Why does the government hate young people? Or is it that they love us instead?
Why is the driving age going up, along with the drinking age? Will this one day result in the voting age being lifted? The age at which we can get married? The age at which we can legally get naked with someone and touch all their yucky bits?
I can’t imagine what my first two years of university would have been like if the drinking age had been 20 when I was 18. O-Week is pretty much a time to get your drinking legs and test out your limits, even if it’s strongly recommended that you don’t do that.
To take away what many view as a student’s “right”, to leave home and get smashed so badly they performed poorly in their first semester, would just create a new class of criminal. It would be like the old booze-smuggling days in the 1920s and 30s in America, where gangsters would get booze from Canada, run it across the border and sell it for immense profits in America.
Perhaps criminals would find a new market in this illegal booze trade, hanging around the halls of residence on campus, or at the periphery of the university, selling first years bottles of wine for $20 a pop, even if it only cost them $7 to buy from the supermarket.
I think lifting the drinking age, after it being 18 for so long, would be an un-enforceable law. There will always be a twenty year old ready to buy a nineteen year old some beers. I certainly would, in all honesty. If my little brother was turning 18 and still wasn’t able to drink a beer, I would buy him a beer and take him into the woods to enjoy it. I don’t know many Kiwis who wouldn’t do the same.
It would be damaging to the various “student” bars in town, such as Bar101, Bahama Hut and Outback, all of which rely on students drinking in their premises to make money. If these bars shut down or downsized, there would be a flood of unemployed people with the exact same skills. I know several bar staff who are under 20 themselves and may also lose their jobs when the drinking age is lifted to 20. Not that this stops the 14 year old at the video store selling me R18s.
Come to think of it, why aren’t they also putting up the age at which we can buy cigarettes? Or rent out porn? Isn’t there a serious link between young people smoking and chronic health problems, costing the tax payer millions of dollars? How many rapists watched way too much porn from an early age and then went on to commit that most heinous of crimes, rape?
I seriously wish I had more answers for you guys, but I just get more and more questions every time I hear about the government doing something stupid like this. Raising the drinking age isn’t going to stop first and second year uni students drinking, it’ll just push them into the suburbs, keep them away from the ‘controlled’ environment of town and result in a dozen different places the police have to be at once.
So, good work National. You’re a pack of cocks.