Alcohol Reform Bill

Could I express my gratitude and that of my party to the Government and to other parties in the House for the change to the rules of engagement for this part to enable us to take an adequate number of calls.

I have spoken several times in the Chamber about the Ottawa Charter in this debate, and in particular about the sense in the Ottawa Charter, to which New Zealand is a signatory, that to improve the health of a community we need to empower that community—I will deal with that part of the charter in another call—but also to create a supportive environment around that community. The evidence that the Law Commission heard and that members of this Committee are, I think, all too familiar with is that the environment that some of our most marginalised and vulnerable communities are surrounded by is such that they are practically being basted in alcohol. It is impossible for them to escape the ubiquity of alcohol outlets and sales if they choose to.

Essentially, in recent years we have come to a situation where alcohol is available for sale in pretty much every community in the country, essentially 24/7—24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Indeed, there are around 1,000 outlets in New Zealand that are licensed to sell alcohol on a 24/7 basis. Indeed, in the years between 1990 and 2010, in that 20-year period, there has been an addition—an explosion—of 8,000 new outlets selling alcohol. Certainly, members will be aware of many alcohol outlets in our own communities. These new outlets are not randomly distributed throughout the country or throughout communities or population centres, but, rather, are clustered in low socio-economic status areas. They are clustered in the areas inhabited by the most vulnerable and marginalised. The distance that a person would need to travel in a low socio-economic status area, on average, to make it to an alcohol outlet is 50 percent less than the equivalent high socio-economic status suburb or area. It is just an indication of how the alcohol industry, at its various levels, has targeted these low socio-economic status communities.

The effects of this are considerable. The evidence is, and I quote from the Drug Foundation again, that “For every off-licence, within a kilometre of a residential area, there is a 4 percent increase in binge drinking. Outlet density is linked to underage drinking, student drinking, and high-risk drinking by young people.” The weight of evidence is that when the density of alcohol outlets increases, we also see increased rates of violence and physical assaults, sexually transmitted infections, child abuse, drink-driving, and those other deleterious consequences of alcohol consumption or heavy alcohol consumption that this bill, the Alcohol Reform Bill, sets out to minimise. So there is a direct relationship between outlet density and the purpose of this bill, which is to minimise harm.

I mentioned yesterday that 70 percent of our presentations to accident and emergency departments over weekends are from people who have been consuming alcohol, and I talked about those 1,000 deaths per year. Those are some of those negative consequences associated with the outlet density. There are also aspects of availability that relate to the hours that these outlets are open. Indeed, there is strong evidence showing that longer trading hours mean increased negative and harmful effects. I will not go through that list again, but it is clear that both outlet density and increased outlet hours are associated with increased harm. So if we want to deal with that harm—and this bill says that we do want to deal with it—then we need to address both of those factors.

In the way that the bill sets out to do that, I think there are some advances, but those advances, as with every other part of the bill, do not go far enough. Again, the Green Party will be voting for all of the Supplementary Order Papers that have been put forward by Opposition members and by the Māori Party to actually gain greater control over where outlets are and the hours that they can be open in order to minimise that harm. The evidence around support for those measures is strong. As usual, the scientific research around those factors says that these are very effective means of limiting harm, and the Law Commission, indeed, drew some conclusions that were stronger than those in the bill itself.

But it is not only the Law Commission. The New Zealand public has also had its say through the Health Sponsorship Council survey in 2010, which showed that 66 percent agreed or strongly agreed with reducing the hours that alcohol can be sold. In addition to that 66 percent, there were a further 18 percent who were neutral about that point. That is a vast majority who are either supportive of our tackling that issue or are neutral about it. There were 65 percent of New Zealanders who thought there were too many liquor outlets. I am going to come in a later call to the issue of local alcohol policies, but for the time being what I want to emphasise is the importance of taking this measure.

Again, just as with the calls we heard earlier in this Committee stage, we are dealing here with an issue that there is strong evidence around, and I will be very interested to hear the Minister of Justice’s calls and other calls taken by Government members to defend the course that is set out in the bill, which I consider to be inadequate. This is in contrast to the raging debate that we had around purchase age only a short time ago, where there is very little evidence indeed of effectiveness. Here is something that has strong evidence of effectiveness, that is recommended by the Law Commission, and that enjoys a very high level of support from the New Zealand public. We believe that the bill sets out in the right direction, but does not go nearly far enough. We want to see much more control over where outlets can be. Louisa Wall’s amendments around schools, for example, are a good example of the kind of restriction that we would like to see in general applied right across the country, in addition to the locally specific controls that local alcohol policies will produce. And we want to see a very substantial restriction of the hours that alcohol can be sold. We heard yesterday from Trevor Mallard in this debate a contribution where he opposed, on the basis of his personal experience, the idea of restricting the hours of sale of alcohol.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: That’s right—shift workers. Stand up for the shift workers.

Indeed. I have been a shift worker myself and have always somehow managed to get a drink.

Malo le soifua, Mr Chairman. Thank you for the opportunity. I want to address my remarks to Part 3, Subpart 3 of the Alcohol Reform Bill, and more particularly the amendment that is in my name, on Supplementary Order Paper 111. But I want to begin with some preliminary comments. If people look at South Auckland, they will find that in the past several years that community has been under constant attack on several fronts, which has had significant impact on people’s well-being in the areas of high unemployment, the high deficit in housing affordability, the low wages, and the area of health. In health we have some of the worst statistics—worse than other communities throughout Aotearoa. In that area, alcohol, particularly alcohol-fuelled violence, alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, alcohol-fuelled suicide, and alcohol-fuelled murders, as we all know, have been in the papers of late and in the past several years. We often forget that this is really about a portion of the community that abuses the consumption of alcohol, but that over the years it has been a part of a culture that collectively we have built up.

