Correcting misinformation

Eric Crampton notes:

On Newsroom-RNZ co-production The Detail, Espiner noted that “there’s some debate about what’s official and what’s not official” while damning New Zealand for not following Canadian examples.

While Canada’s official guidelines look similar to ours, Canada’s standard drink measure is 34.5% larger than New Zealand’s. If we take that into account, Canada’s low-risk guidelines are more liberal than New Zealand’s. Three standard Canadian drinks is four standard New Zealand drinks.

If New Zealand followed Canada’s example, we would be relaxing our guidelines rather than tightening them. And Canada’s guidelines have not changed since 2011. …

No-one listening to that NZ On Air funded episode of The Detail will know that industry intervention helped to correct an error. Or that, if we followed Canada’s actual example, our low-risk threshold would increase from 15 to 20 standard New Zealand drinks per week.

About five years ago, misinformation was almost a capital crime. Times change.

It is terrible that false information on a government website was corrected. This is clearly wrong. False information is good, if it comes from the right people.

We see another interesting example around pregnancy labels. Alcohol Healthwatch did a report which claimed 34% of alcohol products had no pregnancy warning label on them. They refuse to release details of which retailers they surveyed.

This so alarmed the Alcohol Beverages Council, that they commissioned an audit of a retail store where all 1,756 products were checked. They found 99.3% of products had correct labelling. They are able to provide full details of the store and the audit.

A key issue is that the requirement for labelling only came in on 1 August 2023, so products manufactured before then do not have to have the label. So while almost all beers will have the label, many wine and whiskeys etc which are often sold after they have aged will be on the shelves for a while.