" »

It was around 11 in the morning and Aunty Mavis came to the door. It had been raining: her wig was askew and her badly drawn on eyebrows were running down into her eyes. As usual, she had a bottle of Stone’s Green Ginger wine in a string bag.

It was just before lunchtime and my sisters and I were sitting around the Formica table in my grandparents’ kitchen shelling peas onto newspaper, preparing for a baked dinner. She came in and was drinking with Nanna who was peeling potatoes in the sink. Grandad was out the back, drunk, listening to the races.

Continue reading "If alcohol is no big deal, go without it for a month" »

It’s the kind of thing that would get you pelted with stones in the town square in less civilised countries. So as a celebration of our freedoms I’ll say it. Australia Day is a load of rubbish.

And it is increasingly celebrating the worst aspects of our national character, where rather than being a day for thoughtful reflection on our history and our values, it’s starting to look more a half-witted contest to see how much meat you can eat and how much grog you can sink.

This isn’t a wowser’s warning against barbecues and beer. Far from it. I’m a keen supporter of binge-drinking, I’ve never met a meat product I didn’t adore, and I think the likes of NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione and federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon should quit their day jobs and seek formal employment as nannies, such is their enthusiasm for treating adults like babies and criminalising fun.

Continue reading "Why Australia Day is rubbish" »

That’s it. We’ve arrived at what is officially termed the Dizzy Limit.

NSW Police, warming to their recent self-appointment as a freelance social policy think tank, trustee of public morality and holy rolling temperance society, have announced that Australia Day should be as dry as the Nullarbor Plain. Starting now.

They have reasonable cause. Shockingly, some people treat such occasions as an opportunity to get on the squirt and a small minority of those consequently get stupid and some proportion of those play up and a fraction of those become violent and commit felonies.

Continue reading "Sorry officer, but I’m drinking for Australia" »

Impartiality is everything in journalism but at the risk of sounding slightly biased it’s fair to say that if the NSW Government were a dog you would take it down to the bottom of the yard and shoot it.

Discussing the innate and irreversible badness of the NSW Government is about the most banal thing you can do these days. If anything this may be its most evil legacy – the cruelling of casual political discussion.

It’s like the inspired Gary Larson cartoon featuring nerds in hell - “Hot enough for ya?” – where remarking that NSW seems to be in political strife is as profound and insightful as noting that Germany has a bit of a chequered history, the Cuban economy could probably be doing better, or that Afghanistan has historically under-invested in infrastructure.

Continue reading "Moral lectures from the ethically challenged" »

How times change. When I started working in an office a little over 20 years ago, you could still smoke at your desk. In fact, when you were shown the stationary cabinet on your first day in a new job you could kit yourself out with a stapler and sticky-tape dispenser as well as an ashtray.

In those days, ‘smoking or non-smoking?’ was an everyday question when checking in for an airline flight’, you watched the Benson & Hedges World Series Cup over summer and the Winfield Cup over winter and the back cover of almost every women’s magazine carried an ad featuring an attractive blonde, a beach, acres of cheesecloth and a packet Alpine.

At about the same time blokes would go to the beach in the middle of the day, shirtless and hatless, while women would lay for hours baking themselves to a golden brown while occasionally basting themselves with coconut oil. Sun protection was not standard work issue for workers out of doors and sunshirts and sensible hats had the same sartorial appeal as sandals with long socks.

Continue reading "Sip, slop, slap: let’s stop drinking like it’s 1969" »

If you read the headlines, late-night violence in Melbourne is out of control.

To a degree this is true, but we have little chance of curbing the problem with illogical solutions.

Take some of the measures proposed in the past fortnight, for example. Firstly, there was the party promoter who banned “metrosexuals” from the Ding Dong Lounge.

Continue reading "Idiots are the problem, not alcohol" »

We live in an environment where alcohol is under siege.

