An absurd and deceitful Goliath

This week the alcohol industry, aided and abetted by The Australian’s columnist, Troy Bramston took aim at the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.

Pulling questionable double duty as both journalist and columnist, covering the same story on the same day (one can only assume that cutbacks at News Limited’s flagship are starting to bite), Troy Bramston would have you believe the alcohol industry is a limping, powerless underdog, robbed of its rightful role to determine public health policy.

Today on Drink Tank, FARE Chief Executive, Michael Thorn, explains why Troy Bramston’s opinion piece (It’s my party and I’ll drink if I want to, 3 June 2013) leaves him flattered, disappointed, but ultimately not surprised.

I’m flattered that the Goliath that is Australia’s multi-billion dollar alcohol industry is reportedly running scared of Australian public health professionals, academics, consumer groups, charities and grassroots campaigners.

I’m disappointed that newspaper columnist Troy Bramston sees fit to so willingly echo and embrace the rhetoric and language of the alcohol industry.

But I’m frankly not at all surprised that after repeatedly failing to play the ball, the alcohol industry instead continues to play the man. They have form in this regard.

Despite Bramston’s insights gleaned from a supposed ‘secret report’, (a report so ‘secret’ it was provided to him by the very organisation that commissioned it), there’s really nothing new here, and even less that’s factually correct.

Bramston’s central thesis is that the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE), and the other public health sector organisations, academics and individuals have, as a group, undue influence of government alcohol policy.

Let’s dismiss the absurdity of the assertion that despite the alcohol industry’s intense lobbying and deep pockets, and despite its existing and well known ties to State and Federal political parties and politicians, the alcohol industry somehow struggles to be heard.

Instead, ask yourself who should be helping guide Government alcohol policy – policy that has the over-riding purpose of reducing the harms from alcohol use and misuse?

Not the alcohol industry, and for good reason.

The alcohol industry is in the business of selling alcohol and making a profit doing it. In an average year, Australians purchase liquor products worth $9.3 billion and almost half as much again from bars, restaurants, pubs and clubs.

The alcohol industry’s self-interest and conflict is clear. In the business of increasing sales and profits, the alcohol industry refuses to support effective, evidence-based policies proven to reduce harms, because those policies threaten its own bottom line.

Unable to refute either the extent of national alcohol-related harms, or the evidence which points to how best to reduce the harms, the industry instead attempts to shoot the messenger.

A scaremongering alcohol industry is quick to accuse FARE of being ‘anti-alcohol’ in the hope that such a label might stick.

It hasn’t and it won’t because it is at odds with the truth. A fierce defender of the public interest, FARE is neither anti-alcohol, nor prohibitionist.

‘Anti-alcohol industry’ would be closer to the truth, in as much as FARE’s advocacy puts it in direct conflict with an alcohol industry hell bent on sales and profits to the exclusion of all else.

Aided willingly by the Troy Bramstons of the world, the alcohol industry would also very much like to reframe this discussion as a question of individual rights, and suggest this is a question of competing ideologies.

And again the industry would be wrong.

The harms from other people’s drinking exact too heavy a toll for this debate to be dismissed so deceitfully.

367 deaths, 14,000 hospitalisations, 70,000 victims of alcohol-related violence, 24,000 victims of alcohol-related domestic abuse and almost 20,000 victims of alcohol-related child abuse each year.

There is no moral panic here.

The alcohol industry would also have you ignore the 3500 deaths each year from alcohol-related injury and disease, and the 100,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions.

But that heavy toll cannot be ignored.

FARE believes reducing the harms from alcohol use and misuse is a cause worth fighting for.

FARE is proud to be at the forefront of efforts to convince governments to resist the intense lobbying of a powerful and self-interested alcohol industry and instead, act in the public interest.