Kerre Woodham: Punish the parents, not the kids

It's very hard to stuff unco-operative genies back into bottles. However, Matt Robson's going to have a good go at it, with his private member's bill, seeking to repeal the legal drinking age, being drawn from the ballot box this week.

Matt Robson helped to win 18-and-overs the right to drink back in 1999, but since that conscience vote, his conscience has obviously been troubling him, because Robson's has been one of the loudest voices among the lobbyists looking to return the legal drinking age to 20.

He might actually have a good show as the bill to lower the drinking age only just squeaked though last time, and a number of polls show the majority of New Zealanders support turning back time. I was one of those who was supportive of lowering the drinking age back in '99.

It seemed absurd that you could have sex, marry, die for your country, enter into legally binding contracts, be employed as an adult, etcetera, etcetera, but not be allowed to buy yourself a beer.

It still does seem absurd. In the main, the problems associated with the lowering of the drinking age are not with the 18- and 19-year-olds.

It's with the children who have much easier access to alcohol. They're the ones presenting with the problems. We've all heard the horror stories of 12-year-olds turning up to A and E departments with alcohol poisoning - but isn't that a completely separate problem?

Surely the parents of the 12-year-olds, and those that supplied the alcohol to the underage kids, should be wearing the punishment, not the young adults.

It seems the very worst sort of hypocritical lawmaking to make it illegal to drink if you're under 20, when we know that 18-year-olds will continue to drink, just as we did, and just as our parents did.

And most of us don't have a problem with 18- and 19-year-olds getting on the turps - it's the 16-and-unders who shouldn't be drinking and who we should quite rightly be concerned about.

But surely repressive legislation isn't the answer. Oh sure, it will make us feel like we've done something towards fixing the problem. But the issue of drunken kids is one that needs to be addressed holistically.

We need to look at the parents of these children, we need to hand out tougher punishments to people who supply booze to kids, and we need to look long and hard at our own drinking habits.

Most Kiwis are binge drinkers and they like it that way. So when we wring our hands and bemoanthe appalling behaviour of the younger generation, we might like to ask ourselves where they learned their behaviour.