Every day we are assailed with stories of glassings, drunken and rampaging footballers, binge drinking and all manner of other incidents pointing to an alcohol-fuelled end of civilisation.

Every day our politicians are making new suggestions about how to solve the problem, including today’s suggestion from the Prime Minister: confronting advertising campaigns to warn young Australians about the dangers of excessive drinking.

Continue reading "Drinking less will let you drink better for longer" »

Shane Scott almost made it. He was just 700m from his home when the motorbike he was riding - after drinking six or seven cans of Jack Daniels and cola at the pub - left the road. He died.

Before getting on his bike he had argued with the publican and convinced him to let him make the 7km ride home. Shortly before giving him the keys, the publican had asked for his wife’s phone number so he could give her a call and get her to come pick Scott up. Scott’s response, according to the publican, was: “If I want you to ring my f**kin’ wife, I’d f**kin’ ask ya.”

But crucially, according to people who were there that night, Scott didn’t seem drunk. He told the publican he was fine to ride home. Now the High Court has decided the publican shouldn’t be held responsible for what happened in a ruling that backs what any bartender working under responsible service laws will tell you - it’s often impossible to tell when someone is on their ear.

Continue reading "Court calls last drinks on drunken excuses" »

Well another day and yet another useless decision on alcohol.

Victoria Police will today continue their blitz on drunks at races with the running of the Oaks at Flemington.

Now it’s great that police are targeting these people to stop alcohol fuelled violence, but I personally don’t believe it’s the right course of action.

Continue reading "Targeting drivers is one thing, what about drinkers?" »

You would think a drug that causes more than one in ten suicides, thousands of child abuse cases, and one in three road accidents would be outlawed.

Not chance, of course, because that’s alcohol. Cannabis, on the other hand, mostly causes feelings of wellbeing.

Debate over the relative harms of drugs has been raging this week. Most of the debate has been in the UK, where government drug advisor Professor David Nutt has been sacked for, in essence, arguing that drugs should be categorised according to the harm they cause. Crazy, huh?

Continue reading "Only a dope would say cannabis is worse than grog" »

Did I read the story correctly? Now police can’t even fine a person for drunken behaviour in public places? Time to get serious with the idiots who drink to excess, befoul public spaces, wreck the ‘quiet enjoyment’ of others, and divert our accident and emergency teams…

Here’s the basic principle – if your drunkenness results in police officers, or ambulance officers, or hospital teams, having to deal with you, you pay the full cost of this intervention – call it the ‘abuser pays’ principle.

Now I’d be in favour of bringing back the charge of public drunkenness, but I suspect that the paperwork involved these days for police officers in processing someone charged with an offence deters them from doing so, and we probably don’t have the cell space available.

Continue reading "Abuser pays – make drunken idiots pay for their mayhem" »

If blokes are honest, most of us would admit to behaving differently when there are no women around. While the extent of the change varies from guy to guy, most of us do things and say things we wouldn’t dream of doing or saying in female company.

Usually it’s low-level yobbo stuff - drunken anecdotes, sexual innuendo, a sneaky wee on the lemon tree – but for a minority of screwed-up blokes it involves a complete personality transformation where they drift into a shocking moral orbit, their macho posturing cheered on by their equally boorish buddies.

In the context of sport, particularly in light of Brendan Fevola’s unravelling and the car crash quality of Wayne Carey’s memoir, it’s clear that for many of our sporting heroes, life has been one extended boy’s night.

Continue reading "The boys’ clubs protecting our sporting yobbos" »

There are plenty of normal Australians – normal being defined as prone to uncharacteristic lapses of judgment – who have a dark tale involving an incident of drink-driving where they could easily have killed themselves, a friend, an unsuspecting stranger.

Whenever I see former British Prime Minister Tony Blair I’m reminded of mine. Unlike most of my mates I got through my teens and most of my 20s without ever drink-driving, in large part because I didn’t bother getting my licence until I was 22 and escaped the road-related rattiness that comes with youth.

