References

• Gower, P. (Sep 11, 2009) Goff Admits: We made mistakes. Retrieved 1 September, 2010 from http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10596584
• Smoke-free Environments Act 1990 No 108 (1990 - 2010 reprint) Retrieved 9 September 2010 from http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1990/0108/latest/DLM223191.htm
• Broun, B & Trevett, C. (29 June, 2010) Jail smoking ban riot fears. Retrieved 9 September, 2010 from http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/national/3863424/Jail-smoking-ban-riot-fears
• Butler, T. Richmond, R. Belcher, J. Wilhelm, K & Wodak, A. (2007) Should smoking be banned in prisons? Retrieved 9 September, 2010 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598573/
• Farrar, D. (April 22, 2010) The Law Commission proposals on alcohol. Retrieved 18 August, 2010 from http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2010/04/the_law_commission_proposals_on_alcohol.html
  

• Government outlines balanced plan for alcohol reform (23 August, 2010) Retrieved 20 September, 2010 from http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/government+outlines+balanced+plan+alcohol+reform
• Drinking and Driving (2008) Retrieved 8 September, 2010 from http://www.alac.org.nz/DrinkingAndDriving.aspx
• Christofell, P. (2006) Removing Temptation: New Zealand's Alcohol Restrictions, 1881-2005 Retrieved 8 September, 2010 from http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/378?show=full

more links here: http://www.delicious.com/lukeoram

Have A Drink On Me

Really, what's at issue here is not whether or not our government interferes in our daily lives - the evidence of this is as concrete as the paper trail of legislation trailing the steps of the Beehive. The real issue here is whether or not the populace sees this interference as a good thing or a dangerous thing. Does our government do us a favour when they make blanket restrictions in the name of The Greater Good, or do they take a step too far? And where are the boundaries when it comes to their involvement in our civil liberties? How far is too far?

We've looked at the smoking issue. For some people, including those addicted to nicotine, anti-smoking lobbyists and the hospitality industry, this issue is a very pertinent one. For those who don't indulge in smoking, it's a relatively unimportant one; our lives aren't really affected by The Nanny State getting in amongst the Dunhill butts.

So what happens then, when a dark shadow begins to fall on our beloved tipple?

The debate over alcohol restrictions has been a contentious issue for a long time. Perhaps longer than we think; in his thesis Removing Temptation: New Zealand's Alcohol Restrictions, 1881-2005, author Paul John Christoffel paints a picture of the alcohol issue as a point of historic contention in this country. Alcohol's been on our government's mind for over a century now - they've toyed with everything from prohibition to having control over the number of pubs, to dictating their operating hours.

To wade into a debate this longstanding, it probably behooves us to find a good place to start wading in.

I'm sure we can all agree that alcohol is a consumer product that is relatively harmless when enjoyed in moderation.

I'm sure we can all agree that alcohol is a product that needs to be handled responsibly, by people of a responsible age.

With that in mind, we can probably all agree that baseline legislation like:

• a set drinking age (18)
• legal alcohol limits for driving

are logical and reasonable, right?

So, can The Nanny State be accused of stepping beyond 'reasonable legislation' when it comes to alcohol?

Popular Nanny State alarmist David Farrar was one of the first people to start smelling a rat when rumours of proposed crackdowns on alcohol laws began to rattle through the halls of government.

The result was what the government called a "balanced plan for alcohol reform". From now on, getting your drink on was going to be a lot tougher:

• Firstly, the purchase age was going up - 18 years for on-licence purchases and 20 for off-licence.
• Next up; it's now illegal to provide alcohol to an under 18, unless you are their parent or guardian. And if your under-18 mates want to come around to your place for a quiet Heineken, they have to bring a note from their parents.
• The Minister of Justice is given more power to ban products he/she deems particularly appealing to minors.
• Widening areas of liquor bans
• Tightening the types of places that can sell alcohol.

And that's just the highlights.

