Australia: Where even a school picnic is a piss-up

IS there no event Australians won’t turn into a booze-up? I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked to see the amount of grog at my kid’s school picnic — but I was, writes Koraly Dimitriadis.

IS there no occasion where Aussies don’t have to get pissed?

Seriously. So deeply ingrained is alcohol within Australian culture that every time I think of the word ‘Aussie’, a man with a beer gut and a stubby in his hand comes to mind.

But don’t take my word on it. Refer instead to the consultation draft of the National Alcohol Strategy 2018—2026 by the Department of Health which states “Australia is regularly reported or casually referred to as having an ‘alcohol culture’ where not consuming alcohol can be viewed as being ‘unAustralian’”.

I suppose then that I am being un-Australian — for bringing this up, the issue of children and alcohol, their relationship to it and how they perceive it.

Take my child’s school picnic, held on school grounds, where parents are required to bring food and drink. This year I took a friend with me who doesn’t have children and he was the one that pointed it out because I had been completely blinded by what had been right in front of me through all of my child’s primary school years. We have normalised alcohol to the point where it may as well be a soft drink.

‘Why is there alcohol here?’ he asked me.

And I didn’t quite know how to answer him. My mind started replaying all the kids events I have attained in the past — birthdays for example — where the kids played with their friends and did their own thing while the parents boozed it up in the backyard by the BBQ.

But it’s just a harmless one or two beers, right?

Wrong.

Because you don’t need to be blind drunk to be giving kids the wrong idea about booze. A study conducted by Deakin University saw a drop in alcohol consumption among teenagers, with 70 per cent of surveyed teenagers having already drunk a full glass of alcohol in 2000, versus 45 per cent in 2015.

Lead researcher Professor John Toumbourou, Chair in Health Psychology at Deakin’s School of Psychology put the drop down to parents changing their behaviour.

“It shows parents are making radical changes in their attitude to underage drinking and also how they model their own drinking behaviour.”

If school events are treating alcohol as an essential part of any celebration, our kids will absorb that message.

It would seem when it comes to alcohol, kids do look to their parents.

And so it stands to reason they’d be looking to their schools too. But the school policy advisory guide provided to schools by the Department of Education allows alcohol to be consumed by adults at school events so long as it is approved by the school’s own council. When asked if the department believes the guidelines adequate in light of the research into the harmful effects of alcohol — and the notion that having alcohol at a school event might be sending the wrong message to children, I was told by a spokesperson: “We encourage schools to promote health education to students and parents through a whole school approach … policies on allowing alcohol at school events are made at a local level by individual schools in consultation with their communities … school council approval is needed for alcohol to be consumed by adults on school premises or at school-approved activities, and must be done in line with legal requirements including responsible service of alcohol regulations. School councils should consider the values of parents and the wider school community when making any decisions on allowing the consumption of alcohol”.

But are we really so addicted to our booze that we can’t attend a function without it, even if it’s a function for kids and at a school?

Clearly we still associate celebration and community with alcohol. I have often felt like I am not cool enough when I go to parties and events because I don’t really drink. My yearly consumption is approximately five glasses of red wine.

If we want to make a change to the way alcohol is embedded into the very fibres of our society, we need to start with our children.

I don’t want my child to child to grow up in a world where they feel they are not cool enough if they don’t have a drink. And that every event, no matter what it’s nature, is just an excuse for a piss-up.

Koraly Dimitriadis is a freelance writer.

@koralyd