Nanny wins the day. Again.

The Nanny State is on the march again, with parliament voting 114 to 3 last night to make access to the demon drink more difficult, and life for its would-be sellers more onerous.

And disgracefully, the only serious opposition to the bill came from wowsers demanding even more busybodying than even this bill made possible.

The bill’s author, Simon Power-Lust, must have been giddy with delight as he celebrated the its win in Bellamy’s.  The only serious parliamentary opposition he encountered to running Geoffrey Palmer’s Attack-the-Proles programme was from wowsers who wanted to make it worse.

Meanwhile, as the world’s economies collapse in a welter of sovereign debt and currency wars—and businesses in these tiny islands struggle to keep their heads above water, from Bellamy’s came the cry that “This government sees overhauling our alcohol laws as a priority…”!

Lindsay Perigo states the case plainly:

Power-lust is More Harmful than Alcohol!
The 114 MPs who voted today in favour of the Alcohol Reform Bill should be drowned on the floor of the House in a flood of the sickliest, sweetest plonk available, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo.
    “The Bill is yet another assault on individual liberty by an array of unedifying authoritarian specimens haunted by the fear, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, that somebody, somehow, somewhere may just be managing to enjoy himself with an alcoholic beverage,” says Perigo.
    “It bans corner dairies from selling liquor. It raises the purchasing age to 20 in supermarkets and bottle stores. It bans alcohol products which are 'dangerous or particularly appealing to youth,' without specifying what these might be. It bans the 'promotion of the excessive consumption of alcohol'—meaning, in all likelihood, that Happy Hours will be criminalised. In the words of today's illiterate press release from Injustice Mistress Simone de Power-Lust, it 'makes licences harder to get and easier to loose [sic].'
    “…If this striped-skirted wannabe-dominatrix wishes to know why many youth binge-drink she need look no further than the airhead in her own office who doesn't know the difference between 'loose' and 'lose' any more than she does. The crippling of the minds of youngsters by the state education system has produced more than one generation of airheads and slobs who drink exactly as you'd expect airheads and slobs to drink. The fanatical hostility among our educators to reason and civilised values generally, which hostility reached its apogee when National's Lockwood Smith was Minister of Education, is what has produced Generation Airhead and the drinking habits one would expect of the conceptually-damaged.
    “Prohibition and wowserism are not the solution. The solution is to treat and respect citizens as the self-governing adults they inherently are; most will work their way through the damage and rise to the occasion. Even those who do not should become the government's concern only when they commit crimes against others.
    “Removing the vicious influence of nanny-statist, control-freak, power-addicted dregs like De Power-Lust from our lives would be a significant step towards a culture that respects individual sovereignty. Such a culture will assuredly sport alcohol without anarchy,” Perigo concludes.

One power-luster is more damaging than a hundred alcoholics.

The Nanny State is worse for all of us than a thousand necrotic livers.

A few lessons that a few wowsers, and their apologists, need to take to heart.

And who voted against this atrocity?  Just three heroic stand-alones.  The parliament’s so-called party of freedom barely manages a rump for their founding principles these days, with both ACT Party leader Rodney Hide and deputy John Boscawen casting their votes with the majority for more power-lust and less freedom.

Just another indication of what most ACT supporters should have worked out about their former party long ago.