by Jill Stark
‘Prior to refusing service on the basis that a person is intoxicated, you must be able to rule out various medical conditions and disabilities that cause symptoms similar to intoxication. For example, possible illness, injury, or medical conditions such as brain trauma, hypoglycaemia, or pneumonia,’ the guidelines advise. So on a Saturday night when it’s three-deep at the bar, the music’s pumping, and they can’t hear their own voice above the cackles of a wayward hen’s party, the bartender is expected to weigh up symptoms and make a diagnosis before deciding if the slurring punter in front of them has had one too many shandies or is in fact a stroke victim? It seems like a lot to ask. In my experience in busy venues, particularly in clubs and late-night bars, there’s very little time to make an assessment of the customer’s ability to handle another drink. It’s a production line: the faster you can get the drinks out, the more people you can serve, and the easier your night will be.
At small, family-friendly pubs like The Rose, it’s simpler to spot someone who’s wasted. And a lot of the time, you’ll know them. You’ll know if they’re a bit pissed, but harmless. You’ll know how to take the heat out of the situation, and make them laugh when they get argumentative. And if things do get out of hand, the other regulars will help you out.
Tony has a zero-tolerance policy on violence and aggression in his pub. It’s a standpoint the locals fully support. Although the incidence of violence is low — I can remember only one punch being thrown in all the time I worked at The Rose, and that was between two university mates arguing about whether the death penalty was barbaric — if something kicks off, it will quickly be shut down by the regulars. ‘We just don’t tolerate it,’ Brigitte says. ‘We’ll tell them it’s not on, to take it elsewhere. You look at your bar staff too, and your management. Do you have bar staff who are invested in the pub and are friends with the people over the bar, who have a relationship with those people? Or are they just there to look good? You can defuse so many situations if you actually have a relationship with the people you’re serving.’
Having staff and clientele who feel a connection with the pub may explain why The Rose very rarely attracts trouble, despite being just a few hundred metres from Brunswick Street, where there’s always a strong police presence and most of the bars have bouncers on the door. Brigitte, who has lived just off Brunswick Street for five years, has noticed a change recently. ‘In our place it’s normally very quiet, with the way the building’s facing, but the last six to 12 months, the amount of fights we’ve heard, the amount of bottles being thrown … We even heard a gunshot about three or four months ago, which I’ve never heard before. It just seems to be getting worse and worse.’
There’s no one answer to explain this shift in behaviour, but the increasing availability of booze surely plays a part. The liberalisation of alcohol laws in Victoria in the late 1980s and 1990s led to an avalanche of new liquor licences. In 2011, there are more than 19,000 outlets selling booze — a 77 per cent increase on 2000. Preventative Health Taskforce chair Rob Moodie maintains that Victoria has gone from the ‘wowser state’ to the ‘wet and sloshed state’. Over the same period, alcohol-related ambulance callouts increased by 258 per cent, hospitalisations went up by 87 per cent, assaults by 49 per cent, and family violence incidents in which alcohol was a contributing factor doubled. A few years ago, when my Fitzroy gym started selling beer and my hairdressing salon offered me free champagne with my blow-wave, I remember thinking that there aren’t many places left where you can’t get a drink in this town.
As I say my goodbyes to Tony and Brigitte, I think about the contrast between the convivial atmosphere of The Rose and that of the neighbouring Brunswick Street. It’s hard to believe that the two co-exist in such close proximity. I’ve seen the aggression — when you’re living in the inner city, it’s hard to avoid. I stopped drinking in Brunswick Street years ago, partly because I moved further out, but also because the friendly village feel that used to make it so appealing has all but gone. The troubles of the city seem to be creeping further north, enveloping our bar and cafe strips in simmering tension. Being sober makes it even more noticeable. Driving home through Fitzroy one night recently, the atmosphere on the street was charged and hostile. Stopped at the traffic lights, watching drinkers bouncing around erratically like characters in a video game, I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
A lot of the trouble seems to start in queues, as drinkers lose patience with lining up to get into crowded venues. Police say that the smoking ban inside pubs has exacerbated the problem: more people hanging around outside bars and clubs to have a ciggie leads to more altercations with passing punters. It’s a trend the police are trying to combat: a 6 per cent increase in assaults in 2010 in the City of Yarra — which takes in the popular inner-city drinking areas of Fitzroy, Collingwood, and Richmond — led to a crackdown on antisocial behaviour. Pissed punters caught damaging cars and shops, getting into fights, drinking on the street, or being drunk and disorderly were arrested, handed on-the-spot fines, or banned from the area for 24 hours. The operation was deemed a success. Still, once a suburb is sprawling with cops, you can’t help thinking that some of its charm has been lost.
