Legalities

There's been all this wrangling in NZ over the drinking age recently. It's only been in recent years that the drinking age has been lowered from 20 to 18, but 'young drunks' have been getting a lot of press recently. (Even though 65% of heavy drinkers in NZ are aged over 30).

Still - they voted on raising the drinking age back to 20 the other day. Sense prevailed though and the MPs here realised that there were better ways to tackle drunkeness and kept the age at 18. Much like the UK, young drinkers here will find a way to get alcohol even if the law changed.

Anyway - the UK and NZ's drinking age might be the same, but there are some strange differences in other cases. For example - the legal driving age here is 15. Which maybe wouldn't be so bad, but you don't have to have car insurance in NZ, which means you have 15 year olds driving round in highly revved cars. Not a great mix.

Even more bizarre though is the age you can buy fireworks over here. Again - it's something that's been in the news a lot recently as NZ also celebrates Bonfire Night, so seasonal round of firework injuries, etc had been the news diet.

But, what can I say? What good is banning rockets when you let 14 year olds buy fireworks??? They have somne strange ideas in this country I can tell you that!