All except for the day of the 1997 British election, when with friends I’d attended a dawn breakfast at the National Press Club in Canberra to watch the BBC coverage, where we ate a hearty English breakfast laid on by the British High Commission, washed down with English beer. Lots of English beer.

Continue reading "Let’s stop taking the piss over drink-driving" »

A good bit of campaign journalism was launched in Melbourne yesterday by the Sunday Herald Sun in throwing open the debate on whether the drink driving limit should be dropped to .02.

.

The Sunday reported that 39 people had been killed in Victoria alone in accidents involving drivers under the .005 mark in just the last five years.

Victoria’s Deputy Police Commissioner has tentatively backed the debate, if not quite advocating an actual change to .02

Continue reading "Should we cut the drink driving limit to 0.02?" »

I did something pretty unusual on Saturday night.  Well, unusual for me. I had a quiet one.

I declined various invitations to meet up with mates at a gig, a house party and a pub.  Instead I grabbed a likeminded friend whose liver also needed a night off. We headed to the cinema, donned some 3D goggles, sat through a pretty enjoyable movie and then headed home.

Why did I ‘waste’ a perfectly good weekend party-night? Truthfully I was tired and completely happy to just throw on my comfy jeans.

Continue reading "I saw myself plastered and it wasn’t pretty" »

In an effort to be seen doing something about alcohol-related violence in Melbourne, the Victorian Government is toughening up its enforcement of laws around security staff for venues.

Music venues around Melbourne are getting hounded by a group of almost 50 inspectors to enforce a 10-year-old law that says any live music venue needs at least two security guards for anything under 100 people.

While, superficially, this is the private venue equivalent for demands of “more cops on the beat”, the problem with private security is that they’re not cops and often they can cause more problems than they solve.

Continue reading "Can you call off security? Clubs’ bouncer problem" »

Kung-Fu master, movie star and all-round whoop ass machine Bruce Lee found it hard to walk down the street in Hong Kong without being challenged to a fight by some bloke who’d watched too many of his films.

Lee would receive letters daily from other Kung Fu academies putting forward their best students for a chance to fight the master. Unsurprisingly Lee was not amused: “I find this sort of thing really annoying, I’m not going to fight with anybody.”

The bashing of AFL superstar Lance “Buddy” Franklin in a Perth nightclub (at least on the facts available) is further evidence of a less sophisticated Australian version of this ego driven phenomena.

Continue reading "You wanna fight? Why footballers get targeted" »

First, I’d like to know how much taxpayers’ money was spent on a research report that concludes many Australian workers enjoy a drink with their colleagues and occasionally push the boat out too far.

But the report, commissioned by the federal Department of Health and Ageing, also suggests bosses could start pushing Australians to cut back on their drinking. Let’s translate one of the key parts:

“Workplace interventions (bosses, workmates or HR pulling up staff on drinking habits) are likely to be cost effective (cheap) and efficacious (fancy word for effective). Occupational health and safety and industrial relations frameworks exist (there are existing laws and regulations) that can incorporate alcohol-related issues (under which you could just slip in a new anti-booze regime).”

Continue reading "Revealed: Going for a beer after work is bad for everyone" »

It was the incident that gave flaming sambuca a whole new meaning, turned a young Greek woman into a national heroine and shone an embarrassing spotlight on Britain’s yob culture.

Stuart Feltham, a 20-year-old from outside London, had his genitals set on fire after allegedly dropping his trousers during a boozy night out at a bar in Crete.

Marina Fanouraki, a 26-year-old Greek tourist, admits having soaked Feltham with sambuca in retaliation for having her legs and breasts “forcefully fondled” by him, but denies that she purposely set him alight.

Continue reading "Eurotrashed Aussies almost as bad as plastered Poms" »

Those of us who enjoy the occasional night on the razz often have a special outfit that we like to wear when hitting the town. Some years ago I worked in a newsroom which had a communal purple silk tie which was shared around like the yellow jacket in the Tour de France. When worn it became code for: I am leaving the office, and may be some time.

