New Zealand has come in last place in a study comparing alcohol control policies in 11 countries or provinces. Photo: 123rf
New Zealand has come in last place in a study comparing alcohol control policies in 11 countries or provinces.
The study, released by the Public Health Communication Centre and conducted by researchers at Massey University, found New Zealand was particularly lacking when it came to alcohol marketing and longer-than-average trading hours.
Other jurisdictions studied were Lithuania, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, and Australia, as well as four Canadian provinces ranked individually.
Lead co-author Professor Sally Caswell told Morning Report alcohol companies had free reign to advertise as they wish, particularly online.
"There aren't any rules - what we have is a voluntary code which is organised by the commercial interests. What we really need is regulation. We do have a little bit of regulation but the police have told us it's really very difficult to enforce that.
"As well as all of the hoardings, all of the marketing we see everywhere, we're also exposed to marketing on social media platforms, which is very very worrying because using artificial intelligence the commercial interests are able to use a great deal of data about us to target and design marketing messages."
That made it harder for problem drinkers to quit, she said.
"This is not just a concern about young people ...but it's also adult drinkers that are drinking heavily, would like to cut down, tell us that they are exposed to very worrying stimuli in a range of places but including social media."
Caswell said New Zealand was also found lacking in regards to tax on alcohol.
"If we look at something like our tax rate, the amount of tax that is in the retail price ... we're about 34 percent and Australia is 46 percent. Some of the countries, the countries that were doing really well, the tax rate is about 60 percent... So we're not doing well there," she said.
"And we're certainly not doing well on trading hours, because our national trading hours for takeaway alcohol are still around 11pm and many of the countries are shorter than that - 8pm or 9pm.
"So really we didn't do very well on any of the policy domains that were measured."
