Temperance zealots are setting the nation’s drinking guidelines

Joe Aston Columnist

Feb 5, 2020 — 12.00am

AFR

We return to the militant league that is Greg Hunt’s National Health and Medical Research Council.

The NHMRC’s new, draft guidelines for recommended safe alcohol intake were drawn up by its Alcohol Working Committee, a body utterly captured by temperance zealots. Its leading members are not just abstinence crusaders, but professional deniers of the thoroughly established science of moderate drinking’s cardioprotective effects. The Bjørn Lomborgs of public health.

NHMRC chief executive Anne Kelso presides over a monstrously ideological Alcohol Working Committee. Jeremy Piper

We’ve previously mentioned the academic research of committee member Tanya Chikritzhs, which contends, absurdly, that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.

And another, Emily Banks, has been accused by peers of ignoring evidence of lower mortality in moderate drinkers than teetotallers.

But we skipped blithely past Michael Livingston, whose research is now funded by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education. FARE was seeded in 2001 with $115 million (of a Commonwealth beer excise hike collected, then blocked by the Senate) and legislated orders to spend it all on alcohol abuse treatment and prevention by 2005. Instead, its governors set up a Capital Fund that now spits out annual income of $4.2 million, $2.5 million of which is soaked up by the salaries of FARE’s staff and directors.

Better yet, Livingston undertook his PhD on a scholarship jointly funded by the Australian Rechabite Foundation. The Rechabite movement was established in 1835 to promote total abstinence from alcohol. While the Rechabites played no role in the design, conduct or reporting of his doctoral studies, Livingston did thank them in his thesis, not just for their “financial support” but also their “enthusiasm … at the various scholarship events”, which he found “gratifying and motivating”. A motivating interest that Livingston never declared during his recruitment to the NHMRC committee.

Dr Livingston even joined the ARF’s board, where he remains. He did declare that.

He denies the PhD funding constitutes a declarable interest – as does, reportedly, the NHMRC itself. How they suppose that is entirely beyond us.

Under Section 42A of the NHMRC Act, committee members “must give to the CEO a written statement of any interest the member has that may relate to any activity of the Council or committee”. A system in which any interest is annulled simply by its disclosure is patently idiotic, but whatever.

Full to bursting with this manner of expert, is it any wonder the committee is producing public advisories so unfastened from credible science and medicine? Can you imagine the (justifiable) uproar were these positions instead filled by card-carrying urgers for the liquor industry? The ideological capture here is monstrous.

Livingston, incidentally, is politically active, spending May 18 “handing out [how-to-vote cards] at Fawkner Primary with a big squad of Greens [volunteers]. Gearing up for my first ever scrutineering shift and then (hopefully) watching [Minister Hunt’s Cabinet colleague] Peter Dutton … get turfed out.” No such luck.