Australian politics and law are a gold mine for most any topic you wish to compare and contrast. I have mentioned more than a few things antipodean hereabouts but today I came across a story with a number of new cultural points of difference:

A total ban on takeaway alcohol in Fitzroy Crossing will not be introduced by the State Government because of claims it is impossible to get drunk on the maximum 2.7 per cent alcohol content to be sold under a crackdown in the Kimberley town. For six months, residents will be allowed to buy only takeaway lowstrength beer under tough liquor restrictions proposed by WA director of liquor licensing Barry Sergeant. Indigenous Affairs Minister Michelle Roberts said you would probably drown before you got drunk on the low-strength beer.

At the end of the six-month trial, there would be an opportunity to extend the ban on full-strength beer once the impact of the moratorium had been reviewed. Fitzroy Crossing community members have suggested that the proposed ban would result in greater social harm, including an increase in sly grogging, more road accidents and increased criminal activity.

OK, first things first. "Sly grogging" is apparently the illegal transport bootlegging of alcohol into a dry district like that of sadly troubled Fitzroy Crossing. But the real news is apparently that it is a matter of government policy that a human cannot get drunk on 2.7% beer. You can read more about the Honourable Michelle Roberts here on the government website for the State of Western Australia.

I, for one, am pretty sure I could get quite snoggelled on 2.7% beer given time, opportunity and thirst but that political claim got me to recalling another brash position taken by another voice of Australian governance in the 1980 case of R. v. O'Connor before the High Court of Australia. The case turned on the fine point of whether one could be so drunk as not to be criminally responsible and whether a jury could be left to decide. The ruling includes this passage by Chief Justice Barwick:

A distrust of jurors and an anxiety that they may too readily be persuaded to an acquittal if evidence of the result of self-induced intoxication, particularly by drugs other than alcohol, were allowed, may have formed some part of the public policy on which the decision rests. I may say at once that I have, of course, no experience of English juries: but I have of juries in New South Wales. Starke J., a most experienced judge in the hearing of criminal charges in Victoria, having had as well a long and distinguished career as an advocate, expressed himself in the present case in relation to the impact of evidence of intoxication upon Victorian jurors. He said:

"I, of course, have no knowledge of how English juries react. But over nearly forty years' experience in this State I have found juries to be very slow to accept a defence based on intoxication. I do not share the fear held by many in England that if intoxication is accepted as a defence as far as general intent is concerned the floodgates will open and hordes of guilty men will descend on the community."

I share his views, as if they had been expressed about jurors in New South Wales. In my opinion, properly instructed jurors would be scrupulous and not indulgent in deciding an issue of voluntariness or of intention. Indeed, I am inclined to think that they may tend to think that an accused who had taken alcohol and particularly other drugs to the point of extreme intoxication had brought on himself what flowed from that state of intoxication.

My professor - lo, those many years ago - asked we first year keeners what was really being said there. What is all this stuff about the reaction of English jurors as opposed to the fine jurors of Victoria and New South Wales. He suggested that the underlying concept is that Australians would have a far more comfortable personal rough and tumble manly experience of being quite hammered and would, therefore, have no problem with the weighing of evidence of and arguments around the state of mind of an accused. The same, evidently, could not be held for the somewhat less rough and tumble jurors of England if the state of the law at that time was to be believed.

Point? It is one thing to have a national bravado about one's national capacity as it relates to the drink. But it is quite another to have it raise to the point of political principle or legal rule. Accordingly, I give you - Australia!

[You all in response, accompanied by clinking of glasses: Australia!!!]