In South Auckland, we are beset with the proliferation of liquor outlets, more so in our community than in other communities. We have got signs of alcohol advertising that litter our streets, giving full exposure to everybody, particularly young people who are walking to and from school. We have heard in the news of deaths of young people who have either, essentially, abused the consumption of alcohol or committed suicide, fuelled by the culture that it is OK to get wasted. We continue as a country to perpetuate the alcohol culture—that it is OK to get drunk, it is OK to get wasted. The South Auckland communities, I have to say, are sick and tired of that. You, Mr Chair, and my colleague here, Louisa Wall, will know full well that over the past several years there have been marches, there have been protests, and there have been community meetings held, and you will find that there is a unanimous feel in the community that we are sick and tired of the alcohol culture, which many of our community believe is driven by vested interests that are contrary to the interests of children and families. The majority of communities want parliamentarians to take seriously the recommendations of the Law Commission.

Our front-line emergency people at Middlemore Hospital are sick and tired of having to deal with fixing the broken bones, the wounds, etc., that come in the early hours of the morning. The police themselves have said that they want parliamentarians to toughen up on alcohol availability to protect our communities. I have to say that, by and large, you will find that in the community in South Auckland there is great disappointment that when they had hoped that we had this opportunity as the Government, as parliamentarians, to really make a change for the better for the community, that has not been the signal that this Government has given to our community.

So I want to introduce a Supplementary Order Paper. I will be looking to support all the other Supplementary Order Papers that colleagues are putting forward, because I think it is an opportunity that we should not miss to make some changes that will support our communities and protect future generations from a culture that we have contributed to over the years. My Supplementary Order Paper proposes an amendment to the Alcohol Reform Bill to provide an opportunity for schools’ boards of trustees and early childhood centres within a radius of 3 kilometres to have their views taken into account when an application for a liquor licence is made in that area. The amendment provides an opportunity for schools and early childhood education centres, if they so choose, to have a say in the location of liquor outlets, with a view to reducing children’s exposure to alcohol on their way to and from school. We have too many in my community, and almost all of these outlets will have huge signs, as I have said, that litter our streets and place themselves in the face of children on the way to and from school.

I think most of us will agree that you will find that most of the community representatives on the school boards of trustees or early childhood education centres will have a better idea than most and provide accurate information on which liquor outlets have behaved responsibly in their areas, and which outlets blatantly act irresponsibly and flout the law in advertising, selling to under-age children, and allowing drinking outside their premises. There is general consensus that the harm in the communities is caused by not only those intoxicated or who abuse alcohol consumption but also by those who sell liquor in an irresponsible manner. For the communities who care about what happens in their neighbourhoods, especially with the children in our communities, there is a strong feeling that we have got to do all we can to at least limit the harm and abuse that arise from alcohol availability, and in particular the exposure of young children to alcohol.

My Supplementary Order Paper provides an opportunity to the members of the local community boards of trustees of schools or early childhood centres to have their say and be heard if they choose to provide a view on the location of liquor outlets in their communities. The Minister of Justice, I understand, has pointed out that the Alcohol Reform Bill has provisions for local alcohol policy to be established, and she has indicated that, therefore, she will not support my Supplementary Order Paper. I would say that although the Alcohol Reform Bill does provide for local alcohol policy, these provisions are voluntary, and unless the council initiates it those local alcohol policies will not exist. Furthermore, the process for establishing local alcohol policies will be a long public consultative process, which we all know can be quite draining on the community and can certainly be quite expensive. My amendment offers an alternative that can happen immediately, without the drawn-out consultative process, and can eliminate the costly normal public process. And though it might be difficult for the boards of trustees to be able to determine the future impact of any alcohol availability and advertising on children, my amendment at least provides an opportunity for the local community to be heard if it so chooses, and for the district licensing agency to consider the concerns of that community and of that school, and the substance of those concerns.

I would urge members of the Government, because it is up to them in terms of the numbers, not only to support my amendment but, I think, to take seriously all the amendments that members have put up. It is not about politicking; it is about genuinely representing the strong views that do exist. And the Minister will know this, because those views also exist in her community, in Papakura. So I move that. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Chair. Thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. My Supplementary Order Paper 107 really wants to put children at the heart of policy. My community of Manurewa has over 30 off-licence liquor outlets, but within the context of the greater Manukau—and it is great that I have followed on from my colleague Su’a William Sio—we have 494 liquor licences. We have 181 off-licence facilities. Unfortunately for our community, we fit a lot of the profile that my colleague Kevin Hague was talking about. In terms of the demography of my electorate, we have 14 decile 1 schools, we have nine decile 2 schools, and we have four decile 3 schools. So of the 29 schools in my electorate, 27 are either decile 1, decile 2, or decile 3. That really is at the heart of my Supplementary Order Paper, which is about enabling communities to self-regulate, but from a clean slate.

The reason my Supplementary Order Paper came to be was that just before Christmas the Myers Road superette applied for a liquor licence. The Myers Road superette lies between two schools, Manurewa East School and Greenmeadows Intermediate School. The communities were so enraged by the fact that there was an application for a liquor licence that they leafleted all the homes in the suburb, which is part of the Manurewa electorate, and we had 400 submissions from members of that community opposing that liquor application. I want to take this opportunity to commend the leadership of Phil Palfrey, the principal of Manurewa East, Cathy Chalmers, the principal of Greenmeadows Intermediate School, and also Colleen Brown, a member of the Manurewa Local Board, who holds the portfolio of alcohol.