Carlton’s Brendan Fevola is in a league of his own when it comes to his fashion regimen. This elite A-grade sorting superstar seems reluctant to leave the house unless he’s frocked up, literally, in a pink petticoat, felt bowler hat with flowers in it, and a foot-long sex toy which he either hangs out the front of his pants or waves above his head.

He did it at the end of last year’s season, snapped by a casual punter who recognised him as he stood looking like something out of A Clockwork Orange on a Melbourne CBD street corner in broad daylight.

Continue reading "These nobs are going to cost us all a drink" »

It was recently revealed that the Victorian Labor Government employs “a small army” of media minders and spin-meisters. But Brumby’s battalions of PR hacks cannot deny the undeniable fact that crime rages out of control.

The evidence is right there in front of us. Our TV screens and newspapers are filled with stories of the street violence that is seemingly an everyday occurrence in Victoria.

It has gotten so bad that even the police are intimidated by the marauding thugs who have come to rule our streets.

Continue reading "Mandatory minimums the answer to drunken thuggery" »

Australia’s binge drinking culture sure is a divisive issue. But to put it simply we have two options. Stand by and do nothing and risk the $16bn alcohol toll escalating further out of control, or do something to break the cycle and make us a safer country.

Last week, when I asked the readers of The Punch for a solution, there were some comments which suggested that I wanted to turn Australia into a nanny state.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. And just so we’re crystal clear I don’t want to or ever plan to introduce prohibition.

Continue reading "No silver bullet in the binge drinking debate" »

BEN Cousins still drinks. I discovered this in Fred Pawle’s excellent piece on the AFL’s favourite recreational drug user in this month’s GQ magazine. I also learned that the Louis Vuitton drawstring (tracksuit) pants he wore in the photo shoot cost $1460, but I won’t get into that except to say footballers have changed.

It would not be such a revelation that Cousins still enjoys the odd beer had he not spent the slabs of his career heading out for a quiet drink after the game, only to emerge four days later on the front of The West Australian in the same jeans, white thongs and Elwood t-shirt. In his final season at West Coast, he was spending more time with bikies than at training.

We’ve been led to believe Cousins’ transformation from druggie to role model is complete, but Pawle’s article proves he has a long way to go. When asked if he still has a drink, Cousins’ reply was sheepish. “Yeah…I have to be careful with that sort of stuff,” he said.

Continue reading "Ben Cousins needs a friend" »

Newsflash: smoking is bad for you.  So, apparently, is drinking to excess.  And, wait for it, regularly gouging on fatty foods is no good either.  It’s shocking, I know.  Better go get a coffee to help get over it all; but do make it one of those low fat, caffeine free types so as to look after yourself.

Maybe, however, you happen to be one of the 99 per cent of people who knew these things to be the facts of life already.  You may still engage in one or some of them, but you do so knowing that there are risks.

This informed consent that you grant yourself is under threat.  A new buzz-phrase is sweeping the bureaucracy and is being visited upon us all.  It’s called “preventative health”.

Continue reading "Motherhood health report tells us what we already know" »

With the current kerfuffle about binge drinking, you might be inclined to think that drinking copious amounts of alcohol is a fairly recent phenomenon. The truth is that the history of Western civilisation is soaked in alcohol. 

In the spirit of informing the current debate — and helping policy makers and public health officials to see what they’re up against — The Punch presents the following comprehensive* history, spanning over 2500 years of drunkeness.

360 BC — Plato. The history of binge drinking in the West begins in Ancient Greece with the philosopher Plato who compared drinking parties to going to the gym. Just as going to the gym temporarily weakens you but makes you stronger in the long-run, drinking parties, he argued, can make you stronger.

