Editorial: NZ's boozing culture hard to shift

Booze and nicotine have, as so often in New Zealand's history, been the flavours of the week. Drink made its appearance with the referral to committee stage of Matt Robson's bill to raise the drinking age back to 20 and tobacco featured in the national Year 10 smoking survey, conducted by Action on Smoking and Health (Ash).

In the public discussions raised by these developments one theme which kept popping up was a sense that public health campaigns are impotent against the mighty machiavellian forces of commercial advertising.

In the case of Mr Robson's proposed legislation the linkage is quite explicit. In addition to seeking to overturn the 1999 reduction in the legal drinking age his private member's bill contains a provision that would not allow advertising on television until after 10pm. The argument goes that the sophistication and spending power of the booze and baccy barons pitched against the limited resources of health campaigners mean that there is a mixed message, especially for the young.

It's hard to disagree that the message isn't mixed. How many reports of the Barmy Army travelling with the Lions have breathlessly implied that their ability to drink pubs - indeed towns - dry is a matter for pride. And we can hardly console ourselves that this is an attribute only admired by beer-bellied, pink-faced Poms. The link between sporting trips and the consuming of improbable amounts of alcohol is not exactly foreign to New Zealand.

And you don't have to watch too many films or imported television series to see the link between the cool and the lighting of a fag, even if our reality is to stand hunched in a doorway in the cold surrounded by sodden butts.

But perhaps the campaigners should not quail so readily before the power of commercial advertising, or despair that their messages are a faint whisper against a pumped-up sound system. Big spending on advertising does not always equate with effective delivery of the message.

The history of advertising is littered with expensive failures, proof that the slickest, most artful practitioners cannot move a public that doesn't want to be persuaded. The best efforts of the PR people cannot, for instance, make many of us believe that Prime offers a decent news service.

The seed of an idea has to fall on fertile soil. And here there are signs that public campaigns will eventually deliver a change in attitude. The drive for us to keep our children out of the sun has been extra-ordinarily successful, so much so that we are now having to be reminded that a little bit of sunshine is not a instant cosmic death-ray but is quite healthy.

In the smoking survey it seems that the message is getting through, with fewer teenagers taking up the habit and with a drop even in that most recalcitrant group, young Maori women.

The drinking culture is, perhaps, a tougher call. The briefest look at our past reveals that this nation has what we might call an attitude problem with liquor since it first arrived, well before we could blame the allure of glossy advertising and logos on racing cars.

So let the campaigners take heart. Theirs has to be a guerrilla strategy. Win the hearts and minds and even the most heavily funded enemy may have to surrender.