For us it was an opportunity to mobilise the community, which actually did not need much motivation to get mobilised in terms of writing a submission. They had 20 days. I guess the process for us was won because, when the application was made, there was a try to subvert the opportunity for our Manurewa community to have a say in the issuing of that licence for that superette to sell alcohol.

The experience of our community has been that communities can make a difference, and that communities want to ensure that our children grow up in an environment where they can grow and develop in a positive way. So the Supplementary Order Paper about banning off-licence premises within 1 kilometre of a school is very much a recognition that our schools are our learning, nurturing centres for our children and that the immediate environment around our schools needs to be protected.

Where did the 1 kilometre limit come from? Actually, I wanted it to be a bit further—3 kilometres would have been good—but the reality is that children who live within a kilometre of school actually walk to school. My contention—and, I am sure, the contention of the House—is that alcohol is a product that should be consumed by adults only. There is no place in the life of a child for alcohol, and what really concerns me is that our children who do walk to school and stop at the local superette on their way to school are going to be confronted with alcohol in their environment, normalised. We are going to have kids who are going to be buying fruit, pies probably too, and lollies, but alcohol is going to become, and has become, a normal part of children’s lives.

I think that we should seriously think about starting from a clean slate. What my Supplementary Order Paper will ensure is that the current licences will continue to the point that they need to be renewed but within a context of the local alcohol policies being created, which is very much about the community regulating off-licence liquor outlets. I cannot see any reason why this House would not endorse and support the idea of our children growing up in environments where alcohol is not a normal part of that environment for our children.

I do want to highlight some research, because the Supplementary Order Paper was very much a response to the local community. I am sure my colleague Cam Calder, who is also based in Manurewa, will talk about our Manurewa Youth Council and the fact that the Manurewa Youth Council has endorsed my Supplementary Order Paper. Also, for our Manurewa Youth Council, alcohol has been identified as a pollutant. It is a toxic substance that is an incredibly pervasive commodity in our communities. It is responsible for a lot of family violence. It is responsible for a lot of damage to property. It is responsible for a lot of negative consequences, and so for our Manurewa Youth Council—and I would like to commend Simeon Brown and his team—we have to provide our communities with the tools so that they can regulate alcohol and off-licence premises out of our communities.

What I wanted to highlight was a report entitled The Impacts of Liquor Outlets in Manukau City. One of the primary researchers for this piece of research, which was funded by the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand—now by the Health Promotion Agency—was Dr Michael Cameron, who is an economist. There was a team of them. There was a social scientist, Dr Bill Cochrane, and Dr Craig Gordon from the Health Promotion Agency, along with Dr Michael Livingstone from the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne. Essentially, what they found was that there is a density of liquor outlets in communities in South Auckland, and that is because our communities are seen to demand alcohol. For whatever reason, there are stresses in our community that enable the retailers to set up because there is a demand in our community.

💬 Su’a William Sio: They’re targeted.

They are targeted—you are absolutely right. I guess there is a chicken and egg argument about whether the density of outlets then kind of ensure that that demand is ongoing, which is part of the issue about ensuring that our children are protected. We cannot normalise alcohol in communities that already have high levels of family violence, as I talked about before.

One of the critical things that I want to highlight from this piece of research was some research about a media review. There had been 438 articles identified by Dr Cameron and his group, and from the stories they were able to focus on, liquor outlets and the density of liquor outlets is a huge problem. Three main themes emerged from the research they did. There is a dominant view from the community and from the media that there are too many liquor outlets. There are various concerns about the distribution of outlets—that they were clustered in areas of deprivation, that such clustering promotes price competition and longer opening hours, and that both of those things increase the consumption of alcohol. The third point they wanted to highlight was that locating outlets near schools is particularly problematic. So there is evidence from the research that Michael Cameron and the University of Waikato team have conducted that says that, actually, our children need to be protected from alcohol.

I also wanted to highlight the child-friendly cities framework, which is a framework for action. It is really about guaranteeing the rights of our children and young people. Our children should be protected from exploitation and abuse. Child-friendly cities aim to improve the lives of children, and we really do need to recognise the rights that young people have to grow up in an environment that is not densely populated with liquor outlets. Normalising liquor outlets in communities like the ones I represent, the ones my colleague Su’a William Sio represents, and, in fact, the one that you represent, Mr Chair, makes it very difficult for us to transform the lives of young people who are already growing up in socially and economically deprived families.

So to compound the life opportunities of young people who are already growing in a context of material deprivation and to put liquor outlets into that context is, I think, an ethical issue for this House. As legislators, one of the things we should do is do no harm, and from what I can see our liberalisation of alcohol laws historically has done huge harm.

It is a pleasure to take a call on Part 3 of the Alcohol Reform Bill, a bill that is the first step in decades in a push back against increasing liberalisation of alcohol laws. I agree with my parliamentary colleague Louisa Wall that alcohol does have a toxic effect on much of our Manurewa community, and I can see real value in elements of Part 3 in helping to reduce the enormous harm that alcohol misuse does in our society and in our Manurewa community. It is believed, for instance, to contribute directly to 1,000 deaths a year—1,000 deaths a year. A major cost of approximately $5 billion is estimated to be due to alcohol-related harms, and it is a known major driver of crime, alcohol being implicated in 30 percent of all police offences, 34 percent of all family violence, and 50 percent of all homicides. This bill sets out to reduce those harms.

