Alcohol policies are better in Australia than in Aotearoa

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-02-24 03:00

Australia; New Zealand; International

West Midlands Police, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

An analysis of alcohol policies across eight high-income countries finds New Zealand lags behind the rest, and Australia is only a little better. Researchers weighted the strictness and impact of policies on trading hours, outlet locations, pricing, marketing, and drink driving, across seven countries and four Canadian provinces. Aotearoa had the best score for affordability, with alcohol being relatively more expensive, but scored lowest for strictness of policy overall followed by Australia. The impact of Australian and NZ policies was also lower than in all jurisdictions except the four Canadian provinces. The researchers say their approach is a useful way to monitor and compare alcohol policy between jurisdictions.

Expert Reaction

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Professor Sally Casswell, Professor of Public Health and Social Research and Director, SHORE & Whariki Research Centre, Massey University

An international policy index was used to assess how well seven countries and four Canadian provinces ranked in terms of putting in place the alcohol policies known to be effective to reduce alcohol harm.

"Unfortunately, New Zealand scored at the bottom. This reflected our lack of regulation of alcohol marketing and a below average score on hours and days of sale. Our drink driving legislation scored well as did that of the others in the study. Our best score came in pricing of cheap alcohol relative to income and this reflected the regular inflation adjustment to alcohol tax.

"Australia did somewhat better than us and the top scorers were Lithuania, Norway, Finland and Ireland.

Last updated: 21 Feb 2025 10:42am

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Declared conflicts of interest Professor Casswell is lead author of this paper

Journal/
conference: Drug and Alcohol Review

Organisation/s: Massey University, La Trobe University

Funder: The data collection in Aotearoa NZ and analysis for this study was funded by Te Whatu Ora, Health New Zealand.

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