There are many issues facing local government, however there is one that I would like to highlight concerning our city’s drinking culture.

Tino rangatira is a tikanga based principle that means people taking control and responsibility for own their lives and well being in health, education, housing, justice, community safety and economic security.

Kotahitanga safe streets together.

‘What should we do with a drunken sailor early in the morning?’ This was a famous line of a song from a singing group called the Irish Rovers that I used to hear growing up in my younger days. I even used to sing it at parties. What I didn’t know was the colonial history behind it. It’s really telling the time of the grog culture that was part of the British sailors and some of the early settler’s way of life. Alcohol was brought onto our shores in the early 19 Century. It had a devastating effect for those sailors, their whaanau, society and communities. It has left a wake of misery for my people mana whenua and all people in Aotearoa. Traditionally Maaori did not drink alcohol. Maaori were one of the few societies in the world that did not use intoxicants.

What is grog?

I was brought up as a child with the term grog, referring to alcoholic drinks. For my whaanau and friends it was beer and whiskey but later came to be anything alcoholic. A sly groger was usually someone in the area that sold beer at a higher price after the bottle store had closed, an illegal practice. Bottle stores were attached to pubs and closed at 6pm. The abusive drinking behaviour caused domestic violence and a breakdown of whaanau values.

The roots of grog

Admiral Edward Vernon (12 November 1684- 30 October 1775) a Royal Navy officer and politician was appalled at the drunken behaviour of sailors due to the rum ration. The alcohol volume sat in 1866 at 95.5 proof. Vernon helped minimise the effect of the alcohol on his sailors by watering the rum ration down to 50% proof. This was an intervention.

A history lesson

William Fox ( second premier of New Zealand ) in 1877 visited a grog shanty in Aotearoa and he ordered a meal which he stated that absolutely everything on the table smelt of rum. He wrote,

“The roast beef smelt of rum, the potatoes smelt of rum, the water bottle smelt of rum, the very tea smelt of rum and the woman who brought the things into the room smelt of rum, she was so drunk that she could scarcely take them out again.”

(Bollinger, C. Grogs own country 1967)

Te Pae Oranga o Kirikiriroa

I sit as a kaumatua on Te Pae Oranga- (a place of wisdom). This name was gifted by the late King Tuuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII, he launched it at Kirikiriroa Marae with Te Koohao Health and then down in parliament 2018. It serves as a pathway for restorative justice an iwi/ Maaori community-led course of action for low to medium offending offenders, aiming to prevent court appearances and reduce reoffending.

One of the disturbing trends I see is the high number of alcohol related offences such as assault, fighting, intoxication, public disorder offences, urinating in public the list goes on, women and men fighting each other, young people and aggressive groups attacking one another.An area of concern where the trouble happens is on a Thursday, Friday, Saturday night from opening time to 3am closing. The area of concern is the south end of Victoria where the drinking establishments are.

What should be the mature age for drinking?

Our current drinking age is 18 years old. This is a larger national conversation than a local one. We need to look at how we as a society consume alcohol. Poor adult drinking is mimicked by rangatahi. Research indicates that while children legally become adults at the age of 18 years, a child’s brain doesn’t actually reach maturity until there’re almost 25 years old. This means regions of the brain that are important for judgement, critical thinking, and memory do not fully mature until a person is in their mid-20’s. There are huge differences between legal age and biological maturity. The evidence is overwhelming alcohol can/ does damage the normal growth and development of a teenager’s brain cells.

Today alcohol continues to be, by far, society’s greatest drug problem. A study published at the end of 2010 in the medical journal The Lancet, ranked twenty of the most popular recreational drugs according to their degree of harm it placed alcohol at number 1, scoring 72 out of 100 points. With heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) second and third places…alcohol is now considered generally more harmful than all popular illegal substances.

The cost of grog binge-drinking culture today

A typical story goes like this, people drink cheaper grog at home binge-drinking until they are nearly drunk when they hit town where they continue to drink heavily and can’t remember what took place. A disagreement happens which leads to a fight, people are hurt. Police arrest them put then into the paddy wagon, they are then taken to the police station and processed. A tragic fact is that some never make it that far. I was told by some people out at the same bar on the night of the recent death of a young man that they and his loved ones would of never have believed that their beloved taonga-treasure would not be coming home that night.

It all comes back to “Kotahitanga safe streets together”. We need to come together on our Marae and communities to have a mature discussion and not be persuaded by the liquor outlets. We can change the binge-drinking culture in my lifetime for the sake of our mokopuna.