Once again Parliament is obsessed with binge.

Specifically, protecting teenage girls from binge.

The corridors run knee deep in righteousness. In the Senate they are having an alcohol-free day.*

One by one, the Greens and Nick Xenophon have been peeled off by the Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, and wooed back into the Government fold.

By yesterday afternoon this left the Family First senator, Steve Fielding, drinking alone in the Last Chance Saloon.

Fielding, to the best of anyone's knowledge, is not a big drinker. Like Xenophon, who says he has never been drunk, Fielding can assert some superiority over the feckless boozers who otherwise dominate the parliamentary landscape, journalists included, of course.

But in the Senate yesterday he sounded alarmingly like a late-night patron arguing against the closure of the pool table.

"This is a joke. A basket case. Seriously, this is a joke," he sputtered, delivering the latest in what is becoming a gripping series of Senate ravings.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/it-takes-a-lot-to-save-nanny-roxon-from-a-selfinflicted-binge-20090317-9104.html

Yes Steve, it’s a joke alright …. & your it …

Your refusal to back the 70 per cent tax hike on ready-to-drink alcoholic beverages because the government wouldn’t agree to your demand for a ban on alcohol advertising during daytime sports broadcasts will mean that Alcopops are likely to be cheaper within weeks, with almost $300 million likely to be returned to distillers because the government's tax hike on pre-mixed drinks was defeated.

The cost of alcopops, popular with young drinkers, will now fall by between 30 cents & $1.30 a bottle. A case of Vodka Cruisers will cost about $25 less.

And out the window go the government’s agreement to legislate for warning labels on alcohol containers & an end to self-regulation of alcohol advertising.

Yes Steve, Australians will see the joke … a sick joke …. that one nutter politician, elected to the Senate on the vote of less than 60,000 people (less than 2% of eligible voters) can frustrate the efforts of the elected government to achieve some meaningful level of control over this major social problem.