On Australia Day, I'll be sitting down with family and friends for our traditional barbecue lunch. My mates and I will have a beer as I turn the meat; the ladies will have a sparkling white as they prep the garlic bread and salads indoors.
That's what the liquor industry has us doing anyway. According to it, it's our right to rejoice in the pleasures of Aussie family life and mateship over a drink or two, and we should resent having that right trampled by do-gooder politicians and nanny-state troopers on account of a few mischief makers.
Such is the response to police suggestions to restrict full-strength liquor sales on the public holiday. ''We seem to be targeting everybody for the actions of a few and I just don't really understand why that's the case,'' Darren Pearson, who runs four bottle shops on the North Coast, bleated to the ABC.
The acting Queensland Premier, Paul Lucas, said he hadn't seen any such problems with Australia Day: ''I wouldn't want to be saying to mums and dads that you can't have a beer."
Buried under the romantic imagery of such responses to the threat of clampdowns is an alcoholic's argument: the notion of the right to imbibe alcohol uber alles. Notwithstanding the well-documented short- and long-term socio-economic costs, such polemics expose an element of our drinking culture that's less visible but pregnant with portent.
There's a couple of fundamental flaws to the argument in favour of a silently-sipping majority's right to a drink or two. The first lies in an inherent Catch-22: the more vehemently one argues one's right to consume alcohol, the stronger the evidence of an unhealthy love of the stuff, and the more likely it is that one shouldn't be touching it.
The liquor industry shares the tunnel vision attitude of its more dangerously loyal customers, that nothing is more important than unfettered access to full-strength alcohol. The whole stance is predicated on the idea bad apples can be easily identified and corralled away, leaving the rest of us to sip politely and chatter away in peace and harmony about the kids and the house renovations.
But this fails to take into account the random way in which personal responsibility dissolves in alcohol. On any given night, we don't know who's going to be a bad apple and who's not. There aren't many people who can seriously guarantee their good behaviour after one or two drinks. And that's not just the manifestly alcoholic ones. Many teens have visited casualty for a charcoal stomach-pump before maturing into a polite, moderate adult drinker.
Here's what the liquor industry, and the governments guzzling the excise, expediently fail to notice: the world is not neatly divisible into upright, responsible citizens and yobbos who can't hold their piss. Human nature is fluid at the best of times. Under the influence of alcohol, it is extremely so.
After a vicious glassing attack last October at the Chalk Hotel, near the Gabba in Brisbane, hotelier Jason Titman announced he was looking into civil actions against those involved (including the victim) for damage to his business's reputation and costs connected with investigation and legal compliance.
In the online trade publication The Shout, Titman has argued the tough-on-grog case fails to acknowledge that fewer than a quarter of serious assaults occur on licensed premises. This, he concluded, makes it safer to be inside licensed premises than not. "When was the last time we saw the media or politicians quoting these kind of numbers?" he asked.
Presumably what happens at 2.30am on the footpath outside a pub, and on the way to the other licensed premises nearby, doesn't count.
Such nonsense bears all the sincerity of those microscopic reminders on bottle labels to ''enjoy in moderation''. And those bourbon billboards admonishing consumers to ''please, drink responsibly''.
The blatant conflict of interest in all such reminders is evident in the wording. If they meant it, they would say ''please, drink less''. But there is not a liquor distiller or retailer in the capitalist world who would not prefer that you bought two bottles of its product rather than one.
No doubt, to answer such accusations, they would retreat into that old tobacco defence, the one about taking market share from competitors rather than increasing it overall. Rubbish. While one bourbon distiller is no doubt keen to wrest market share from another, both want to maximise the wider bourbon market and their share with it.
After that, the bourbon distillers might argue that they are working to wrest a bigger share of the wider spirits market, by persuading scotch and vodka drinkers as to the virtues of bourbon, and then they might say they are trying to turn existing wine and beer drinkers to bourbon.
But at the bottom of all such arguments is the laughable idea of a concrete ceiling on the number of drinkers and how much they will drink, and that no amount of persuading will get them to buy more and no amount of suggestive advertising will increase that ceiling. But any advertising worth its cost will expand not just the advertiser's share of the market, but the market itself.
It is common practice among barristers to emphasise a point by way of extreme analogy. Heroin users have been known to burgle, bash and rob others for money to feed their habit and avoid the pain of withdrawal. Such is the intense discomfort, they lose the ability to balance their interests against those of others.
The liquor industry displays the same kind of self-centredness - and on Australia Day as on every other, the fairest game for all these desperadoes is the drunk community.
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