Some of you are thinking 'great, fine, down with KGB's and feijoa-flavoured vodka - this drinking thing is a man's game anyway, any drink that needs the crutch of a tropical fruit deserves to be singled out.'

But, let's, for the sake of my already abandoned concept of brevity, just look at the last point.

There's some fine print in that last point; it's to do with the government's changing definition of 'on-license' and 'off-license' - the long and the short of it is, under the new legislation, dairies, convenience stores and superettes now lose their right to sell alcohol.

Suddenly, the government has stepped into your local dairy and taken a baseball bat to the small liquor aisle, and consequently, taken a chunk out of the small store owner's livelihood. And in the blink of an eye, there is nothing they can do about it. Unless they want to upgrade themselves to a supermarket, who can continue to sell alcohol.

And this is the issue, really. Because any dairy owner suffering to carve a living from already slender profit margins will tell you that "the greater good" of the nation just came at the expense of the carpet being pulled out from underneath their bread and butter.

Where There's Smoke...Part II

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu writes that "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting" - that is to say, a masterful takeover is one where a party's resistance is dissipated with subtlety, quiet blow by quiet blow.
The Nanny State could easily be accused of taking a leaf out of old Sunny Tzu's tome - look at her war against smoking; it was a quiet one, carried out in small legislative blows, bit by bit - eating away at civil liberties in small enough bites to avoid a total civil mutiny. Of course, Nanny's supporters would say these bites were too small, Nanny's detractors would say she had no right to take a bite in the first place.
It wasn't long after the furor of the public smoking ban had settled down, that another amendment was announced. Earlier this year, Corrections Minister Judith Collins confirmed that the government were going to initiate a total smoking ban in prisons as of July 1st next year.
As is customary in suspected Nanny State activity, Collins and co. have asserted that the primary drive behind this ban has arisen out of concern for prison staff being exposed to secondary smoking. Our government cited similar bans in Australia that had been lauded as successful.
Of course, 'successful' here is subjective - a report by Australian drug and alcohol experts, clinicians and criminal experts had to concede that, while a ban was good for the health of the prisoners (duh...), cigarettes held a more valuable place in the complex social structure of prison life.

Tobacco smoking, the report noted, was "an integral part of prison life and an established part of the prison culture. Tobacco serves a range of functions in prison: as a surrogate currency, a means of social control, as a symbol of freedom in a group with few rights and privileges, a stress reliever and as a social lubricant."

See, right there, that's a whole can of worms. Is it perfectly acceptable to remove one final liberty from those who have had every other liberty taken from them as punishment for their crimes?
Or is this a step too far? Should even criminals be allowed their 'small liberties', which, beyond being small liberties, have been identified as a vital part of social currency within prisons?

Former inmates have lined up to have their say, muttering prophecies of almost apocalyptic proportions, claiming that cigarettes are such an ingrained part of the inmate's world that they will just go to greater lengths to obtain them, resulting in an increase in deception, prisoner unrest; hell, one of them reckons "There's going to be more murders inside than out there, I'm telling you now"
The unions representing prisoners fear the worst too - Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon says that most prisoners use tobacco as a way to ease off the drugs they were on before their incarceration

"I'd be surprised if [inmates] don't take some collective action. It's not unusual for prison systems to cut back on everything and finally have a riot. There's the double bunking, the reduced unlock hours and visit times and now we're taking smoking off them."

There's a party you want to miss.
I mean, either way you cut it, all you nicotine-loving small time crims out there better get busy getting locked up, because it won't be long before you're eating cold turkey with your Nanny State cellmate.

Where There's Smoke...

How are we to recognize the presence of The Nanny State here in New Zealand? After all, no-one would dare be so bold as to blatantly swipe our civil liberties from us, like Old Miss Poppins tearing candy out from the hands of her young wards. No, Poppins would devote her time to quietly persuading her wards about the dangers of candy ("your teeth'll blacken! darker 'n liquorice!") until said candy was viewed as truly evil, and said liberty was more easily taken.

