Should minors be prosecuted for purchasing alcohol from any licensed premises?

In my opinion there is something wrong where we need to focus on punishment rather than re-education. While in this instance we are discussing alcohol it seems to be the NZ way and really reflects a flaw in our thinking. Drinking is a responsibility and maybe we need to stress more the need to think of the consequences of our actions on others. Fines really have limited affects on young people anyway, and some sort of compelled re-education may work better. It also does not stigmatize a youth for a bad decision their whole working life, and we all make the odd mistake.

On the point of re-education, I think not only minors need to be re-educated but also the likes of older siblings or even friends or acquaintances that are over the age of 18 - from personal experience being school at Wellington Girls', I know a lot of minors actually possess alcohol through older siblings etc. I really stress the importance of the education of anyone affiliated in the way of which could potentially lead to the purchasing of alcohol by minors or for minors.

i have a big enough issue with the "zero" limit for drink driving in youth. "zero" is not really zero and the penalty isn't hard enough. it doesn't stop them either.
You want to penalize minors for purchasing alcohol how did they get it in the first place?
And if they did purchase it and get caught then let's have something set up to educate them and make them think twice about how their drinking can effect everything in their lives.
Why can't we have a half day presentation that they have to attend which displays all the negative things that come from drinking too much. real life cases of people who have drunk too much and killed people whilst drink driving, have got involved in fights with strangers and hurt someone or themselves, gotten violent when drinking and hurt their loved ones. what happens to them over time when drinking too much. what happens when someone spikes your drink or the god awful aftermath of sexual assault. it might be shock tactics but everyone needs to realise what might happen when they drink too much. all youths think it won't happen to them but if you put young people in front of them who thought the same thing but it did happen to them then they might think twice about how much they drink and how it doesn't just effect them but everyone in their life.
And back to who sold them this alcohol in the first place - they are the ones that should be prosecuted, and harshly

For the purposes of this comment I am going to assume there is a way of legally getting somebody to do something without prosecuting them. If I'm wrong, let me know.

I agree with the overall idea that there should be greater personal responsibility for minors purchasing alcohol. However, I also believe that we need to be very careful in the way that this is put in place.

I will below list my thoughs on a number of ways that a greater sense of personal responsibility could be instilled in minors starting with what I think is the worst, fines.

I believe that fines would be the worst possible way to discourage minors from purchasing alcohol. For the most part because the minors in question generally don't have the ability to pay it off by themselves and therefore will turn to thier parents to pay it off instead. Obviously this compleately misses the intention of personal responsibility and instead promotes, somebody else will deal with it. Moving on.

Community service is a better idea than fines but I think that it has a couple of problems that mean there are ideas that would work better. One of these problems is that the 'punishment' doesn't really reflect the 'crime' (I need a better word here) And so while it does create a sense of personal responsibility, to some extent at least, it ignores the education side of the coin which is just as important. I believe that we can combine education and 'punishment' together, as you will see below.

@nikkiline below the idea of a half day presentation that minors who get caught purchasing alcohol have to attend is a good one. However, I don't think that it is the best possible approach. Images and ideas that would be presented in something like this are already being thrown at young people via tv ads, posters at school etc. and simply adding to this wont change anything. I do believe however, that if we take this idea and ramp it up we may be on to something...

Which brings me to my final point. I believe that the idea behind a half day presentation would be excecuted better if it was made much more real. Instead of presenting stories, even with reasonably shocking images and videos, we should show the reality of the situation. Allowing minors to spend a night with the duty officer in the central police station on a saturday night, or helping out at a homeless shelter if there are people there who are there because of reasons involving alcohol, would give a much more vivid face to the problems of alcohol that would stick in their minds. I firmly believe that people can only be told so much and often need to be shown for it to really sink in. We need to do that here.

In summary I believe that prosecution will not work and we instead need to concentrate more on making the problems of alcohol more real for minors rather than just bombarding them with information we are already telling them.

Sean Johnson, 19 years old, 3rd year university student, Wellingotn City Youth Council.

I support the ability to prosecute minors under 243, and equally the people who are supplying minors. This includes parents and others; and there have been a number of examples where parents do supply alcohol irresponsibly to their children (eg, bottles of spirits). The Act also has the ability to do infringements and there could be a progressive scale.

I'm sceptical about education campaigns as they exist already - and prosecutions/infringements are aimed at those that consciously choose to break the law. I do agree with other comments that the campaign should focus on the positive behaviours rather than the negative. Currently the licensee carries the full responsibility for any breaches and have to prove they took all reasonable steps to determine the age.

Would be useful to have some information on the size of the problem of underage drinking in Wgtn (either by purchasing themselves or having others supply it to underage people). May be in the survey - so will have a look there.

With any ability to prosecute or issue an infringement notice there is a degree of discretion and it could be a scaled approach. It's not clear how the prosecutions or any discretion would work on a local level. Is the AMS able to determine the level of discretion that should be applied. I know that infringement notices/prosecution are resource-intensive for Police and they are the only ones who can enforce it. It would have to be supported by other actions

@seanjohnson @clintondenheyer @richardfortune @geraldinemurphy what a rich conversation! The underlying agreement seems strongly set on how we achieve more personal responsibility. Clinton's proposal has created discussion that has refined how this might best happen. You have some choices to make from here. Clinton could close this proposal now as it has done its job. Given the strong views from agree to block it probably won't be the best that can happen, and a new proposal can arise out of the discussion. Perhaps for example, shaped by Sean's last post about community service based on alcohol related environments and their consequences. This is a great way to continuously improve the thinking in the group until you have something that has developed between the collaborators and that everyone is happy with

@gisellebareta do you know of any data that might help answer @geraldinemurphy 's questions regarding the size of the underage drinking problem in Wellington?

@alannakrauseloomiohelper and @geraldinemurphy We don't have Wellington specific data related to this but the last ALAC Youth Drinking Monitor is a good piece of research to refer to for national trends:
http://www.alac.org.nz/sites/default/files/research-publications/pdfs/2009-10-Annual-Summary-Report-FINAL.pdf

I will see if Wellington Police can tell me how many prosecutions under the current Act they have taken against minors and or infringement notices they have issued in the last year and come back to you on this.

Minors shouldn't be prosecuted, for most minors just the confiscation of the alcohol is sufficient punishment.

It doesn't make sense to waste time and money prosecuting them when the retailer could be caught - if there isn't proof of sale the alcohol could have been legally provided by a parent or guardian. This money could be better spent on education and community support.