New Zealand has come in last place in a study comparing alcohol control policies in 11 countries or provinces.
The study, released by the Public Health Communication Centre and conducted by researchers at Massey University, found New Zealand was particularly lacking when it came to alcohol marketing and longer-than-average trading hours.
Other jurisdictions studied were Lithuania, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, and Australia, as well as four Canadian provinces ranked individually.
Lead co-author Professor Sally Caswell told Morning Report alcohol companies had free reign to advertise as they wish, particularly online.
"There aren't any rules - what we have is a voluntary code which is organised by the commercial interests. What we really need is regulation. We do have a little bit of regulation but the police have told us it's really very difficult to enforce that.
"As well as all of the hoardings, all of the marketing we see everywhere, we're also exposed to marketing on social media platforms, which is very very worrying because using artificial intelligence the commercial interests are able to use a great deal of data about us to target and design marketing messages."
That made it harder for problem drinkers to quit, she said.
"This is not just a concern about young people ...but it's also adult drinkers that are drinking heavily, would like to cut down, tell us that they are exposed to very worrying stimuli in a range of places but including social media."
Caswell said New Zealand was also found lacking in regards to tax on alcohol.
"If we look at something like our tax rate, the amount of tax that is in the retail price ... we're about 34 percent and Australia is 46 percent. Some of the countries, the countries that were doing really well, the tax rate is about 60 percent... So we're not doing well there," she said.
"And we're certainly not doing well on trading hours, because our national trading hours for takeaway alcohol are still around 11pm and many of the countries are shorter than that - 8pm or 9pm.
"So really we didn't do very well on any of the policy domains that were measured."
2 comments
Drinking Hours in Tauranga
Posted on 15-05-2025 20:03 | By Watchdog
The drinking hours in downtown Tauranga are among the longest around the motu. Why do we need to drink for so long. Booze is killing us and causing violence when over-fuelled people get into arguments..
Cherry picked stats
Posted on 17-05-2025 10:50 | By Ratbert
This study seems to be cherrypicked to support the authors anti-alchohol bias and doesn't include the most important measure. How much alcohol people are actually drinking to see if the regulations they are measuring actually work! For example Australia, Ireland both have higher rates of duty on alcohol but significantly higher per capita consumption than NZ. Canada and the Netherlands both have lower duty rates than NZ and lower consumption per capita. If they were actually focussed on harm instead of trying to control how normal people consume alcohol and damage legitimate businesses they wouldn't be publishing such misleading studies. NZ actually has some of the lowest alcohol consumption in the world (which is consistantly dropping year on year), the lowest rates of harmful drinking and (unsurprisingly due to these sorts of misleading studies) the highest rates of post drinking shame.
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