TAXING BEER IS NOTHING TO QUAFF AT

IT'S AN uneasy, queasy feeling, agreeing with Peter Costello, even if
it is only on one small point. But in the face of TV advertisements
showing decent Aussie blokes forced to turn to raspberry lemonade
because booze has become too pricey, thanks to the GST, he quite
rightly said that if the Government was going to tax children's
clothes and books, it was certainly not going to exempt the old jungle
juice.

Cheers to that, although there are many of us who say that children's
clothes and books should be GST free. But even if they were, alcohol
would be well down the queue of "essentials" - somewhere behind those
big plastic trumpets kids blow at football matches in my book.

The problem with alcohol is that it's a drug and a highly addictive
one. It may be part of our culture, our image and all that "blokedom"
twaddle but, to a huge percentage of people who consume the gazillions
of litres of booze produced in this country every year, it's just a
cheap and readily available means of getting off their faces.

Ask any policeman what drug causes the most problems in Australian
society and they will answer alcohol: no hesitation, no question, no
doubt. Think of the violence both in public and, most chillingly,
behind closed doors. Think of the carnage on the roads. Think of the
health problems, the lost working hours and the damage done to the
social fabric as a whole. Heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and speed aren't
even in the same game, let alone the same league as beer, wine and
spirits.

Now before anybody starts pointing fingers and shouting "wowser",
which is up there with pedophile and One Nation member in the list of
social pariahs, I don't think alcohol should be banned (just as I
don't think heroin should be legalised). A glass of red is good for
the heart, a bottle of chardonnay makes a dinner more of a party and a
couple of beers on a sunny day makes life that little bit more pleasant.

But for heaven's sake, it's not an essential in our lives and it
shouldn't be portrayed as such. Ask the parents of a kid who's wiped
himself and his mates out in a drunken road smash. Ask the women and
children who cower in fear when Daddy comes home tanked up and looking
for an easy victim on whom to take out his inadequacies. Ask the guy
in the gutter who once had a job, a home and a family.

By some curious coincidence, there's been a lot of huffing and puffing
this week about marijuana being sold openly in Kings Cross cafes. Now,
some people see "grass" as the first step on the slippery slope to
hard drugs while others reckon the most dangerous thing about it is
that it's illegal and you can get into trouble for having it. Joe
Cocker, the unwilling voice behind the Government's GST ads, found
that out when he was frog-marched out of the country for possessing
recreational weed all those years ago.

This week in Amsterdam, where marijuana is sold legally, the England
soccer team suffered a humiliating defeat in the European
championships and the Dutch police braced themselves for pitched
battles started by angry English thugs who usually don't need an
excuse anyway.

But apparently the worst that happened was some disgruntled mumblings
when the snack bars ran out of food. Relieved local cops said they
reckoned the England fans, who'd been on the wacky baccy all day, were
just too mellow to do much more about it.

There's a lesson there although I'm sure neither the brewers nor Peter
Costello would agree with me. Phew! I feel better already.