NZ Cricket disregarding community boundaries in Saxton sponsorship saga
When it comes to healthy and respectful relationships, consent is an essential ingredient, not just with interpersonal relationships, but in relationships between organisations, institutions, and communities too.
Nelson City and Tasman District councils, as co-owners of the magnificent Saxton Oval sporting facilities, are under tremendous pressure to remove protections from alcohol advertising contained in the publicly consulted Saxton Field Reserve Management Plan.
Having been granted a temporary exemption by Nelson and Tasman last October, it seems NZ Cricket is once again threatening to throw its toys out of the cot if they are not granted further exemptions.
It seems they won’t take no for an answer. It’s just not cricket.
Alcohol is incredibly harmful. Not just a little bit harmful, alcohol is New Zealand’s most harmful drug. Drinkers are harmed through a huge range of medical conditions, cancers, dependence, accident, and psychological disorders.
Other people are harmed through trauma and injury, traffic accidents, crime, sexual violence, family harm, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Meanwhile all of society is harmed through direct costs such as healthcare, police, prisons, social services, and indirect costs such as loss of productivity and absenteeism.
More than a quarter of deaths by suicide in New Zealand between July 2007 and December 2020 involved acute alcohol use.
Alcohol marketing matters because it is a cause of youth drinking – we know this because it has been established by rigorous criteria, that determine causal links between environmental exposures and disease.
Increased exposure to alcohol marketing, including sponsorship of sports, increases the risk of children drinking at earlier ages. Children exposed to more frequent alcohol marketing drink more, and drink more hazardously.
In New Zealand, children are exposed to alcohol marketing about 4.5 times per day, with sports sponsorship accounting for about a third of that. It won’t be any surprise that Māori (five times higher) and Pacific (three times higher) children face much higher rates of exposure than New Zealand European children.
Not every child who starts drinking early will go on to develop an alcohol use disorder, or settle into patterns of hazardous drinking, but of those who do develop alcohol use disorders, half will have done so by age 20, and 70 per cent by age 25.
Given the serious harms caused by alcohol, and the significant costs borne by society, it is perfectly reasonable for communities to take some modest actions to prevent some of these harms occurring.
Perfectly reasonable local measures like the kind in place at Saxton Oval means children won’t be plied with messages about alcohol’s place in society while they are enjoying a cricket match.
In the 1990s, our parliament acted to remove tobacco sponsorship from sport, including cricket. Last year our Parliament dropped the ball on removing alcohol sponsorship from broadcast sports as recommended by Kiwis league legend Sir Graham Lowe back in 2014.
The pressure that NZ Cricket is exerting comes without any guarantee of more cricket matches. Even without the policy on alcohol advertising there was a fiveyear gap between international matches at Saxton Oval.
Saxton Oval is a fantastic venue for international cricket and would be even more attractive for families if NZ Cricket respected community boundaries and put their alcohol signs away for the day.
NZ Cricket and its alcohol sponsors can respect the Nelson and Tasman communities by acting in good faith and having fantastic cricket events without alcohol branding present. They have options.
The Saxton Field Management Committee has a public meeting on Tuesday at 9.30am, in the Heaphy Room at the Tasman District Council building at 189 Queen St, Richmond.
The committee is independently chaired by Derek Shaw, with Cr Brent Maru and Cr Jo Ellis serving on the committee for Tasman District, with Cr Campbell Rollo and Cr Tim Skinner serving on behalf of Nelson City. Anyone wishing to speak at the meeting should register their interest at least 48 hours in advance.
I’m sure they would love to hear what locals have to say on the issue.