A National Disgrace!

Australians woke today to the news that the National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC) had lowered their recommended maximum weekly alcohol intake from fourteen standard drinks to ten.

Seriously, ten standard drinks.

And a standard drink isn’t even a proper drink, like a schooner or a decent glass of vino. It’s a middy or bloody thimble of wine. What’s the point?

Who the damn hell do the NHMRC think they are, making recommendations that no-one asked for, and will have no effect other than to put thousands out of work? Brewers, wine producers, hoteliers and their staff, Accident and Emergency workers, booze bus police, drug and alcohol counsellors. Do the NHMRC think about any of these people and their livelihoods when coming up with their do-gooding drivel?

All that is bad enough, but what these wowser proclamations truly obscure is something far more insidious. Alcohol is not just a pleasant intoxicant and powerful social bonding tool, it is actually a measure of a nation’s vitality.

I remember reading an account written by a Hanse or Lombard merchant who had occasional dealings with the Vikings. He was deeply impressed by their vigour and capacity for random violence but was staggered to note that they were always drunk.

Always.

He could turn up at breakfast and the Vikings would already be smashed, and yet these same drunken oafs conquered all of northern Europe, discovered America, settled Iceland and Greenland, made incredible advances in shipbuilding, navigation, diplomacy, metallurgy, farming and invented their own runic form of writing.

Not bad for a bunch of early medieval pissheads.

They were going just fine until some idiot replaced all their cool gods, like Thor and Loki – full on drinking gods who knew how to have a good time – with mono-bloody-theism with its devoutness and abstinence. The Viking empire dwindled in direct proportion with the demise of their drinking culture.

Now Scandinavia is a teetotal basket case, infested with Lutherans and other non-drinking nonentities – and the NHMRC is trying to do the same to Australia!

We are being invited down the same nanny state path that led the Vikings to oblivion and I for one won’t stand for it.

I am calling for an increase in minimum weekly alcohol intake, from fourteen standard drinks up to thirty. Thirty proper drinks – not your standard thimbles!

Let’s get Australia moving again, filled with the spirit that drove the Vikings (and the Romans before them) to such incredible advances.

And if all that doesn’t convince you, let’s not forget that Hitler was a teetotaller.

Is that what you want NHMRC? A return to National Socialism?

Because only a bloody Nazi would want Australians to stop drinking.

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