Continue reading "The complete* world history of binge-drinking" »

Look into the faces of those dozens of people glassed in violent incidents in our pubs and clubs in recent years and you’ll know that we have a problem. Those faces are worth more than any of the words I’m writing on this topic at the invitation of The Punch.

The images of our young people fighting on our streets with total strangers whose paths have they have crossed by chance, makes you wonder if we’ve got it right as a society. We shouldn’t live in a wowser state. I am clear on that.

Equally, we shouldn’t live in a state where our very human pursuit of enjoyment takes us down a darker path where alcohol becomes the end in itself.

Continue reading "We should not accept drunken violence as normal" »

Tougher penalties for alcohol-related offences were the most popular response to a call from Family First Senator Steve Fielding for new ideas on tackling binge drinking in Australia.

But that was from those who agreed it was a problem in the first place. Many were also of the view Australia’s relationship with alcohol is just fine, and there was some mirth at Senator’s shock at a staff member who confessed to drinking 12 “jagerbomb” cocktails the night before playing cricket.

“12… 12… IS THAT ALL HOW SOFT ARE YOU!” was the response of one proud binger.

Continue reading "10 of your ideas for dealing with binge drinking" »

I’m going to do something here that most pollies wouldn’t do and ask for help. Help in trying to address Australia’s $16bn alcohol toll. I want the readers of The Punch to leave a comment and share their ideas on how governments can address Australia’s binge drinking culture and the violence which stems from it.

Three years ago I took a 10 point plan to both John Howard and Kevin Rudd. It included advertising restrictions and health warning labels.

But with that plan shot down its now time for fresh ideas as this a real issue which this country as a whole needs to take responsibility for.

Continue reading "Our drunk nation" »

REMEMBER this name - or if you’re drunk, get a friend to write it on the back of a beer coaster and stick it to your forehead for future reference. It’s going to be important later on.

Not next week. Not in a month’s time. But in a few years, when shouts are banned, shots are illegal, when you are limited, by law, to a maximum of four purchases of spirits, liqueurs and/or fortified beverages within a 24-hour period at any licensed establishment.

When it’s illegal to drink in the presence of minors. Illegal to drink at any sporting event. Illegal to drink at a picnic.

Continue reading "The right of consenting adults to really tie one on" »

I used to be a cop. I’ve seen firsthand the damage that alcohol can cause when mis-used. Along the way I became a dad and, like most parents, worry about my kid’s safety. Now, I find myself as Managing Director of Brown-Forman Australia, proud makers of Jack Daniels. 

I’m not sure which role has given me the sharper insight into life as most of us know it but if you think that this country recently had a ‘debate’ about alcohol policy, you’re dead wrong. 

What was supposed to pass for a war on binge-drinking has turned out to be a well meaning, but badly aimed, paint-ball skirmish – messy, misdirected and ultimately without lasting impact.

Continue reading "Ban being drunk in public if you want to stop violence" »

Things we should consign to the non-recyclable rubbish bin of a lost Australia.

Female tennis players winning Grand Slams. Babies christened Keith or Shirley. Bank branches in small country towns. Australian wine under ten bucks a bottle.

While you’re just as likely to bump into the Beaumont children as encounter any of the first three, there’s still an ocean of palate-numbing, environment-raping, image-trashing plonk out there and everything that is great and good about the Australian wine industry is drowning in it.

Continue reading "I got my cheap wine and a pending liver transplant" »

In having a gentle dig at US beer maven, food guy and legendary brewer Garret Oliver, Paul Colgan put his finger on what is the greatest obstacle to beer becoming anything other than a weapon of mass consumption for most Australians.

While it is OK – almost expected – for the urban sophisticate to have a touch of the wine tosser these days, if you show the slightest interest in what’s in your beer glass – or even ask for one when you order a beer – you are marking yourself as a twat of the worst order.

