Simon Collins, social issues reporter, looks at the cost of alcohol abuse. Part one of a series of five.
KEY POINTS:
Rachael Vakauta has had to stop her children playing in the park which is virtually outside their front door - because it is so often strewn with drinkers' broken bottles.
Mrs Vakauta, 33, has lived close to Molley Green Reserve since she was four, a tiny patch of greenery in a state housing block that stretches down towards the Manukau Harbour south of Richardson Rd in the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill.
Her six children are now aged from 15 down to 2.
"When I was younger it was not like this. It was a lot safer," she says.
When the Herald visited just before Christmas, an empty bottle of Steinlager lay on the landscaped verge of the green.
"There's drinking and stuff that happens there, and the next morning there's boxes of beer everywhere, empty bottles and smashed bottles as well," Mrs Vakauta says.
"One incident was really bad. It started going like a real yahoo party and ended in a full-on brawl. I rang the cops and 45 minutes later they came.
"The saddest thing is that I can't send my kids to the park because there is always guaranteed to be broken glass there."
When Mrs Vakauta was growing up, Mt Roskill was one of about a dozen "dry" areas of the country that had voted to ban all alcohol sales.
But regular three-yearly votes on liquor licensing were consigned to history with many other restrictions on our lives by the pro-market Labour Government of 1984 to 1990, which changed the liquor laws in 1989 to let anyone sell alcohol provided that their character was deemed to be "suitable".
Today Mt Roskill boasts 11 "off-licences" where you can buy alcohol to take away, says early childhood hub co-ordinator Zena Wrigley.
She helped to galvanise the community when Brar Holdings applied to open a 12th liquor store in McKinnon St, a short link from the houses around Molley Green to the Hillsborough Kindergarten, Hay Park Primary School and Waikowhai Intermediate directly across Richardson Rd.
Mrs Wrigley, Shona McCormack and other residents quickly gathered almost 1000 signatures on a petition to oppose the application and attracted 74 people to a public meeting chaired by Hay Park School board of trustees chairwoman Roseanne Hay, daughter of Auckland Deputy Mayor David Hay and granddaughter of the home-building pioneer after whom Keith Hay Park is named.
The meeting voted unanimously not just to oppose the new liquor licence, but also to ask the city council for liquor bans in Keith Hay Park and Molley Green.
Waikowhai Intermediate principal Howard Perry says residents raised the issue of the parks spontaneously and there was unanimous support for banning liquor in them.
"There's a new carpark being built for Hay Park and youth are going down there in cars and drinking," he says.
The police opposed the application for the new liquor store.
"We had questions in relation to the applicant and the application," says Auckland West police liquor licensing co-ordinator Sergeant Jason Loye.
Five days before the hearing was due on December 15, Brar Holdings withdrew its application because of what its consultant Peter Swain describes as "personal circumstances of the applicants".
Meanwhile David Hay presented a second petition for liquor bans in the park, signed by 780 people, to the city council on December 11.
Officials have told him it normally takes seven to eight months to get a liquor ban approved, but he wants to speed it up. The ban looks likely to go through.
Around the country, similar local resistance is bubbling up against the spread of liquor outlets, which have more than doubled under the 1989 Sale of Liquor Act from 6295 in 1990 to 14,139 last June.
"This is not a Roskill South issue. It's a national issue that every community faces," says Mrs Wrigley.
"Remuera has two liquor outlets, Mt Roskill has 11. They are targeting certain areas because it's low socio-economic groups they are targeting. It's creating huge issues in our communities."
A long-term study of about 1000 people born in Dunedin in 1972-73 confirms that adolescents aged 15 to 21 with unskilled or semi-skilled fathers are 2 times as likely to drink large amounts of alcohol as youths of the same age with fathers in professional or administrative jobs.
And a national study by Canterbury University geographer Dr Jamie Pearce found last year that there are five times as many liquor licences per head in the most deprived fifth of census meshblock areas in the country as there are in the best-off fifth. (Each
census meshblock has about 100 people.)
This study found, incidentally, that there are also almost four times as many fast food outlets, and three times as many supermarkets and grocers, in the poorest fifth of communities as in the richest fifth.
This suggests that both food and liquor stores tend to be in poorer areas partly because the land is cheaper there, and not just because poor people drink more.
This matters because heavy drinking is a big factor in crime and violence.
A Ministry of Health survey in 2004 found that 5.7 per cent of all New Zealanders, and 21 per cent of young men aged 18 to 24, had been assaulted in the past year by someone who had been drinking.
Mt Roskill Community Board chairman Richard Barter says society needs to impose similar restrictions on alcohol to those on poker machines, which are subject to local control.
"Business is business," he says.
"But I can't see any justification for more liquor outlets in the community when the consequences of its abuse are so evident."
