This evening I’d especially like to welcome Professor Gail Crossley from the Australian Catholic University, where I am proud to be a Professorial Fellow at the North Sydney campus.
As I was listening to the news of John Della Bosca’s resignation as Health Minister, yesterday I walked into South Sydney library to borrow my favourite P.G Wodehouse novel, ‘Love Among the Chickens’. As I stood in a queue, I overheard a young woman say to a friend, “I’ve just finished reading ‘Under The Influence’.
When her friend asked, “What’s it like? my …

FOR most of European history, the social effects of drunkenness were widely perceived as a problem and the individual drinker was seen as the source of that problem.
Before the 19th century, what is most notable about responses to excessive drinking is its perceived connection with licentiousness, sinfulness and crime. English laws against drunkenness enacted in 1552 and in 1606 repressed what was seen at the time as “the odious and loathsome sin of drunkenness”.
Problem drinking and alcohol-related harms hinted at moral defects in individuals, so remedies focused on punishing sinful …

Although my mother was an atheist and my father a lapsed Catholic, as a child at home living in the petite bourgeois Melbourne suburb of East Brighton, before our main meal, which during the week we called “tea and which started at exactly 5pm, we always said “grace.
These days, over 60 years later, I still think saying grace is a good idea. This is in part because there is a lot to be said for gratitude , about being alive for starters and for being able to eat a nourishing …

IF 29 countries, including France and Germany, can completely or partially ban the advertising of booze and in the process reduce alcohol consumption, why is Australia dragging the chain?

This is something our health ministers should urgently consider.

According to a recent commonwealth report, the annual cost to Australia of alcohol abuse in terms of policing and health care is $15 billion.
In NSW, the chief health officer estimates alcohol causes 1220 deaths and 47,000 hospitalisations a year.
Last week, NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca called for a public debate …

THE recent review of the Northern Territory intervention and the recommendation to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act in the NT were welcome news to the vast majority of Aborigines in Australia, who lead ordinary lives and who are not drunks or child abusers.
The suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act affected Aborigines living outside the prescribed areas just as much as those living in them. It damaged their self esteem and public standing around the country by saying they were so remiss in their roles as parents, guardians, friends and neighbours, …

It’s worth remembering that Australia’s only coup d’état took place in Sydney at a time when alcohol was widely used as a currency in the fledgling colony of New South Wales.
On 26 January 1808, Governor William Bligh (of the mutiny on the Bounty fame) was forcibly deposed by George Johnston, Commander of the New South Wales Corps. Johnston led 400 armed soldiers — many of them young — up Bridge Street, Sydney to take Bligh prisoner in what soon became known as ‘The Rum Rebellion’. This was because control over …

A HARD-HITTING American study from the Rand Corporation – hardly a soft and fuzzy organisation – found that every dollar spent on treating drug and alcohol addiction saved seven dollars in law enforcement. But this research has had little impact on policy directions in any country, let alone the US. Treatment services remain under-funded while police and corrective services still get the big dollars. This does little more than service the status quo.
Meanwhile more recent research, the internationally acclaimed Australian Treatment Outcomes Study, which was completed in the past three …