How things have changed. As a child in middle class suburbs of Brisbane in the 70s, I recall my parents going to parties where the dads all rocked up with a half carton of XXXX tallies and the wives with a four litre cask of Coolabah Moselle or Riesling.

Continue reading "Whither the wine wanker" »

OK, so the headline’s a bit cruel - you wouldn’t use this material in the front bar unless you enjoy a public humiliation, but it’s a good potted guide to beer tasting and matching a brew with steak.

It comes from BigThink.com and springs off Obama’s beer summit, offering advice on etiquette next time you’re settling a major national issue over a drink. Enjoy.

If you’re a beer enthusiast, check out our own Matt Kirkegaard, The Punch’s resident lager-and-stout expert.

Gary Reinbach died a couple of days ago in the UK of alcoholic liver failure, aged just 22.

His life could have been saved with a liver transplant, but Gary didn’t qualify because he wasn’t well enough to leave hospital to prove he could clean himself up and deserved a second shot at growing up.

Obviously the allocation of donor organs has to comply with a set of criteria, such is the limited supply. But it seems amazing to me a 22-year-old could be told he wasn’t worth being on the list.

Continue reading "They should have given this 22-year-old alcoholic a liver" »

For those like me who’ve wondered (worried) about how many innocent brain cells they’ve wiped out at the pub over the years, the most exciting news in ages is that, just maybe, our brains are smarter than we are.

How so? The evidence is growing that the brain isn’t a fixed collection of a few billion neurones, but a living laboratory that can make its own new cells. And while that is not an excuse to wipe them out with that fourth martini, it does open up a whole new way of understanding the human mind.

It’s all part of an evolving area of science which views our brains as plastic. And no, we’re not talking that hard coloured stuff they make Lego out of. The idea is that your brain is changeable. And one way to encourage it to do make the right changes is– and here we get radical – thinking in the right way.

Continue reading "The modest drinkers’ guide to growing back brain cells" »

There are currently some 700,000 university students in Australia, which I would estimate represents 145,478 cases of Chlamydia, 49,678 one-night stands and 4,567,099 packets of instant noodles consumed in the last calender year.

We have institutions aplenty (39 at last count) which are excellent at pumping out graduates who have gained little beyond a vague understanding of post-structuralism and an impressive repertoire of drinking games involving Sambucca.

But Julia Gillard thinks we need even more university students: 300,000 more to be precise. All part of the Education Minister‘s plans to give the higher education system a bit of a face lift.

Continue reading "Tune in, drop out, get drunk, become a hairdresser" »

I enjoy a drink as much as the next person. Unless that next person happens to be Fiona O’Loughlin. Or Andrew Symonds.

But the Australian Hotels Association’s opposition to a cancer fundraiser is just plain wrong.

Three blokes who’ve lost loved ones to cancer have started Dry July to raise money for Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital.

Continue reading "Pubs’ attack on charity is a dry old argument" »

Ten years ago I had the good fortune of sitting next to Paul “The Chief” Harragon, hardman for the Newcastle Knights rugby league team

We shared a generally enjoyable conversation until discussions turned to a player who had become the media focus for – what else – excessive drinking.

Harragon was genuinely staggered that the drinking exploits of a league star would make tabloid fodder.

“If a plumber goes out and has a few to many,” he said, “no-one thinks of writing that up in a newspaper.”

Continue reading "Binge-drinking, boob-jobs and the black art of spin" »

JAKE Friend will slip on the number 9 jersey and run out to play for the Roosters tonight. It will be just under a week since he, along with teammate Sandor Earl, allegedly assaulted a 31-year-old woman in a Sydney nightclub.

Despite being formally charged, they are free to wear the colours of one of rugby league’s foundation entities – and even the most ardent Roosters fan must see that there is something terribly wrong with a club that allows it.
It doesn’t take Jack Welch to point out that a badly managed organisation tends to rot all the way to the bottom.

