Swill, swill, glorious swill

Unholy Alliance

of Brewers and Wowsers

The liquor question has for decades been a football between an exclusive coterie of pressure groups such as these, lined up as a rule with well-intentioned inanity on one side and sordid and cynical greed on the other. "In the no-man's-land between them," wrote Fairburn in 1944, "is the great mass of the public, flabby and inert, powerless to impose a civilised pattern on the drink situation."

That our present drinking laws, and drinking habits (except on the West Coast) are barbarian, is axiomatic.

Wellington's public bars between 5 and 6 p.m. on Saturday are probably the most disgusting sights in the world. For those who have never seen the sight, let me describe one:

It is a long, bare room with varnished wood or tiled walls and terrazzo or rubberized floor like a lavatory, to make for easy cleaning (presumably with a hose). It opens straight off the street (for ease of access) by a number of swing doors, but the windows are all painted or boarded over (to spare the passing public from the sights within). The room is quite devoid of furniture, except for a long elliptical counter or bar down the centre, equipped with half a dozen plastic hoses with pressure-taps at the end (through which, beer is squirted into customers' glasses), and, more important still, an equal number of cash registers Inside the bar stand the barmen, squirting away with the hoses and ringing away on the cash registers as hard as they can go.

Humanity is packed into the space outside the bar at the rate of slightly over one person per square foot. These persons drink as fast as they can because after 6 o'clock no beer is served, and they are immediately thrown out. They fight and spill beer over each other, getting to and from the bar, where the nozzle of the hose is indiscriminately held into each glass until it is as near brimming as it can be (the glass holds only 9 ounces—or slightly less—when level with the top, and the customer is charged for 9 ounces). Every sort of contagious bug is thus ceremoniously distributed among the customers.

Auckland students' "Capping Book" prophesied in 1955 that "Some Aucklander will probably invent a huge bowser with numerous coin-in-the-slot nipples on the ends of plastic hoses: a self-service bar, with men drinking like sucking pigs round a sow. As it is, they surge to and from the bar like pigs round a trough."

Around 6 there is an equally animal run on the bottle store, and irrational and stuttering arguments are carried on in the form of fisticuffs on the footpath.

Faced with this dismal scene, the temperate citizens can be excused for veering into the Prohibitionist camp. in the days of longer drinking hours and suburban pubs, the picture was certainly no more dismal—but was brought more forcibly to the temperate critic's attention. It was then that the Prohibition cause won its greatest victories—with majorities over Continuance in 1905. 1908 and 1911 frustrated only by the statutory requirement of a thre-fifths majority before it could be carried.

Attempts to get this requirement reduced brought the low methods of the liquor trade out into the open, and New Zealand politics to the lowest level of corruption in its history.

The wife of a New Zealand politician has described what happened when a Hill making such an attempt was introduced in 1911:

"This . . . exposed the liquor trade to possible extinction at the next ballot. My husband said. 'The licensed victuallers are in a panic, their agents are swarming the lobbies' . . . The next day [X-the man is named) came to him with a definite proposal—the Trade would pay all his election expenses for the coming encounter. They would guarantee he would get in. They would spend money and do the job much better than he could do it. . . . However, my husband was incorruptible. .

"The next day the offer had risen—election expenses plus £200. Nothing doing. . . . Each day as he came in to lunch we asked him with our eyes what the latest offer amounted to. He would put up 3 fingers, then 4, then 5. in a few days it had risen to £800 plus election expenses.

"The next day no fingers were shown. They had found cheaper support . . [X had said. 'You don't need to change your mind. Charlie. Just go to Te Kuiti and miss the train on Tuesday night so that you'll miss the division!']

"Previously, votes in the House had been counted and it was known for certain that there was at least a majority of two who had given election pledges to support the Bill. When the night came there was a majority of five against it. Three members had surprisingly missed their trains. One particularly ardent Prohibitionist who had lived during the whole three sessions of that Parliament at an expensive hotel, had paid the proprietor never a penny. It was common knowledge that his creditors were anxiously awaiting the close of the House. ... He was not only able to pay his debts, but to buy himself a flourishing bicycle business. . . ." (Helen Wilson, "My First Eighty Years." pp. 178-9).

Prohibition zeal waned when in 1917 6 p.m. closing was introduced (as a war measure, perpetuated by an Act of 1918). Meanwhile local option polls drove the pubs from the suburbs into the cities, where they came increasingly under the control of ownership of a small number of brewery concerns; and enactments to appease wowserism restricted the sale of liquor for "on" consumption entirely to these pubs. Thus a pattern emerged, highly profitable for the breweries, of the maximum number of hotels concentrated in the minimum area (which cut distribution costs), with an unbroken 9-hour-day and 6-day week (which cut labour costs), during which liquor could be sold in maximum amounts at minimum cost to the vendor, to the maximum number of people in the minimum time for the maximum price.

Many reforms in the apparent direction of hygiene have also been prompted by the drive to cut costs. Where barrels used to be filled at the breweries, carted to the pubs, rolled into the cellars, and linked to pump-handle taps on the bars—today beer is pumped from the breweries into huge steel tankers from them through a pipevent in the footpath outside the pub into a tank inside, and from there through the plastic hoses described above into the customer's glass.

Gradually every added service has' been eliminated. Where are the counter lunches of former years? Where are the tables and chairs where students used to sit and sip at the old "Empire"? All gone in the greedy stampede for bigger profits.

This drive has been ably assisted at every stage by the wowsers, whose anxiety that drinking should be kept out of sight, and that it should be associated with no other pleasures to increase its attractiveness to the young and innocent, has led them to bestow us the piggers that is the New Zealand pub from 5 to 6.

There is also a great deal of material on the malpractices of breweries and publicans in the matter of charging the same price for different sized glasses, of re-selling "slops" emptied from used glasses, of keeping dummy accommodation for 'guests" as a cover for after hour drinking, undetectable control of privately owned pubs by brewery companies, and letting the standard of accommodation fall to concentrate on the more profitable bar traffic.

This material, and some strong suggestion of intimidation of witnesses by their present or former employers, indicates the extent of the honesty of the liquor trade little more than 10 years ago. There is no reason to suppose that they have improved since. They may not be as desperate now as they were in 1911, but they are still essentially inspired by the same motives and capable of stooping to the same methods.

Their present honesty is exemplified by the mendacious and inaccurate series of advertisements that has been appearing under the heading "Hotel Heritage."

In the light of the 1911 incidents, there is perhaps nothing odd in the fact that none of the recommendations of the Smith Report were ever put into effect except some of the least significant which were incorporated in the 1948 Licensing Amendment Act. and the hours issue which was put to the public in the most misleading form in the 1949 referendum, liven where "Trust" licences have been approved be the electors, the proposal has been allowed to be frustrated by the combination of unsympathetic authorities and the scheming of the trade.

The Smith Report recommendations would, by encouraging the outward conditions for giving booze its rightful place in a civilised life, and by removing the motive of private profit from the trade altogether, go a long way towards solving New Zealand's liquor problems. The recommendations were not lightly made Eighteen months of investigation went into them, and they were supported by a majority of [unclear: its members] (including a Judge, a barrister, and two farmers) against three (including a Brewery Company secretary and an official of the Hotel-workers Union).

The trade is now making the assertion that it approves reform of the law and that it always has done so it books rather as if it can see that the popular demand for reform cannot be withstood much longer, and wants to make sure that whatever reforms are made are on its own terms. We on our side and as students are interested as summers, citizens, and morally and socially conscious human beings—must make sure that the long overdue reforms ate effected on our terms.

The Smith Report furnishes a very sound and practicable programme of such reforms.

—B.