Coronavirus brings back the wowsers
Naughty Australians! Stressed out by lockdowns, you’re relaxing with an adult beverage at the end of the day. Such behaviour will not be tolerated by the the new left’s temperance league, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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We keep being told that we need to get used to the “new normal”, which is bad enough. Now, apparently, we are going to have to be sober for it, too.
Thanks to a few too many of us making jokes about getting sozzled during lockdown or sharing our Dan Murphy’s hauls on social media during those tense few weeks when no one was really sure whether bottle shops constituted an “essential service”, Australia’s wowsers are once again firing up.
And they are not amused about some of our coronavirus coping strategies.
Take a new campaign by the taxpayer-funded Alcohol and Drug Foundation.
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Entitled “Little Habit”, it suggests that not only have Australians become complete souses in lockdown, but if they don’t mend their sinful ways, they are on a one-way ride to the gutter and the grave.
“Our lives will head back to normal … but there’s something we don’t want tagging along with us,” the Foundation’s ad says, showing a woman opening a bottle of wine after work pursued by a monster urging her to go on, have that glass of sauvignon blanc.
Disappointed when the would-be wino hears the campaign’s message, the monster stalks off.
Presumably, the heroine spends her night virtuously drinking tea instead of doing what millions of people around the world have safely been doing for millennia.
It’s not just this campaign, which was put together by Labor-connected ad agency Campaign Edge, whose client list includes a number of unions including the CFMMEU, state and territory Labor parties, and gay marriage advocates who sought, unsuccessfully, to shut down the marriage plebiscite and kick the issue back to Canberra.
Nor is it just the various health advocacy groups like cancer groups who have also joined the temperance fight, deciding that far from providing health benefits in moderation, alcohol is the new tobacco.
The left has, for some time now, held it as an article of faith that getting on the sauce (or rather, getting on the non-microbrewed, biodynamic, or locally distilled sauce) was a decidedly un-woke activity.
As Chris Kenny pointed out in The Australian earlier this week, the ABC’s new series about alcohol, On the Sauce, is decidedly anti-booze, part of “our new wowserism, led not so much by the Methodist Ladies at the Temperance Hall but by public health officials on a sugar tax campaign”.
And while it’s easy to mock the taxpayer funded website, ABC Life, for being a perfect window into the obsessions of a certain sort of inner-city, left-wing neurotic, it’s also hard not to notice that it preaches about the evils of Satan’s liquor more than a Baptist preacher in the backwoods of Georgia.
There, they can barely go a month without someone or other writing a testimony to their booze-free month or summer or entire year, or providing a stern warning (“The dangers of rewarding yourself with alcohol”) or encouragement (“Unwinding without alcohol after a hard day at work”).
But really, who wouldn’t need a stiff drink after reading some of their other copy (“Weird things I’ve heard as a bisexual woman” was one recent offering) and realising that our taxpayer funds went to commission, edit, and publish that online.
For once, let’s keep the throat-clearing caveats to a minimum — yes, there are some people who shouldn’t drink. Some people drink too much and it does them harm, or inspires them to harm those around them. Some people become morose, grumpy, angry, or forget where the toilet is.
These people should probably stick to soda water.
But for the rest of us this sort of tut-tutting, particularly when we have been through some of the roughest months any of us have experienced, is offensive.
However, the concerns of our modern-day Anti-Saloon League are not just wrong — research by industry group DrinkWise found that most Australians drank the same or less in the early months of the pandemic — but also offensive.
Unpopular as it may be to say, there’s nothing wrong with adults unwinding with a legal product, particularly one as comparatively overtaxed as alcohol, as any Australian who has ever visited an American liquor store can testify.
And for all the societal harm we hear about, socialising over beers or wines or what have you in a backyard, around a dinner table, or at a pub or restaurant is a net benefit to our individual and community and mental health.
Everywhere but Victoria, where such things will be banned until sometime around 2140, it should be encouraged, not sneered at.
That’s before noting the $160bn — and half-million people employed by — the alcoholic beverages industry contributes to the economy.
Yet for a country whose elites have always wanted us to act more sophisticated and, dare one say it, European, it’s hard to see what the particular drama is with having a daily wine after clocking off.
It is the alcohol-fuelled violence panic all over again.
Except instead of going out and punching on, we are staying in and … maybe falling asleep on the sofa after a few wines and waking up a bit dusty for the morning’s Zoom meeting, or something.