RE-ENTER PROHIBITION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22629, 22 July 1935, Page 8

RE-ENTER PROHIBITION

In their campaign in the interests of prohibition the president and secretary of the New Zealand Alliance are essaying the difficult task of stirring up public interest in a question in the discussion of which public interest has perceptibly waned of late years. It is not apparent that prohibition is to-day a live issue in New Zealand. The New Zealand Alliance hopes, of course, to. make it so again, and to move the community to a sense of the importance of. the objective for which it stands.. To do that it will have to convince it that prohibition is a good thing and that the country has need of it. It can hardly be expected at this stage to impart any freshness or novelty to its methods of persuasion. So far as its particular charges against the liquor trade are concerned, those who represent that trade are capable of replying for themselves. General assertions affecting the whole community invite, however, general comment. According to Mr Blanchard, New Zealand has suffered financially and morally through the liquor traffic. He has cited figures to the effect that since the last licensing poll there have been 25,475 convictions for drunkenness, apart from other offences traceable to the consumption of liquor. Offered in bulk and covering a considerable period such figures may appear to read rather impressively. But Mr Blanchard refrained from giving the figures from year to year, or bringing out the fact, which he cannot have failed to notice, that the arrests for drunkenness have shown an almost continuously steady decline since 1928, when the last prohibition poll was taken, and in 1933 —the last year for which the statistics are available—represented barely more than half the total for 1928. In 1933 the arrests for drunkenness numbered 3499, whereas if we look back somewhat we find that over quite a long period of years the number never fell below 10,000, and in one or two years exceeded 13,000. And the population has increased since then. Mr Blanchard evidently felt no urge, "however, to present the figures in that light, or to show, by reference to official sources of information, how the number of convictions for drunkenness per ten thousand of the population fell away from 52.2 in 1923 to 43.2 in 1928 and 26.7 in 1932. Expressed in that way, the suggestion of financial and moral evil wrought by the liquor traffic in the Dominion would not appear quite so awful as Mr Blanchard has been pleased to depict it. That under prohibition the figures would be reduced to a lower level with compensating benefits to the community is a fairly broad assumption. For clearly it appears that New Zealand has become a distinctly sober country. Whatever political party has been in office, Mr Blanchard asserts, it has felt the power of the liquor interests. How.else, he asks, can the reduction in the excise duty on beer last year be explained? This reintroduces the alleged "gift to the brewers" upon which opponents of the Government dwelt in Parliament. But in the debate on that measure the concession was not unreasonably explained. There was a case for consideration of the excise duty as excessive. "We are anxious," Mr Coates said, "to make satisfactory arrangements for the sale of our local hops." The increase in "home-brew" Mr Blanchard did not mention, nor did he show that harassed business men, groaning under taxation, haye had reason to be troubled about the falling off in revenue from beer duty. Mr Malton Murray's examination of the position in the United States with a view to showing that repeal of prohibition has not made things better there cannot be very illuminating or helpful to anybody. The American people may be allowed to know their own business best, and apparently they are considerably less concerned than are representatives of the New Zealand Alliance to connect the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment with the financial and economic troubles through which their country is passing.