What’s interesting about this rise in aggression is that it’s not just blokes picking fights. I’ve seen women throw punches; I’ve watched them get kicked out of pubs for abusing bar staff. The rise of a phenomenon described somewhat unimaginatively as ‘ladette culture’ means that sculling drinks, getting wasted in public, and being cheered on by your mates for drunken bad behaviour is no longer left to the boys. While men are still binge drinking at higher rates than women, the girls are catching up, as rates for blokes are slowing, or, in some age groups, declining. Between 2002 and 2009, the proportion of Victorian women aged 16 to 24 who had knocked back 20 drinks in one sitting on at least one occasion in the previous year jumped from 15 per cent to 32 per cent. Across all ages, the number of Victorian women charged with alcohol-related family-violence offences jumped from 27 per year in 2000–01 to 147 in 2009–10, while over the same period, their rate of emergency-department presentations for intoxication increased at more than twice the rate of men, leaping from 785 a year, to 1874. Researchers talk of an emerging ‘badge of honour’ mentality, where some young women celebrate extreme drunkenness, aggression, and violence as signs that they’re keeping up with the boys. It’s good that the pub trade has moved past the days where the only women allowed in bars were the ones pouring the beer, but it’s a sad indictment on our culture that the quest for sexual equality means some young women feel compelled to drink so much they end up in hospital, or become so aggressive they’re arrested for getting into fights or, more worryingly, as police are increasingly reporting, for glassing incidents.
I can honestly say that, while being drunk has contributed to some silly arguments with friends and the occasional spat with workmates, I’ve never found myself so plastered that I feel the urge to shove glassware in someone’s face. But as a former bartender, I wonder how much I’ve contributed to the culture of antisocial drinking we’re now witnessing. In my decade of bar work across three countries, I regularly served pissed people.I encouraged excessive drinking through ridiculously cheap happy-hour promotions and, in one pub, offered free drinks to anyone who could down a yard of ale. I served Guinness and Jameson to thirsty Irishmen at 7.00 a.m. on St Patrick’s Day, and lined up shots on the bar for fresh-faced customers without checking their IDs. On both sides of the bar, I have been irresponsible.
But public-health experts argue that the problem goes beyond the actions of the bartender or the personal responsibility of the drinker. They blame the alcohol industry as a whole. These days, bottle-shop booze is so cheap that many people are drunk before they leave the house. Just like Beth and her friends, who ‘pre-drink until [they’re] at a comfortable level of drunkenness’, many young people are well on their way to being smashed by the time they head into Melbourne’s entert
ainment precincts. The health lobby claims that systemic discounting, in tandem with aggressive marketing and a proliferation of liquor licences, have left our streets awash with booze. Rob Moodie describes this discounting as the ‘Bunningsisation of alcohol’, where a bottle of wine can be sold for less than $3 in massive cut-price warehouses, and punters are encouraged to buy in bulk and load up shopping trolleys with grog. A 2009 analysis found that large liquor barns were responsible for 70 per cent of all Australian alcohol advertising, up from 30 per cent in 1989. Adverts for boutique stores fell from 29 per cent to just 5 per cent.
It probably doesn’t help that Australia’s leading supermarket chains control half of the country’s liquor supply. Woolworths, which owns Dan Murphy’s and BWS, and Coles, which owns Liquorland, First Choice, and Vintage Cellars, leverage their duopoly regularly to undercut competitors, using heavily discounted alcohol as a loss leader. In March 2011, Foster’s was forced to withhold the supply of key brands, including VB and Carlton Draught, when it learned that the supermarket giants were planning to sell them for $28 a slab, well below cost. The brewer said the discounting undermined their brands.
Some of my friends have begged me to stop giving health experts a platform to condemn cheap, all-night booze as an inherently bad thing. They have read my stories about a blitz on late-night bottle shops, or calls for an end to discounting, and sent me half-joking text messages asking what I have against affordable, readily available grog. But while slashing the price of booze might be a boon for the average drinker, it’s usually the community’s most vulnerable who suffer. According to the World Health Organization, underage and heavy drinkers are the groups most likely to drink excessively when booze is cheap. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Australia’s Indigenous communities, where alcohol abuse has ravaged towns, and the rate of drinking-related deaths is twice that of the general population, through chronic disease, accidents, violence, and suicide. In June 2011, in response to alcohol-fuelled violence in Alice Springs and to criticisms that its cheap booze was contributing to the problem, Coles announced that, from 1 July, it would stop selling two-litre casks of wine — a product that sold for less than 50 cents a standard drink. A minimum price of $8 was brought in for bottles of wine. Woolworths quickly followed suit. The retail giants ruled out extending the policy to the rest of Australia, but there may be changes ahead: the federal government has asked its National Preventive Health Agency to investigate the merits of a national floor price for alcohol, similar to the one being introduced in Scotland.
It’s not just Indigenous communities that are hit hard by heavily discounted booze. A few years back, I reported that price wars had become so fierce, some smaller bottle shops were offering public-housing tenants credit and free home delivery, in a bid to compete with the big chains. Some customers on pensions had racked up massive debts and were being hounded by loan sharks. Research by Turning Point and VicHealth shows that disadvantaged areas are flooded with bottle shops, with up to six times as many outlets as wealthier neighbourhoods. Studies have consistently shown that areas with a high number of bottle shops have greater rates of chronic disease, risky drinking, assaults, and domestic violence. It raises the question: is the alcohol industry deliberately targeting poor people?