One of the initiatives in Part 3 that I am most excited about is about local communities being able to create their own local alcohol policies. As a list MP I have chosen to base my office in the vibrant and diverse community of Manurewa, and one of the earliest gatherings I attended in the Manurewa electorate was a public meeting regarding concerns about yet another alcohol outlet opening. I have heard from Louisa how many there are—

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Order! The member will use the member’s full name all the time.

💬 Hon Annette King: No, the Speaker doesn’t mind if they use first names, remember.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I am in the Chair.

I have heard from the honourable member Louisa Wall the number of alcohol outlets in our community. The Manurewa community are all too well aware of the harms related to alcohol misuse. They have been active in making their concerns known in respect of possible solutions. In my two surveys of the electorate the overwhelming majority of respondents to those surveys were in favour of a purchase age of 20 years at both on-licences and off-licences. The Manurewa Youth Council has been actively involved, as the honourable member Miss Wall has observed, supporting a 20/20 purchase age. I argued for this in the House; sadly, the motion was lost—a huge opportunity lost, in my opinion, but that is democracy.

I know that the Manurewa community and communities the length and breadth of the country will be delighted with this legislation and Part 3 of the bill, which empowers local communities to create their own local alcohol plan: the when, where, and how regarding licensed premises. Communities will have more important decisions. Local authorities will be able to limit the sale of alcohol, and set conditions on licences. Councils will be able to develop local alcohol policies to determine the trading hours of licensed premises, limit the location and density of licences, and impose conditions on these licences. They can take into account the proximity of schools, early childhood education centres, and other community assets such as parks when forming their local alcohol policies.

Further, clause 100, which contains the criteria in the bill for the issue of licences, is clear. Clause 100(1) states: “In deciding whether to issue a licence, the licensing authority or the licensing committee concerned must have regard to … (c) any relevant local alcohol policy:”. Well, we would hope that that would be the case. Under clause 100(1)(h) it must have regard to “whether (in its opinion) the amenity and good order of the locality would be likely to be reduced, by more than a minor extent, by the effects of the issue of the licence:”. New clause 100A(1)(b) requires the consideration of “the extent to which the following purposes are compatible: (i) the purposes for which land near the premises concerned is used: (ii) the purposes for which those premises will be used if the licence is issued.” Fundamentally, then, this bill broadens the matters that must be considered in licence decision-making, and also affords a greater opportunity for members of the community to object to a licence application.

In the absence of a local alcohol plan, a national default mechanism of maximum hours exists. These are 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. for off-licences and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. for on-licences. To me, these provisions seem overly generous, and I would expect many communities to ensure they formulate their own local alcohol policy to reduce the availability of alcohol in their own communities as they see fit. I applaud this local alcohol policy provision in the Alcohol Reform Bill and am sure it has the potential to lead to significant reduction in alcohol-related harms in our community.

New Zealand First believes in local democracy and in fully empowered local government, unlike the current Government. We say that local alcohol policies must be compulsory, and that is the subject I wish to address in this speech. New clause 75 would provide that territorial local authorities develop local alcohol policies for their districts and would require that the development process for a draft has, first of all, consultation with police, inspectors and medical officers of health. It would also require the draft policy developed in this way to go through the special consultative procedure set out in the Local Government Act, so that the public can have their say too. New Zealand First believes that it is extremely important that public buy-in should be provided for, because if the public does not support the regime for alcohol in their district, then it is going to be compromised, and that is very bad.

It is also very important that a local alcohol policy and Government legislation should enable local attitudes to be reflected and local needs to be met, because there are many and various districts and cities in this country, which have widely different requirements and people with quite different attitudes, and they should be reflected. There should be provision for that. These policies must, under the bill as presented, take into account a range of considerations such as a district plan, with which the local alcohol policy would obviously have to be consistent; the number of liquor licences in the district; the opening hours and locations; also local alcohol by-laws; and, most important, I think, tourism considerations and public health considerations. For those reasons, it is therefore important that all territorial local authorities should have a local alcohol policy so that the residents of the district can have a real and substantial input into local alcohol policy-making. For that reason, the local alcohol policies must be mandatory. It must be mandatory for each and every territorial authority in this country to have such a policy. I cannot understand the logic behind simply empowering local authorities to do so. That lets some of them off the hook, and none of them should be let off the hook. It is an important matter for local communities and local authorities. Each and every one of them must have one and this legislation should make it mandatory. And it would not create any great imposition upon them to do so. It is fundamental to the welfare of their communities. It would not require a huge amount of money; they do a lot of this stuff already. So why not make it mandatory? I cannot see any reason why not.

There are many competing interests in alcohol policy-making and a balance between commercial interests, community interests, public health, and policing concerns will vary from one district to another, and that balance must be achieved on a local basis, which can happen only if there are mandatory requirements for these things to happen. Some districts have significant holiday locations, such as Mount Maunganui, Wānaka, and Queenstown, where there are special considerations because of the sheer scale of visitors to those places to celebrate occasions such as New Year’s Eve.

The Government, it seems to me, has apparently bowed to commercial interests in not making the adoption of local alcohol policies compulsory. Community concerns are therefore, I think, being sidelined in favour of commercial interests because of this, and the balance that I spoke of will not be achievable unless the requirement is mandatory for these policies to be produced.

