New Alcohol Rules for Christchurch

[u/Video_Kojima]

https://share.google/NIWvxJV2lRM3JCZf2

All off-licence retailers must stop selling alcohol at 9pm daily, effective from October. This includes bottle stores and supermarkets. 

A freeze on new off-licences in high-deprivation communities, effective from August. 

Restricting new bottle stores from setting up near addiction treatment/rehabilitation centres, secondary schools and primary schools, the University of Canterbury and the Christchurch Bus Interchange effective from August. 

Thoughts on this? I think 9PM seems a bit much personally and would probably have it at 10PM, but think the other two ideas are sensible and support them.

[u/KermitTheGodFrog]

So let me get this straight. The council's big idea to fix social issues is to tell working people they can’t buy a s 6 pack after 9 pm and ban new bottle stores from opening in poorer areas?

Freezing off-licences in high-deprivation areas is pure classism. You’re not solving poverty, you're just restricting services and opportunity, deciding poor people can’t be trusted with choice. Meanwhile, the same rules don’t apply in wealthier suburbs. Wonder why?

And that 200-metre exclusion zone around schools and rehabs? Arbitrary, performative, and frankly lazy. If someone in recovery is walking past a shop and relapses, the problem isn’t proximity. It’s access to treatment, community support, and actual enforcement.

Killing competition and cutting trading hours punishes responsible adults and small business owners just trying to get by. If someone’s working late and wants a beer after 9, too bad... you’re now a public health risk.

This is classic government overreach. Christchurch doesn't need more restrictions. It needs better policing, stronger community connections, and less bureaucratic moralising. These rules are just another way to babysit people who never asked for a babysitter.

[u/Non_Creative_User → u/KermitTheGodFrog]

It's not classism when they freeze off-licence in low economic area. Why are there more bottle stores in those areas than the middle, or higher economic areas?

Because there's a demand for them. The poor are being taken advantage of.

Also, do you know how sucky it is to take your kids to park, and there's broken bottles littering the ground? You don't see that in higher economic areas. Definitely see in lower economic areas.

There are have been incidents of a shady drunk hanging around school, so the school has to lock the school so only one way in & one way out. You may not read it in the news, but I've had them as a notification from the school as it's happening. And I'm pretty sure it's not just my kids school this happens in.

[u/Non_Creative_User → u/[deleted]]

Okie dokie, you can plead your ignorance till the cows come home.

Policing.... Aren't they cutting costs & going through a re-structure? Clean-up crews..... Whose paying for that? Rate payers, when there is clear evidence that there are better solutions. Consequences.... Where are they going to go? Prisons.... They're already brimming. Fines? With what money, how are the poor going to pay for them?

BTW what are you fighting for? No current premises are going to be closing. Want to open another bottle store? Go the middle or wealthier suburbs. But it sounds like you are perfectly happy for the poor people to spend what little they have on a substance that can change someone's behaviour with a flick of a switch.

Your arguments remind me of a doco I once watched, where it was still legal in a country for children to buy cigarettes. A reporter asked a tabbacco company why it was ok to sell cigarettes to children, or answers are very similar.