According to a post I discovered on TheShout.com, the Australian people are becoming increasingly annoyed at hearing messages about the woes of alcohol which anti-alcohol activists are pushing on people. According to a political commentator people are sick of hearing how excessive alcohol consumption is bad for them.

This is a problem because when people become tired of hearing the message, they will begin to ignore the message and this will exacerbate the problems associated with binge drinking such as alcohol fuelled brawls.

Read what the post had to say:

Australians are sick of being preached to by anti-alcohol activists, argues political commentator Christian Kerr.

 Kerr this week penned a column for The Australian arguing that preventative health is too heavily influenced by ideology rather than hard evidence. He told TheShout that Australians are starting to see through activists’ agendas and he forecasted that the ‘nanny-state’ will become an election issue.

 “Australians don’t like wowsers,” Kerr said. “We are basically a common-sense lot, and don’t like people telling us how to live our lives.

 “If Australians feel as though they are being preached to, they either switch off or rebel.

 “Public health advocates should remember this, or risk a backlash and people ignoring messages.”

 AHA (NSW) CEO Paul Nicolaou added: “These groups won’t be happy until we are all vegetarians living in solar powered huts drinking nothing but water and eating nothing but tofu.”

 “Bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy – the perfect example of interest groups trying to justify their existence.”

Source: http://www.theshout.com.au/2013/01/23/article/Australians-switching-off-to-wowsers/THGHTJXBUR.html

Unfortunately the alcohol fuelled problems are not stopping which presents an even bigger problem. If people are no longer willing to listen to the experts and continue to abuse alcohol at their current rate, authorities will be forced to take even further action. Strategies such as sobering centres could become more common and spread across the country. Also police will be forced to take a stronger stance against people drinking in public and the alcohol fuelled violence that has followed it.

Although the post insists that Aussies are a sensible lot, we cannot generalise. A culture of excessive drinking has been entrenched in our society and it is because of this handful of alcohol abusers that we are inundated with messages of alcohol’s ability to cause harm.

Of course servers of alcohol, like bartenders, waitrons and liquor store sales people play a crucial role in the fight against this anti-social behaviour. This can be done by limiting the amount of alcohol sold to any one customer and never providing alcohol to unduly intoxicated patrons. Another important consideration is ensuring they do not serve alcohol to anyone under the legal drinking age.

They should also make every attempt to help people get home safely by encouraging them to call a taxi or take public transport to prevent drink driving and loitering which has been shown to contribute to alcohol fuelled violence in many areas. Even security staff of licenced venues has a role to play in combatting these problematic issues, and must undergo Responsible Service of Alcohol training so that the messages that dominate our media about the dangers of alcohol consumption can soon come to an end.