Perhaps then, a good reference point would be highlighting areas in which our society was being slowly persuaded there was "a great evil" that needed to be dealt with.

And ironically enough, you don't have to stray too far from candy to find one.

The government's involvement in our country's smoking habits has been a long and well publicized one: in 1990 our government introduced the Smoke-free Environments Act, which restricted the smoking of cigarettes in workplaces and schools, to combat the effects of passive smoking. A mild enough move; hell, parents were just glad to be rid of the stench of Mr. Smythee's Port Royals all over their beloved son's pantaloons (or whatever it is they wore in 1990.)

Then, in 2003, an amendment. (there's a red flag word) - the smoking ban was to be extended to all indoor workplaces and venues; pubs, bars, restaurants and casinos. Across the nation, publicans, casino wranglers and warehouse bosses were told that within a year, they would be forced to tell their puffing patrons to abandon their well-grooved barstools and "take it outside."

Anti-smoking advocates were in a fizzy kind of bliss. Many in the hospitality industry claimed it would be their very own death knell. A survey of NZ bars showed a 30% decrease in profit within the first year of the ban. the iconic Club Hotel in Carterton closed their doors soon after, reporting a 50% decrease in profits that they attributed directly to the ban's "inane legislation."

Other pubs went underground and became smoking speakeasies, discretely allowing smoking and becoming hotspots among smoking pub-goers.

You can easily begin to see how a country gets split over legislation like this.

The Nanny State will always have two faces; one is the face of a caring government, concerned for the health of our nation, and anxious to put strictures in place to enforce The Greater Good. The people who see this face will tell you smoking bans are necessary for the sake of our children, our air, our god-damned health. The people who see this face would like to see tobacco banned altogether by 2017; see the whole thing criminalized.

The other face is the creased brow of a meddling old aunt; eager to enforce her upper hand on a public who just want to be left alone to make their own choices.The people who see this face are being run out of business in an already harsh and rule-bound industry. The people who see this face think that if they want to put poison in their bodies, then that's their god-given right - perhaps it's the non-smokers who should be braving pneumonia in the cold Canterbury winds surrounding their 'designated outside areas.'

Here's Nanny

It is said British Conservative Party member Iain McLeod was the first person to coin the phrase 'Nanny State' in the December 1965 edition of The Spectator. The clever bastard also came up with the nifty term 'Stagflation.'
Mr Macleod probably had no idea that this golden term ('The Nanny State', that is - turns out 'Stagflation' didn't really have wings) would eventually become one of the most formidable weapons in the political lexicon. Liberals rally against The Nanny State while Singapore is proud to be a Nanny State. In New Zealand, the country's leading parties flip the term more frequently than a fishwife's accusatory finger - when Labour was in power, National accused them of enforcing Nanny State Policies; now they're in power, National find themselves fending off claims that they are guilty of the same.
But what exactly is The Nanny State? Like many jargonisms before it, the term has descended into a sea of meaningless rhetoric and empty semantics, flung from the furthest backbenches to the streetside soapbox.
Put simply, The Nanny State describes the amount of control a government enforces upon its people. The Online Cambridge Dictionary sums up The Nanny State thus:

"A government which tries to give too much advice or make too many laws about how people should live their lives, especially about eating, smoking, or drinking alcohol"

Which serves as a perfect definition for this filter blog.
Think of it this way: if the Orwellian vision of Big Brother is one of the government's all-seeing eyes, then The Nanny State in one of the government's restrictive arms, actively interfering in our day-to-day through legislation; dictating and enforcing how we should live. For The Nanny State's supporters, this is a good thing - for her detractors, this can only lead to an lawfully imprisoned world and a total lack of citizen's liberties.

Either way, it's imperative to be be educated about what The Nanny State looks like - because one day, she might just come knocking at your door.