I would like, in closing, to refer to Supplementary Order Paper 80, in the name of Kevin Hague, which replaces in clause 75(1) the word “may” with “must”, and that is all it takes to do what I am asking for. In fact, if Mr Hague had not put this Supplementary Order Paper in, then New Zealand First would certainly have done so. He also proposes a number of consequential amendments to that, but I would like to particularly refer to one of the other amendments he proposes in respect of clause 84(2) to delete paragraph (c), which relates to abandoning a policy that has already been developed. It seems to me to be utterly unbelievable that legislation should actually empower that to happen. Similarly, in clause 86A there would be a power to discontinue the development of a policy. To me, that is a breach of trust between the local authority and the community that it represents. How can the local authority go through all of these consultative procedures, and then simply decide to give up midstream? As I said, I think that is a breach of trust and is a most inappropriate provision that should be deleted, as Mr Hague has proposed.

Similarly, in clause 91 we see another area in which a similar deletion is required. Mr Hague has proposed to replace subclause (1) with: “A territorial authority may, by using the special consultative procedure, revoke its local alcohol policy, and adopt another in its place.”, which excludes the possibility of simply revoking and not providing another one in its place. So it is very important that those provisions be adopted as well, for all the reasons I have said.

In conclusion, New Zealand First believes very much in local democracy and that every local council must use that principle of local democracy to have a local alcohol policy that is fully consultative, reflecting local needs and reflecting local attitudes. I would commend to the Committee the adoption of Mr Hague’s Supplementary Order Paper 80 to carry out those particular objectives, which we think are so important.

It was pleasing to hear from the honourable member Cam Calder in his contribution to the debate—at least to hear from a member from the Government at last on these very important considerations. As I think we have established in other parts of the debate on this very important bill, the Alcohol Reform Bill, the earlier debate on age alone has somewhat derailed the reality of the requirements or the need for proper regulation around alcohol sale—that is, that it is not just a question of age and regulating the age of purchase; there are other measures that are required as well. Pricing is one, local input and regulation is another, and access and availability is yet another.

I want to talk to my Supplementary Order Paper 110, which deals with the accessibility or availability of alcohol. But before I do that, I just want to say in relation to the local alcohol policies and the ability of local authorities to make effective regulation on the sale and distribution of alcohol that it does sound suspiciously like social well-being that local authorities will be called upon to regulate and to consider and to deliberate upon. Yet we know that in other legislation this Government is doing its darnedest to remove that power and that ability from local authorities. So this is somewhat contradictory to this Government’s strategy—dare I say, because there does not seem to be one—but, in any event, the other failing, apart from being inconsistent with the overarching local government legislation, is that, of course, it is not mandatory. It is, if you like, a voluntary scheme that local authorities can enter into.

If there is one thing that has become clear in my consultations with members of the public or the communities that I have engaged in regularly since I have been a MP on this issue, it is that they are looking for leadership from this House. They look to Parliament to provide leadership. For this legislation as it stands—with or without the age of purchase issue that has been disposed of, leaving it at 18—the overwhelming view is that this is incapable of making a material difference to the very real social problems that the existing regime on the sale and distribution of alcohol are presently creating. People are looking for a material difference, a substantial change that is going to make a real difference to the availability of alcohol, so that we can start—all of us: parliamentarians, local authority members, entire communities—to take responsibility and take control of the very real social issues that a much more liberal alcohol regime has been creating.

In relation to that, my Supplementary Order Paper dealing with the opening hours or the trading hours of off-licence premises is very important. The default position created by the bill is that off-licences will be able to trade or have default trading hours of 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. It is simply unnecessary, in a community and in a society awash with alcohol as it is, for off-licences to be trading for such an extensive and extended range of hours—16 hours in a day. The purpose of my Supplementary Order Paper is to simply accept a reality: for there to be alcohol available at totally socially responsible and socially acceptable levels, it is not necessary for off-licences to be open so early and it is not necessary for them to be open so late. Having opening hours from 10 in the morning to 8 in the evening allows those who are responsible—planners and organisers of events where they wish alcohol to be available either at home or when they are inviting people round—to have ample time to make their purchases of alcohol.

I think one of the arguments that we have to get on top of is this argument we often hear that rights are being infringed. There are no rights being infringed. I make that argument because we consider the issue of rights in this context to be that the obverse of a right is not responsibility but obligation. When we claim a right, we are claiming that there is an equal obligation on another to observe or respect or uphold that right. There can be no claimed right of access to alcohol or access to purchase alcohol. What is now called for is an acceptance that alcohol is a substance that is capable of causing harm, and that demonstrably is causing harm, so there can be no question of a right to alcohol. The reality is that it has been a part of our social landscape—a feature of our social lubrication, if you like—over many decades and over centuries, so no one is arguing that we should ban alcohol, because it can be consumed responsibly. But the regulatory regime we have in place will reflect our view about how important it is or how accessible it should be. My submission in support of my Supplementary Order Paper is that it is time to send a signal that a greater restriction on the availability and accessibility of alcohol is now due if we are to get to grips with the very serious problems that it is creating.

The proposition in my Supplementary Order Paper is to reduce the default hours to 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. There can be no complaint or criticism that that does not allow reasonable access for those who participate in, and partake of, this substance, this drug, responsibly and in a socially acceptable sort of way. I urge members, in particular those members opposite whom I met in the lobby when we came to vote on the purchase age—we were all voting for the raising of the age to 20—who, in the comfort of the lobby, expressed great concern about the more liberal access to alcohol that we presently have, and implore them to think again, to think very carefully about the sorts of changes that are being proposed in all of these Supplementary Order Papers, and to support those changes that are about making a material and sensible difference so that we have a more responsible alcohol sale and purchase regime. They know that they want change. That is what they wanted when they voted for raising the age to 20. There is more they can do. There is more that has to be done. They know it can be done, and by supporting these other Supplementary Order Papers they can achieve that and salve their conscience.

