Australians drinking at historic lows? – What lies beneath those stats

Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education Chief Executive, Michael Thorn says that behind the relatively stable apparent consumption of alcohol data, we continue to see an unacceptable level of alcohol harms throughout Australia.

Australians appear to be drinking less alcohol now that any time in the last fifty years, according to the report released last week by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The ABS Apparent Consumption of Alcohol data shows that in 2013-14 there was 183.7 million litres of pure alcohol available for consumption in Australia.

On a per capita basis, that’s 9.7 litres of pure alcohol available per person aged 15 years and over.

Counter intuitively, the news was seized upon by some in the alcohol industry, who were first in line to offer their congratulations.

Perhaps searching desperately for a silver lining, the alcohol industry attempted to interpret the data as proof that problems of alcohol misuse and resulting harms have somehow magically evaporated along with their previous year’s sales records.

According to the Australian Liquor Stores Association “Australians are now having a sensible and mature relationship with alcohol” and “…drinking to success, not to excess.”

I’m not sure Mr Hungry Jack’s, Jack Cowin would agree after his recent altercation with John Singleton at a long boozey lunch.

Australian Hotels Association WA Chief Executive Officer Bradley Woods took to Twitter to claim “the ABS data proves hysteria over alcohol use in Australia is manufactured fear by health lobbyists”.

You would be wise to look past the alcohol industry’s spin.

The apparent consumption of alcohol data is one measure to determine the amount of alcohol available for sale across a country and it is a good indicator of national trends over time.

The welcome decrease in the amount of alcohol that is available for consumption in Australia is a result of a number of factors including an ageing population, migration trends, and young people commencing drinking later.

But it is critical to note that the ABS per capita data includes both abstainers and drinkers and, as such, this generalised measure alone does not provide an accurate picture of how drinkers are consuming alcohol.

Apparent consumption of alcohol data is a crude economic measure that often hides beneath patterns of alcohol consumption and behaviours that lead to significant, and in some cases growing, levels of alcohol-related violence, hospitalisations and deaths.

When examining the ABS apparent consumption of alcohol data, it really is a case of ‘same story, different year’ with the volume of pure alcohol available for consumption per person largely unchanged since the early 1990s. But sadly the same cannot be said for alcohol harms.

It can be of no comfort that Australia’s apparent consumption of alcohol data has remained relatively stable over the last two and a half decades, when at the same time we are witnessing such dramatic increases in harms.

In the Eastern States alone we are seeing 24,457 cases of alcohol-related domestic violence in a 12 month period and over 113,000 alcohol-related hospitalisations.

You won’t find the alcohol industry commenting on this data, but these are the figures we simply can’t ignore.

Alcohol continues to kill 15 Australians each and every day and hospitalises a further 430. Alcohol is responsible for four times as many deaths as our annual road toll.

This is the bigger story, and until we see a significant reduction in these harms there can be no celebration.