LESS DRINKING.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 10831, 1 April 1932, Page 4

LESS DRINKING.

AUSTRALIA BECOMING “DRIER." Sydney, March 24. Although there is no Vo'latead Law in Australia to prohibit the manufacture and drinking of alcoholic liquors, the fact remains that Australia is becoming “drier” year by year. In three years the drinking of liquor in Australia has fallen by 50 per cent. Economic conditions and high duties, it would seem, are more effective agents for prohibtion than any Eighteenth Amendments and a standing army of enforcement officers. Licenses boards’ reports from two of the most populous states in the Commonwealth, Victoria and New South Wales, are a fair indication of the slump in drinking that has spread over the Continent. One fact alone in the report of the Licensing Reduction Board in Victoria shows that the loss in fees received from hotelkeepers, compared with 1930, is £77,712. Similar figures are shown in the report of the New South Wales board. Hotelkeepers and brewers recognise that a slump is setting in, and Brisbane, which is a notable city for beer-drinking, is on the verge of a price-cutting war which, reports say, will bring the price of beer down to two-pence a mug.

New South Wales and Victoria have already had their price-cutting war and beer was never cheaper in these two States. Rival claims of breweries and keen interstate rivalry has characterised the war in Sydney end Melbourne.