St Michael's Church Hall

Christchurch

I want to thank Brendon Burns for organising this meeting tonight and to all of the people who have agreed to make a contribution as part of the panel and to participate in what is an important debate.

I want to begin my contribution by quoting my husband. Some of you will have heard me say it before, but I think it is important to remind ourselves when discussing the law, that it is only ever one element of a total package that must be devised to address the problem at hand. My husband says: ‘red lights don’t stop trains’. In other words laws in themselves don’t stop people from doing things – if that were the case we would have no one in front of the courts and no one in prison. Laws tell people what is unacceptable and what will happen to them if they are caught and convicted. Some laws are more effective as a deterrent than others. Essentially that comes down to whether people think before they act – and if they do – it is the risk of getting caught and the consequences – what in commercial terms would be called a cost benefit analysis.

That being said there is no question that the law is important. It draws boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not; it defines what the community will tolerate and what it will not. However, the questions we need to address as a community go wider than the law.

Because the law does not of itself prevent certain behaviour, it is important that those that can really influence the behaviour are willing to act.

And it is in this context that it is important that people realise that more alcohol is consumed away from licensed premises than on licensed premises and that most alcohol supplied to young people is said by them to be supplied to them by their parents.

This leads me to my first point - the Sale of Liquor Act does not contain a drinking age and never has. It restricts the sale or supply of liquor to people over 18 years of age. There isn't even a law against supplying liquor to an under 18 year old – the offence is purchasing or acquiring it with the intention of supplying it to someone under 18. An absolute stranger to you as a parent can ply your 16 year old daughter with alcohol, but as long as he didn't buy it with the intention of supplying it to her, he has committed no offence. It's not even illegal for under 18 year olds to drink alcohol at unsupervised places even though they are not old enough to buy it and even though they would be committing an offence if they were drinking in restricted areas of licensed premises or were trying to buy it themselves.

So question number one is, does the present law actually send mixed messages?

It was my preference for seeing 18 & 19 years olds in supervised environments rather than non-supervised environments that led me to support standardising the Sale of Liquor Act age to 18 years. I say standardise the age, because there were many exceptions that allowed 18 & 19 year olds to drink on licensed premises before the last changes. The benefit of licensed premises is that they have to supervise patrons because they are required by law not to serve patrons if they are intoxicated. These protections do not exist in unsupervised environments.

I am now not so sure about the decision to reduce the age for off-licence purchases to be 18 years of age. I don't think I personally appreciated that the offence wasn't to supply it to someone under 18, but to purchase or acquire with the intention to do so.

I believe we could send a very clear signal about the need for supervision as far as alcohol goes by increasing the off-licence age and/or introducing an explicit offence against supplying alcohol to someone who is under 18 years of age.

There is another change that I would like to see and that is addressing what I would call the normalisation of alcohol as an ordinary commercial product. As Minister of Commerce I am responsible for our competition laws. These exist so that consumers are not subject to unfair pricing for example through collusion between competitors. It looks like complete nonsense when the competition authority warns health bodies and councils against price-fixing when all they are trying to do is to get owners of bars to agree not to have discount drinks after a certain time at night.

I have seen the correspondence and I can see the frustration of 'commercialism gone mad'. But can I sound a note of caution. In Australia the competition authority was criticised for daring to challenge the supermarkets for colluding over the price of alcohol in the Northern Territories because they were helping the Aboriginal people by pricing products out of their reach. A closer examination of the products that had had their prices increased exposed the lie that this was – they had increased prices on products the aboriginal people were not drinking – they still had cut price casks of wine and other accessible cheap alcohol.

The solution therefore is not to hand the power to the industry, but rather to establish the rules at the central or local government level and ensure they are enforceable. In Christchurch we have a proactive Council that has worked with the police and the industry on the one way door policy – this is very worthy, but do you think the time would be 4.00 am if the Council and police were able to act in the public interest without the fear of being challenged by commercial interests.

And there are wider issues. As is made clear in the Countdown case, Parliament did not intend anything more than wine & beer to be available from supermarkets, but nor did we intend wine & beer to be available from dairies.
And yet the various superettes and other convenience stores, which look more like dairies than supermarkets, have been allowed to get licences and no one has appealed the decisions of the Liquor Licensing Authority to the court to get a definitive statement on this important matter. I am seeking advice on this from officials, but sometimes the government is asked to step in and fix things before anyone has proven they are broken.

Last Saturday was Smokefree Day and it reminded me that New Zealand has put in place rules that provide all sorts of limits around the sale of tobacco and I am asking why can't we provide limits around alcohol too – for example loss leading (which means discounting a product to bring people into the store). I believe there would be support from the industry for a prohibition on some of these activities. Alcohol is not a product where getting the best price for the consumer is necessarily in the public interest. And I noted with interest the statement this morning that a minimum price per volume of alcohol might be a potential option.

Another issue that we need to work through carefully is how we reinforce the message about what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in public. That is actually what the Broken Windows policy is all about. People don't feel safe in town late at night and Brendon and my night out with the police confirmed why. Urinating in alley ways; vomiting on the pavement; smashing bottles on the streets. Why would anyone consider such behaviour to be acceptable?

There is no law against being drunk in a public place anymore and although I don't advocate a return to criminalising such behaviour, perhaps something at a lower level than an offence (like a parking fine) would mean there could be a series of low level interventions we could devise that would not take much of the police's time and resources, but that would enable them to get troublesome individuals and potential victims out of harm's way.

The last matter I want to raise is the question of issuing liquor licenses in the first place.
I am deeply concerned about the lack of community input in terms of the types and location of licensed premises particularly in suburbs. If a community does not want a bar in their neighbourhood, then the community should have the right to say no. My colleague, George Hawkins, has a private members Bill that I will be supporting that will have the effect of expanding the right to object to licences to the neighbourhood and requiring the applicant and the authorities to take the potential social impacts into account.

An extension of that would be to make the licensee responsible for patrons' behaviour after they leave the premises when those premises are in residential areas. An example I think of is the patrons kicking over letterboxes on the way home – this should be able to lead to warnings and then revoking of existing or denial of future licences. I know that individuals should be held accountable for their behaviour, but it is not always possible to identify who is involved and those who run these events should stand in their place instead. If they were to risk losing their licence I bet they would feel compelled to supervise the journey home at the end of events for those who might cause such damage.

The object of the Sale of Liquor Act states:

"(1) The object of this Act is to establish a reasonable system of control over the sale and supply of liquor to the public with the aim of contributing to the reduction of liquor abuse, so far as that can be achieved by legislative means.

Unfortunately the way the Act is structured, there is almost an assumption that liquor abuse reduction cannot be achieved by legislative means at all.

This means that as a community we have to recognise the limitations of what the legislation can do. We have to empower councils through their consultative planning processes to establish rules for different parts of our cities; we need to empower communities to have a say about what is acceptable in the neighbourhoods where we live;
we need to raise the bar for those who are given a license to sell liquor and we need to lower the threshold for booting out those who do not strictly comply with their licences; and we need to think about the messages we send to the next generation.

If we are to reduce alcohol-related harm, we need to work together. We cannot waste time blaming each other for what we can or cannot do. Together we must identify the gaps and problem areas and move forward with initiatives that are practical, targeted and effective and that is what I hope we all get out of tonight's forum.