A great night for a great victory
Oh dear, I really should be past punishing myself by getting in close to 4 am, but if one can’t celebrate defeating a drinking age bill, what can you celebrate???
Will post more details tomorrow, but the bill to raise the age to 20 was defeated by a huge margin 49 votes to 72. A week ago it was looking to comfortably pass the second reading. It wasn’t until around 1 pm today that I felt confident that the bill would be defeated. The Govt’s announcement of a review into liquor supply to minors came at around 3 pm and probably helped with a few additional votes, but the numbers were already there prior to that announcement. Just checked how MPs voted against how we thought they would vote and we had a 95% accuracy rate which is pretty bloody good,
For those interested, how each party voted was:
Labour 15 – 35
National 20 – 28
NZ First 7 – 0
Greens 0 – 6
Maori 4 – 0
United 2 – 1
ACT 0 – 2
Progressive 1 – 0
After the vote around 20 of us headed up to 3.2 (the parliamentary bar) to celebrate. Minor problem was it had closed for the night but we got it re-opened. There for a couple of hours and then seven or so hard-core decided that the Green Parrot was the compulsory next stop.
Lots of food and drink at the Green Parrot. Very good as always even though I missed not having the normal complimentary plates of bread. After a while there we then headed to Courtenay Place and settled into Kitty’s where we met up with some Vic Debating Society students. Was rather funny at 3.00 am when my phone started ringing and I then realised it was my normal wake-up alarm call!
Had a guy in the pub come up to us and congratulate us for helping keep the age at 18 as he said he was there with his 17 year old daughter and he couldn’t wait until she was 18 so she could go by herself. He didn’t fancy having to babysit here for a further two years!
At one point the group had three Jordans. A National Jordan, a Labour Jordan and an ACT Jordan. Far too many to cope with.
Has been a great experience working with everyone who was involved in the Keep It 18 campaign. A really good team effort. More details to follow after some sleep!! 🙂