Editorial: Blow whistle on park drunks

Behaviour at last week's league test made many people cringe. Photo / Getty Images

It has been fascinating to watch the excuses piling up in the wake of the hooliganism on display at Eden Park last weekend.

The Four Nations rugby league event was officially the new stadium's opening contest, and was certainly the first international one.

But unruly drunks in the 44,500 crowd pelted players and other spectators, including children, with plastic beer bottles and other missiles.

Patrons streamed for the exits before the final whistle rather than endure the dangerous mayhem.

The handwringing in the days since has been notable for missing the point.

The easy availability of liquor in nearby Kingsland and at the park itself has been blamed; comments on nzherald.co.nz have even suggested that the efficient public transport to and from the park removed a disincentive to heavy drinking by making it possible for the punters to turn up pie-eyed to the park.

On and on the excuses went. The unholy alliance between the liquor industry was raised - unquestionably a problematic and complicated area, which should and will come in for attention from policy-makers in the future, just as tobacco sponsorship did, but not even faintly germane to the present discussion.

The simplistic ban-the-booze argument got an equally pointless outing. Less than a year out from the Rugby World Cup, with an international beer brand firmly locked in as a sponsor, such chatter is idle.

The idea that the country's major showpiece stadium should be declared dry because of the antics of a few hundred half-wits is ridiculous. Even if it were legally possible - and it's not - it would make this country a laughing stock. And in any event, such a step would not address the problem of patrons turning up "pre-loaded" to use the inelegant term popular in our booze-sodden culture.

Plainly matters may not be left as they stand. Park patrons who are there to watch a sporting fixture rather than drink themselves into oblivion deserve the right to do so. Likewise the residents of the streets surrounding the park are entitled to go about their business without being menaced or abused by drunks.

If nothing else, last weekend's events should persuade park authorities to be more assiduous in the control they exercise over drunken fans and police to more strictly enforce liquor bans in surrounding streets.

Bouncers regularly keep drunks out of nightclubs and licensees who sell liquor to people who have had too much rightly face heavy sanctions. It wouldn't take many instances of louts being unable to use a ticket they had paid good money for before the message started to get through.

The remaining injustice is that everyone will have to endure the heightened restrictions that will be put in place to deal with a troublesome minority. That is why we collectively need to deal with the situation by doing our bit to force a change in our drinking culture.

If obnoxious drunks are openly and noisily reviled in public; if police are applauded as they eject them; if drunken and selfish behaviour is marginalised, and drunks shown the same scorn as drunk drivers, we can begin to engineer a change in the social landscape similar to the one that has happened with tobacco in a single generation.

The authorities and the police can be as firm as you like, but we all need to own the problem of public drunkenness. We need to tell the drunks: we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more.