Dialogue: Anti-noise law is missing teeth

So ineffectual are our anti-noise laws that we have no statutory right to a night's sleep, writes MARTIN HANSON.

National pride is a funny thing. We take pride in things that do not matter, like sport, or in things over which we have no control, like the Southern Alps, which formed millions of years before we arrived.

We are proud of Ernest Rutherford, while at the same time many politicians and teachers are promoting an educational system which seeks to deny a young Rutherford the necessary intellectual challenge to blossom.

Much of the law that governs our lives is a cause for shame rather than pride. Our Government did not consider it necessary to outlaw lead in petrol until a decade after there was overwhelming evidence it was doing irreversible damage to children's brains. We still allow overtaking on the left, when other developed nations have outlawed it (or its equivalent in countries that drive on the right).

These examples are, or should be, cause for national shame. But one of our greatest legislative lapses is in our failure to protect citizens against noise, particularly at night.

Thousands of people regularly lose sleep because of ignorant neighbours for whom the concept of consideration for others is simply too intellectually advanced.

Loud noise in the small hours is intolerable in any civilised country. Sleep deprivation is bad enough, but it is also a serious health hazard because falling asleep at the wheel can result in an accident.

You may say that local authorities already have regulations that deal with the problem. So they do, but what needs to be remembered is not what the statute says but what actually happens in practice.

Imagine the following scenario. Shortly after midnight you are woken by shouting and loud music. At 1 am you ring noise control and learn that other neighbours have already done so. You are told that you will probably have to wait another hour, during which the volume of the noise and the frequency of four-letter words have increased. Twice more noise control is rung. After the third call and a second visit from the noise officer, the noise is deemed to be grossly excessive. But the officer says unless the police are prepared to intervene, there is little he can do.

He knocks on the door and above the racket gets the noise turned down, but up goes the volume again after he leaves.

Eventually, about 3 am, the din stops and you can go to bed. But not to sleep; intense anger is not known for its soporific effects. The following day you walk about feeling more dead than alive.

These events actually happened, and are a continuation of a pattern extending over two years. If anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, this situation is all too typical. For all practical purposes, we have no statutory right to a night's sleep.

A middle-aged noise control officer is bound to show some diffidence in taking on a bunch of drunks. Moreover, he can impound stereo equipment only if he is accompanied by police. So where were the police? They had been phoned, but they were busy. Ring noise control, they said.

Like other overstretched and under-resourced organisations, police have to prioritise. Most noisy parties are held on a Friday or Saturday night, when police are at full stretch. The result is that noise control has both hands tied behind its back and is limited to a slap with a wet bus ticket.

For deterrence to be credible, there needs to be a relationship between the severity of a punishment and the probability of it being meted out.

The weakness of the present law is that equipment can be confiscated only while the noise is being perpetrated. If police could confiscate equipment the following day, when they are less busy, the noise problem would diminish markedly.

It does not seem to have penetrated the minds of the city fathers that one of the chief functions of the law is to obviate the need for citizens to take the law into their own hands. The law seems to bend over backward to protect the rights of people who cannot understand that rights and responsibilities are opposite sides of the same coin.

Consideration for others is not an arcane concept, but the glue that enables society to function. We can only feel justifiable pride in our society when neighbours from hell are put firmly in their place.

* Martin Hanson is a South Auckland science teacher.