Continue reading "Blind Freddy can see league has a leadership problem" »

With Swans coach Paul Roos all but saying he’d like forward Barry Hall to retire after landing another stray punch, the question is now being asked: how many chances should Hall get before he’s just sacked?

I’d ask another question. Is Barry Hall really as big and bad as he is being made out to be, or is the controversy just an indication of how soft football and sporting culture generally has become in Australia?

In short – and at risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw - are Bazza and the likes of Andrew Symonds really too hard or have we just become too soft?

Continue reading "The hard men that soft modern sport has left behind" »

The outsourcing of responsibility for your own stupid behaviour to our nanny government continues apace with Kevin Rudd’s cockamamie plan to effectively pay people to stop shovelling tons of junk down their throats while sitting on their bum watching the telly.

Central to this plan is the utterly laughable claim from the 2007-2008 National Health Survey that 68 per cent of Australians are obese or overweight.

This figure says nothing about the real health of many thousands of Australians, but plenty about the ludicrously narrow definition of obesity.

Continue reading "Hey Kev, get your hands off my modestly-sized beer gut" »

1. Drug prohibition doesn’t work. During the last half century, almost every country in the world signed three United Nations drug treaties committing these countries to minimise the recreational use of specified drugs. Almost every country expanded their police drug squads, rained gold bars on drug law enforcement and kept on increasing the severity of penalties for drug offences. What was the result? Global heroin, cocaine and cannabis production and consumption continued to soar while world heroin production doubled in the last 10 years.

Continue reading "Ten things you should know about drug prohibition" »

Low-carb beers are a beer of the moment. They are the “IT girl” of the beer world with their sales growing at a remarkable 900 per cent per year and every man and his dog who owns a brewery clamouring to get one on the market.

Despite this, you won’t find too many brewers bragging about the beers in any sense other than the technical achievement in producing them. Beer marketers and brewery bean counters will sing their praises endlessly, but the actual brewers seem to stay silent on them – a little like Hunter S. Thompson might have done if he had had a sideline writing Mills and Boon novels.

When they do mention them it is usually in the pragmatic terms of giving the market what they want. The key to the beer’s success – apart from their light flavour profile – is in their name: low carb.

Continue reading "Fruit versus lager: exploding the myth of the beer belly" »

UPDATED: Trouble follows him off the field like the ball does on it. It’s a shame because it’s a waste of talent and a let-down for cricket fans. There are few players better to watch when he starts tonking. There’s video below of the brilliance we now won’t be seeing in the Twenty20 World Cup, because Andrew Symonds has been sent home for breaking team rules.

Cricket Australia is booking his flights tonight. Precisely what happened is yet to emerge but it appears, as is usually the case when Symonds gets in trouble, there’s booze involved. Bizarrely it sounds like Symonds hasn’t repeated anything like turning up for a match drunk, like he did in 2005. CA boss James Sutherland said tonight: “the breaches that I am talking about are not serious, but in the scheme of things, in the scheme of history, they are enough for it to be the final straw”.

Twitter exploded with reaction after the story broke, and I guess the widespread disappointment shows the generally high regard in which Symonds is held, and the fact that people want him to come good.

I particularly liked this, from @KristinByrne:

Andrew Symonds: the only fun thing about cricket.

Anyway, Roy, as he’s known, wasn’t in the Ashes squad but he would have been a key player in the Twenty20 side. This might be the end of his international career. But how many chances should players like Symonds get?

YOU know what I love about the Grand Canyon, other than that it is one awesome kick-arse hole in the ground?

It’s got no fences. You are free to fall into it if you feel so inclined. Sure, there’s the odd sign telling you that straying too close to the edge could bring a premature and permanent end to your holiday, but that’s the extent of the bureaucratic concern.

If the Grand Canyon was in Australia, it would have a fence around it.

Too dangerous, the nannas who govern us would cry, to let people just explore it in a manner of their choosing.

Continue reading "Wowser watch: the plastic beer glass is pure evil" »