National Conference votes to keep it 18

Yay. The main floor of the National Party conference just voted (around 60% in favour) to support a remit calling for the purchase age of alcohol to remain 18, but to enforce current law more effectively.

That’s a huge victory, and big ups to the Young Nationals who spoke well in favour of it. To win over the majority of delegates who are almost all aged over 40 is a great testament to the power of logical argument.

The vote is not binding on MPs (the only MPs I saw with their hands up were David Bennett and Nikki Kaye, but I couldn’t see them all) but it will be of some influence that their own party conference basically said that raising the purchase age was the wrong response to the right problem. There was good discussion that a better course of action is to target supply of alcohol to those aged under 18.

They also after the remit announced the results of the board election, The three candidates elected (in order) were Peter Goodfellow, Roger Bridge and Malcolm Plimmer.