Evidence based party?

Gareth Morgan's TOP party wants to hike the alcohol purchase age to 20.

The purchasing age was lowered to 18 from 20 in 1999.

"It was lowered in 1999 to appease the alcohol lobby, and we were promised at the time that if evidence showed harm went up after the change they would reverse it," Morgan said.

"All of the evidence, all of the reports, have pointed unambiguously to harm going up."

All of the evidence, all of the reports.

Here's the best report on the subject:

Note too that the Boes & Stillman results cast severe doubt on prior work using RDD designs to extrapolate harms from the discontinuity at the purchase age. And their 2013 paper shows no particular effect on other harms.

Meanwhile, their overall policy cites the BERL report on the social costs of alcohol. Egads.