It is a pleasure to take a call on this very important bill, the Alcohol Reform Bill, and to reflect on my time as a former police officer and the difficulties that alcohol has presented in communities across New Zealand. At the outset I would like to make it clear that my view was that the purchase age for alcohol should be 20 years of age, and I have what I believe to be very well-founded reasons for that. But be that as it may, it is clear that this bill has a number of other interventions that will go to restrict access to alcohol by young people in particular, provide better tools for our community, and go towards our goal of reducing the harm that alcohol causes.

On that point, it is important to note that although I believe that the purchase age of 20 was important, it is not the panacea. There are many other provisions in this bill that I think will make an important difference, and I want to speak to one of those. It is contained within clause 224, and relates to the express consent of a parent for a minor consuming alcohol. If we think of the scenario of a gathering of some young people, and a responsible parent, having invested in the child’s understanding of the implications of alcohol abuse, and so on, sends their child to a party where alcohol is provided and is flowing freely, and where supervision of those youngsters drinking alcohol is poor, and before the night is out, the young person is in a situation that is out of control. Adults in that environment indeed become powerless, as do the police when eventually, all too often, they are called to intervene.

This provision allows better tools for responsible parents to ensure that their children are treated with the same level of responsibility by those who would be supervising them. So this provision will ensure that parents who are hosting young children or supplying those under the age of 18 with alcohol must do that with the express consent of the parent of that child. That, in itself, provides a meaningful tool, but the provision will go on to ensure that the parents not only receive that express consent, but also ensure that the hosts are actually in supervision of the young people, so that they cannot just go out of control. That, in itself, will help to limit parties that would quickly mushroom from a few individuals enjoying a social occasion, to hundreds of people sprawling across the neighbourhood, and a situation that is very, very difficult to contain.

This provision will also go on to require that the alcohol is provided in a responsible manner. I want to read specifically what that will entail. In my view, it is something that a responsible parent would do as a matter of their role as a parent, but, unfortunately, they are being let down by those who do not take that caution. That position will no longer be acceptable, with this bill. Let me read the clause specifically. The parent concerned, taking account of their supervision, must “take into account the following: (a) the steps taken by the supplier to supervise the consumption of alcohol: (b) whether food was provided with the alcohol: (c) whether a choice of low-alcohol or non-alcoholic beverages, or both, was offered: (d) the nature of the occasion: (e) any arrangements for, or provision of, safe transport: (f) the period over which the alcohol was supplied: (g) the strength and volume of the alcohol supplied: (h) the age of the minor:”, and anything else that the court, were it the case that it were involved, needed. In essence what this provision allows for is the ability for some more stringent guidelines around the responsibility required when young people are supplied with alcohol, and some fairly clear guidelines for the court for it to make a balanced decision as to whether or not the parents responsible have actually carried out a degree of responsibility in the manner in which the alcohol has been supplied.

As I mentioned, one of the challenges with the consumption of alcohol in New Zealand has been the purchase age. It is fair to say that outside of licensed premises, where alcohol is provided in a private context, often to people considerably younger than 18 years of age, many of the problems certainly that I witnessed as a police officer have been present. The ability now for responsible parents to know that that child goes out with their express consent, or not, as the case may be, and that the parent receiving them must acknowledge and establish that platform, I think is a very prudent and responsible tool that parents will gladly utilise in their struggles in a culture that has been a sad reflection on many of us in society in terms of binge drinking. I believe that this provision goes to the heart of what many features in this bill are about, and that is about restricting access to alcohol and ensuring that there is more accountability and greater accountability in areas that matter.

There is no one provision within this bill—in fact, there is no one activity that we as a community could take on—that is going to solve this issue. More so, it is my belief that it is a combination of a number of different instruments, as well as an acceptance from all of us, whether we be parliamentarians, police officers, schoolteachers, or indeed young people, that taking on a sense of personal responsibility, and taking on an understanding of the consequences of the behaviour of all of us and the examples that we set, is all part of what needs to happen. This particular provision I certainly support. I support the Supplementary Order Papers that make minor amendments to this particular part of the bill. It is my hope that from this exercise, over the many months that this has been in discussion, we as New Zealanders take on an understanding and take on a little of the responsibility that we all must if we are going to address the problems that alcohol has caused in our country. I am very happy, and commend this part of the bill to the Committee.

I would like to make a contribution at this stage in the debate on the issue of local alcohol policies. The number of times that submitters came before the Justice and Electoral Committee and told the committee that they wanted to be able to have more input into, and more influence over, the availability and use of alcohol in their own communities was one of the most significant things that I took away from the experience of having sat on the select committee.

First of all, I think it is a positive thing that the Alcohol Reform Bill provides for local alcohol policies. Let me say that up front. But let me also echo some of the things that have been said already by previous speakers about how much better we could do in this area, because, of course, the fundamental problem with the scheme of the bill when it comes to enabling local input on these matters is that local alcohol policies are not required to be operated by a territorial local authority. It is up to the authority whether it actually chooses to have a local alcohol policy. In other words, what the Government is saying to local government is whether you decide to give your communities sufficient input and control over the use and availability of alcohol in your community is up to you. Whether you do it or not is not a concern of ours. It is up to you whether you decide to enable your communities in that way. That is the fundamental philosophical difference that I have with the Minister of Justice and the Government on this point.

