The ban is part of a five-point plan aimed at reducing the estimated $642 million per year cost of alcohol-related harm in the Territory, with new laws giving courts the power to ban repeat problem drinkers from consuming or purchasing alcohol for up to 12 months. The current Alcohol Court will be replaced by a new Substance Misuse Assessment & Referral for Treatment (SMART) Court to deal with people charged with a criminal offence where alcohol or drug abuse is involved.
Identification of 'problem drinkers' will reportedly involve scanning of identification documents every time anyone wants to buy any alcohol in the Territory, with people on the 'banned' register being unable to complete the purchase.
Alcohol Policy Minister Delia Lawrie indicates that inconvenience is a small price to pay to reduce the number of people taken into protective custody for problem drinking.
New legislation will also allow police to ban violent problem drinkers for 48 hours from the Darwin and Palmerston CBDs and the waterfront precinct.
'The Politics of Surveillance: Big Brother on Prozac' by Stuart Waiton in 8(1) Surveillance & Society (2010) [PDF] meanwhile -
explores the rise of CCTV in society during the last two decades. It concentrates on state sponsored surveillance schemes in an attempt to answer the question of why it is that CCTV surveillance emerged at this particular point in history. At one level, advancing technology can allow a ‘surveillance society’ to emerge, yet the extent to which CCTV cameras have spread into city centres and residential areas suggests something more profound has changed in ‘public’ life. The exponential rise in the surveillance of society is often understood to reflect the rise of authoritarianism, perhaps particularly in the UK. Whether from a Weberian, a Foucauldian, or even – and perhaps in particular – a neo-Marxist perspective, this development is often understood as an enforcement of power, resulting from an ideological consensus built around 'rampant' neo-liberalism; public life is, in part, understood to be undermined by private interests, the power of capital, or techniques of governance associated to one degree or another with neo-liberalism. In this paper, the neo-liberal framework for understanding the rise of surveillance is questioned. Building upon arguments by Baudrillard, Lasch, Bauman and Furedi it is argued that, rather than an aggressive and purposeful moral or neo-liberal authoritarianism lying behind the rise of surveillance cameras the opposite is in fact the case. The diminution of 'public' space both reflects and represents the decline of political purpose and meaning within society and especially within the political elite.Overall I was more impressed by Irus Braverman's 'Governing with Clean Hands: Automated Public Toilets and Sanitary Surveillance' [PDF] in the same issue.
Braverman comments that
To anyone familiar with the story of urban decay in major American cities in the 1980s – and with the subsequent abolition of toilets from city streets – the introduction of automated public toilets (APTs) to urban spaces sounds like very good news. This article explores the re-democratizing message that commonly accompanies the introduction of APTs to North American city streets as well as their on-the-ground manifestations. It focuses on two major components of APTs: privatization and automation. The process of privatization, which characterizes most APT operations in North America, carries with it various exclusionary effects that stand in stark contrast to the democratic aspirations of public space. Additionally, the APTs normally feature automated devices, and, most prominently, the auto-flush and the automated faucet and dryer. On the face of things, these devices eradicate the injustices that sometimes accompany human discretion. However, they also conceal the necessarily social and value-ridden human decision making that goes into their design. The article proposes that both the privatization and the automation of public toilets are part of a broader and increasingly expansive sanitary regime, one that imposes a morality in practice on its users. The latter are left with relatively limited options as to how to use the space of the washroom and at times join the nonhuman devices themselves in “kicking-back” at their programmers. By comparing automated toilets with attendant-based ones, the article suggests that the project of sanitary surveillance exemplifies the fluidity between traditional and new forms of surveillance.
