Greg,
In North Queensland we have a huge problem with binge drinking. Our young people mainly however this sometimes goes into middle age and even old age. I don't have solutions, however I do recognise its existance.

Who on earth is Greg trying to defend? Very few would won't to deny the right for people to have a peaceful drink but to deny a problem among our young is plain ignorant. Maybe Tasmania is 25 years behind the rest of the nation but Greg must of been blotto himself if he fails to see the problems of violence and alcohol in every major city and town in Australia (mainland). Talk to the cabbies about how much spew they have to clean up on Friday and Saturday nights and you will realize the problem we have.

Greg,
You make good propositions about the "nanny" state, and the wrong skew on statistics.
Our society will continue to have problems with lack of individual self control while ever there is the belief that "they'll fix it", therefore "it's safe to be just a bit stupid".
Those who draw media attention by their heavy drunkeness and resulting bad behaviour, seem unaware of the importance of the three "R"s:
Respect for your self
Respect for others
Responsibility for your actions

The "nanny" state is powerless to change people's attitiudes - that only comes by personal awareness of a problem then the personal desire to fix it.

Take your blindfold off Greg Barns. I am disappointed if not shocked that you of all people would come up with such a unbalanced view. What ever happened to your values in "Unfinished Business". Surely it is you who could offer the honesty.

As a female, living in Cape York, FNQLD, I congratulate the Federal Health Minister for her stand to raise awareness to curb Australia's culture of drinking.

As a female I have taken quite a battering within this community as I tried to link the awareness about drinking to domestic violence-kids at risk locally, through crime prevention, health and general "civic safety" forums.

The social and economic cost of this culture is having a 'dire' impact on our Australian culture, on families and community breakdown, on our kids and it is not okay!

Drinking as a 'Aussie' culture has gotten out of hand and those who can not be honest about the need to discuss and aim to help curb it's impact on others, are part of the problem.

Greg Barns perhaps you could discuss your underlying worries of governments 'over or under' regulating our sense of freedom in a more constructive way.

No one wants their freedom curbed, but this is an issue of individual trust - self-government and the ways we value of our citizenship. I do not believe it is the bullies who should roughshod our efforts to clean-up social neglectful awareness.... where there is need - to open the depth of sensibility behind this public address.

http://www.miacat.com/
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There will always be a binge drinking problem with youth until it all clicks with Canberra that the need is for wholesome, fulfilling work/occupation.
The kids lack a solid vision for the future...thats all.
National service would help this problem and establish quite a few in good careers.
I say wake up oz sacrifice and rotten tech where possible...and its advancement to nowhere... and find them manual based jobs.
Tech, reliant on computers and chips, is such a frail event.
It needs to be bagged and thrown away as a major root of so many social problems.

Well said Greg. I was actually going to write something along these lines myself but you did it first and better.

I went to a talk the other day and the speaker mentioned the State's crackdown in the 1850s on street corner larrikins. It sounded much the same as the attack on so called binge drinking by young people. It was all about social control and forcing people into the arms of wage slavery.

I vaugely remember a study which seemed to show that binge drinking was worse in the days of my youth than now (ie in the late 60s and early 70s.) It may have a been a newspaper reference, and so may be lost to my inadequate research skills.

There is one point I will have to disagree with you on however. Alcohol is addictive, much more so than say pure heroin. So there will be alcoholics. Why getting pissed on Saturday night leads to that in a small proportion of people is the question. But attacking young people over their drinking (and imposing a pure revenue raiser in the form of the alcopop tax) won't change the propensity of some to alcoholism. It will however raise an extra $500m in tax.

We live is a society were human relations are reified (ie seen as and expressed as being between things) and the process of production is alienating (ie the products of our labour are expropriated by the owners of capital).

Our reified and alienating society produces conditions conducive to escape through chemical means. This is especially true for those moving from school (perehaps through Univeristy) to the workplace, the site of alienation itself, and those moving into the marketplace, the site of reification. In both cases this is likely to be young adults.

Only a profund change in social relations can remove the external drivers for chemical abuse.

In the meantime, the beat up on binge drinking needs to be exposed for what it is, an attempt at conservative social control.