The coun­cil is going to draft a by-law to ban drink­ing in pub­lic places.

But don’t wor­ry, respectable cit­i­zens! It’s not aimed at you! It’s aimed at pesky booz­ers.

Extend­ing the liquor ban would mean we could deal with prob­lems in the sub­urbs. It would­n’t be about stop­ping peo­ple hav­ing a qui­et beer or a glass of wine on the beach or in the park — and the Police are already on the record as say­ing they would use dis­cre­tion.

Anoth­er “x-ing while brown” offence in the mak­ing.

They break bot­tles, yell and swear, vom­it and cre­ate chaos — but there’s noth­ing the Police can real­ly do at the moment about the drink­ing of alco­hol — which is gen­er­al­ly the cause of the prob­lems.

This is a puz­zler. If peo­ple are behav­ing bad­ly, that’s dis­or­der­ly behav­iour. If they’re not, who cares whether they’re drink­ing?

If only there were some­where for hard­core street drinkers to go. Mean­while, wast­ing police time on herd­ing them around the city is appar­ent­ly the only way out.

There’s a Face­book group in oppo­si­tion. Here’s hop­ing that’s just a start.