In 2007, I found out what happens when a local community tries to fight back against the proliferation of cheap grog. Preston, a traditionally working-class suburb in Melbourne’s inner north, is part of the City of Darebin — a council area with the second-highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in Melbourne. The suburb was experiencing unprecedented levels of underage drinking, with kids buying cheap booze, and running amok in parks and at parties. Alcohol-related assaults, criminal damage, domestic violence, and health problems were also climbing rapidly. Police said that much of the trouble was originating near bottle shops, where drinking was much harder to control than in licensed venues. When an application for a small wine store was lodged with the liquor-licensing department, police and council lodged a joint objection, on the grounds that it would harm the community by encouraging more alcohol abuse. There were already 65 places in Preston to buy alcohol, including 11 bottle shops. That, they argued, was more than enough. In a landmark legal case, Victoria’s then director of liquor licensing, Sue Maclellan, upheld the objection. It was the first time that a licence had been turned down on the grounds of social harm. Health experts lauded it as a major win in the fight to turn around our alcohol culture.
But the victory was short-lived. Six weeks later, Maclellan granted a licence for a Dan Murphy’s superstore in Preston. The council and police objected, on the same basis as their previous complaint. Maclellan dismissed it. As Geoff Munro, a long-time alcohol campaigner from the Australian Drug Foundation, told me at the time, ‘It’s hard to understand the logic of granting a licence to a mega-discount liquor store when a smaller discount liquor store was rejected on the grounds that it might exacerbate existing alcohol harms. It’s just extraordinary. It’s time we had a balanced liquor-licensing law that took account of people’s health and not just the economic interests of liquor merchants.’
The following week, community frustration turned to fury when I discovered that the proposed Dan Murphy’s store was to be less than 200 metres from a Salvation Army rehabilitation facility. Women battling alcoholism would have a perfect view of the liquor giant from their bedroom windows.
To this day, I’ve not received an answer from Maclellan about the inconsistency of her decisions. There’s no suggestion that she did anything improper or was unduly influenced by the might of Dan Murphy’s, but there’s no doubt that the liquor giant has access to far greater legal resources than any small business fighting a licensing decision. The owner of the family-run chain of wine stores who had his licence application refused told me, ‘It all boils down to one thing: the big get bigger and the small get smaller. There’s no way any independent will ever beat the chains.’ The result of this stranglehold on competition is ever-cheaper alcohol.
Since I stopped drinking, I’ve begun to notice just how insidious this proliferation of cut-price booze has become. Much like dieters who see chocolate cake and pizza everywhere they look, I feel as if I’m under siege from dirt-cheap grog. And the more you buy, the cheaper it is. The full-page, and often double-page, adverts in the national press are so ubiquitous that I can’t read my own paper without being bombarded by beer. I may have left bar work behind, but it seems that the alcohol industry is still keeping me in a job.
I’M HAVING LUNCH with a man who’s heard it all before. As a senior alcohol-industry executive, he’s grown accustomed to being called names; he’s had to develop a teflon exterior. Health experts have accused his industry of being disease vectors, of trying to lure children into a lifetime of binge drinking, and of putting profits ahead of people. He stopped getting angry a long time ago. Now, he just seems tired.
We meet in one of Melbourne’s high-end restaurants — his choice, and on his tab. It’s a shame that I can’t join him in a glass of wine; the list of offerings is exquisite. Plus, I quite like the idea of getting sozzled with a corporate bigwig, whiling away the afternoon quaffing Moët & Chandon and Rémy Martin, safe in the knowledge that the bill is being picked up by the very industry charged with transforming me, and countless others, into binge-drinking reprobates. But my decadent fantasy will have to wait for another day. I order mineral water.
I’ve debated this man many times. He’s engaging and whip-smart. His response to claims against the industry is always considered and fair. He often shows a healthy degree of wariness in answering my questions, but today he seems more apprehensive than usual. In fact, he tells me that he does not want to be named in my book.
I start by asking him what he thought when he read the article about my history of binge drinking. He says he was surprised that someone who, he had presumed from my reporting, had a dim view of alcohol abuse would drink so much. ‘It’s a
bit like a police reporter being caught shoplifting,’ he says. I laugh, and he seems to relax a bit. ‘I wouldn’t have said it changed the credibility of what you wrote because you’ve always been reasonably fair.’
It’s a generous concession from a man whose industry I have repeatedly hammered in the pages of The Age and The Sunday Age. While he’s in such a mood, I ask him to be completely frank. I know that he’s paid to represent the alcohol industry’s best interests, but just quietly, there must be times when he thinks, hang on, maybe my industry does fuel harmful drinking?
He doesn’t hesitate. ‘I don’t think it does now, and I don’t think it has done ever. The public-health lobby, like so many social-justice groups, see the industry as vastly more powerful and controlling than it actually is. We’re actually led by our customers far more than us leading them. We might bring out a new product, and if people like it, well, that’s great; it’s not some sort of Machiavellian plan to find new ways that people can drink more and more. We see what people want and we provide it for them. It’s not like we have magical means of saying, “Here, everyone drink more and drink quicker.”’