Already this week we have had the revelation, if that’s the right word, that we are using our phones more than ever in our cars.

In research that looked at a stretch of road with a 100 kilometres per hour limit, they found a third of us basically broke the law.

And the reason we broke the law, not that it makes it right, because it doesn’t, but the reason we break the law is, because we know we aren't going to get caught because the police by in large don’t police it.

And we have the often offered excuse that we are busy, and life is too short to adhere to every minor rule enforced upon us by officialdom.

If you remember back to when the rule was first enacted, one of the questions we all wondered about out loud was whether anyone was ever going to be doing any enforcing.

And I think the research gives us the answer.

Which leads us to alcohol sales, no-one gets more angsty about booze and laws than local councils.

So they have picked and poked. Hours of availability, rules around specials in supermarkets, localising rules in different areas.

All driven by the broadly based hand-wringing PC view that we are a bunch of boozers and if only they can implement a few more laws, all will be well.

The research has been done, and none of it has made a lot of difference.

As indeed most of us could have and indeed did point out at the time.

Now, to be fair, the research points out that almost every law change has faced legal action by the industry, so they haven't made it easy.

But it does highlight the simple truth that you can't really force people, when it comes to social type behaviours and activities, to fundamentally change the way they behave unless they want to.

So you then need to ask, will the councils and lawmakers ever work that out and save themselves and us the extraordinary amount of time, energy, and money that is spent trying to do something we now know won't work?

Every time a council changes rules there is the discussion document, the submissions, the lawyers, the hearings, the appeals. It's millions upon millions of dollars, and for nothing.

Restricting alcohol displays to a single area of a supermarket hasn’t worked.

banning discounts of more than 25 per cent hasn't worked.

Allowing District Councils to create their own alcohol policies hasn't worked.

The researcher's solution? More education and awareness. Good luck with that, whatever that means.

This is a classic case of theory versus reality, the theory of law versus the reality of its failure.

Is there a point of a lot of laws, if they simply don’t work?