The problem, as we know—and I think many members around the Chamber would concede this—is that in the communities where alcohol has the most devastating effect because of its misuse, there will be an inverse relationship to the ability and capacity of people in those communities to influence their territorial local authorities. So making the existence of a local alcohol policy optional, rather than requiring a territorial local authority to actually take into account local input on this question, will be doubly disempowering in the communities where alcohol abuse has the most devastating effect.

That is why I have put forward Supplementary Order Paper 109. The most fundamental change that it would effect as far as the bill is concerned is that it would make it a requirement of every territorial local authority to operate a local alcohol policy. Every authority would be required to take into account the views of their communities, to actively go out and seek those views, and to then incorporate those views in a policy that applied to licensing decisions made in that particular area. I think a fundamental weakness of the bill is that it makes that exercise entirely optional. It says that, well, maybe communities should have input, and maybe they should not; that is a local matter. If we are serious about giving communities some power and some influence over the abuse of alcohol availability, then we really have to make it an expectation of every local authority that it will deal with licensing decisions according to a local alcohol policy that is carefully consulted on in its communities and that takes into account the views of those communities. It is a major deficiency that the legislation fails to do that.

The second change that my Supplementary Order Paper would make is to insert a provision in the bill that forbids territorial local authorities from dealing with any matter other than licensing in the local alcohol plan. Authorities can deal with the location of licensed premises by reference to broad areas. They can deal with the location of licensed premises by reference to proximity to premises or facilities of particular kinds. They can deal with the question of whether further licences should be issued for premises in the district concerned. They can deal with maximum trading hours. They can deal with the issuing of licences subject to discretionary conditions, and they can deal with one-way-door restrictions. Those are all matters that can be provided for in a local alcohol policy, if the particular local authority entity decides to even operate one of these policies. But if the authority does not, none of these matters have to be referred to in licensing decisions.

And even if it does, it is restricted to those matters. Again, this is a problem. The local authority concerned should be able to consider wider health promotion aspects around the availability of alcohol. To restrict the authority in this way is, in my view, to be artificially restrictive about the sorts of drivers of alcohol abuse that exist in communities. So the territorial local authorities not only should have to operate such a plan; they should not be restricted to these licensing matters in the text of the plan. They should be able to deal with much broader issues in the policies themselves.

The third change that my Supplementary Order Paper would make would be to strengthen the content of required local alcohol policies by enabling the consideration of local demographics and socio-economic factors that operate in the particular communities.

The fourth change would be to enable much greater community input into these policies when they operate. So there is an express requirement in my Supplementary Order Paper that local iwi and hapū be consulted when a local alcohol policy is being put together. I do think that would be a real improvement as far as ensuring that we have well-consulted-over documents that actually operate for the benefit of all of their communities when they are put in place.

Finally, there is a requirement that where there are appeals from decisions about the creation of a local alcohol policy, those appeals should be heard in public. There should be a high degree of transparency around the way in which the policies are put together and the way in which appeals about their contents should be heard.

I am aware that the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper makes some changes to the text of the bill, and goes some way to meet some of the concerns that I have expressed, but it does not go the whole way, and I do think that the changes that I am advocating for would be beneficial. In the same vein, Supplementary Order Paper 80, in the name of the Green member of Parliament Kevin Hague, would make some very good improvements in this area. He recognises that the mandatory nature of local alcohol policies would go a long way to enabling communities, particularly at-risk communities, to have a real say about the availability of alcohol in those communities, and he notes, as I do, that that is actually the recommendation of the Law Commission—another area where the Government has departed from the very wise recommendations that were made right at the beginning of this process around enabling communities to control what goes on in them. Mr Hague’s Supplementary Order Paper, as does mine, also tries to facilitate and enable better community input into the putting together of local alcohol policies.

So what I want to do is not only to advocate for my Supplementary Order Paper for the reasons that I have set out, but also to commend to the Committee the terms that exist in his Supplementary Order Paper, because either of them would really make for much better local input into the way in which alcohol is available and consumed in the communities where the abuse of this substance is such a problem, as we heard at the select committee hearing.

It has been very interesting listening to the debate this afternoon, and I think all members right across the Committee should be congratulated on the quality of the contributions. There are a few things I would like to deal with in relation to Part 3 of the Alcohol Reform Bill. Part 3 is the substantive part of the bill. It is the most important part, and it is right that we should have the most debate on this issue.

Mr Chauvel, who has just resumed his seat, has mentioned the very wise recommendations of the Law Commission. Well, it also recommended that this not be a matter that has a personal vote. It actually did recommend that we have party votes on these matters, on the basis that it, in fact, brings about more cohesive legislation, rather than some of the messes that, frankly, we have had in alcohol legislation over the years.

On the local alcohol policies, I particularly want to refer to the comments and contribution from Louisa Wall, the MP for Manurewa, and thank her for them. She has made some submissions on her Supplementary Order Paper 107 that she might think I would normally agree with, around the requirement not to have alcohol outlets located within 1 kilometre of a school or kindergarten, but the trouble with having in legislation for the entire country elements of that sort of requirement is that, for instance, here in Wellington it would mean that the Thorndon New World supermarket would not be able to sell alcohol, because it is just down the road from a school—actually, several schools. So I think we do need to have more of an input from the local authorities.

I know her electorate very well, being in Manurewa, and, of course, my electorate in Papakura, which actually includes a whole chunk of the Manurewa area, is one that has some tremendous issues around alcohol abuse and the location of alcohol outlets. I note Mr Hague’s comments—and I hope I am paraphrasing Mr Hague well here—where he said, basically, that liquor shops open up in places where the poorest people live, and they avoid where the richest people live. I think that is pretty much it. I think he is right, actually. Around some parts of Auckland that I know well, there are few alcohol outlets, and in others that I know because they are in my electorate, they are everywhere. Of course, the thing is that it is not so much the use of alcohol; it is the abuse. We know that availability and hours of access, all those things, have a contribution to make, as, frankly, does the age of purchase, in my opinion.

There have been some comments that Mr Chauvel made around whether or not local authorities should be forced to have local alcohol policies. It is a reasonable suggestion, except that we believe very firmly that we need to let local authorities make their own decisions. The comment was made, and on first hearing it it might sound reasonable, that the poorer communities, in terms of social or economic issues—certainly not in terms of culture and heart—might well be the ones least listened to in the alcohol debate for the local authorities. I hope I have paraphrased Mr Chauvel correctly there. Well, it might sound right, but, actually, that is not the way I see it.

In Papakura and in Manurewa we have extremely active communities—and I see Miss Wall and Dr Calder agreeing with me—because it is the local boards in those communities that are the most strident against the proliferation of alcohol outlets. They are the ones that are most likely to contact me about alcohol outlets opening up and to want to start marches and public meetings against them. It is not the people in the rich areas; they generally do not care. Actually, people in the areas where they see their communities being used and abused by excessive numbers of alcohol outlets are the ones who do want a say. I can tell the Committee that the people of Manurewa and the people of Papakura do not necessarily want to have the same requirements put on them as the people of Remuera or Epsom might. They actually want tougher requirements around the outlets that are opened up.

What I would say is that one of the other things that we are constantly being told by local authorities is that the Government and Parliament should stop putting onerous conditions on local authorities and then complaining when they put up rates. We actually want them to take control and take some action, and I think this gives them the opportunities to do so. The chair, for instance, of the Manurewa Local Board, who is Angela Dalton, a very active member and preceded by another very active member, Daniel Newman, will, I know, be out there saying “We want to have the local alcohol policy for the Auckland region take into account what we need for our area.” The Papakura board will be doing exactly the same.

Actually, I think what we do need to do is to give local authorities some ability to make decisions. They are elected by their constituents. They need to take into account what their constituents want, and if they do not, they will be pushed out. Next year we have the local authority elections. There is an opportunity—should this bill pass through in the form that it is in and we get it through in reasonable time—for local authority candidates to, in fact, campaign on what they want in their local authority policies. I think that is a really good thing. I think too that the local authority policies will be able to take into account the issues that Miss Wall has raised, such as, for instance, where the alcohol outlets will be located. Are they going to be near schools? What sorts of facilities need to be taken into account?

The local alcohol policies will also be able to restrict or extend the maximum trading hours. This is a fantastic thing. At the moment we have around a thousand alcohol outlets with liquor licences that have 24-hour, 7-days-a-week trading—a thousand of them. Frankly, how did that ever happen? Because Parliament at some stage thought we were all going to have this European-style café culture. I have no idea why Parliament would have thought we would ever have a European-style café culture. We have never had one before; we were never going to have one.

Of course, Parliament thought back to the days, obviously, of the King Country, where my parents grew up and where there was, in fact, prohibition. Did it stop alcoholism? Not a chance. People would get on the train at Ōtorohanga—OK it was my family who went on the train, and all their mates; that is why I can speak with some authority on this—go up to Kihikihi in the Waikato, get roaring drunk, and go back again. That was alcohol drinking in the King Country. Then there was the fact that there was moonshine, stills, and home brew everywhere around the place. Prohibition did not stop it. People were taking a legal substance that had been legal pretty much for ever, and prohibition was trying to stop it.

What we need to do is to be very reasonable. We need to give local authorities some power. We need to give local authorities the trust that their electors put in them, and if they do not listen, I promise Parliament that they will be punished for it. The local electors will say to their local authority members “Why is it that you haven’t listened to us?”. They will. I know that the members of local authorities in the Papakura, Manurewa, and South Auckland areas are listening to what their electors say, because they understand that they are there to represent them. I do not think it is unique to them. I think that is true around the country, but they have different priorities in different areas. Of course, some of our local authorities are very small. Some of them do not have, for instance, the amount of power, money, and ability to put in place local alcohol policies straight away, and others do.

The Mayor of Auckland has said to me that he would love this bill to get through as fast as possible so that they can get on to it, and I absolutely support that. But we have to debate this. Everyone is contributing in a really positive way, and I am looking forward to the rest of the debate. We are listening to this, and I say that we should give local authorities a chance to show what they can do. I have faith in them, and I think we will see that they will come up with policies that are appropriate for their area, not for the entire country.

Thank you for the opportunity to address Part 3, which, as the Minister of Justice has said, is really the substance of the legislation. I do want to take issue, not with something that the Minister said, but with something that one of her colleagues said when talking about local alcohol plans. He did refer to local alcohol plans, when this legislation refers to local alcohol policies. When he was referring to local alcohol plans he was actually thinking back to the Sale and Supply of Liquor and Liquor Enforcement Bill, which of course was introduced to the House just prior to the general election in 2008, and which the incoming National Government adopted as its own. It had its first reading in the early months of 2009 and it was referred to a select committee. It does seem rather odd that this is not the first time that we have debated this issue, yet it sounds as if members believe that it is the first time it has been debated in this House. It has taken us 3 years to get to the point of passing a similar version of our local alcohol plans into law.

The Government discharged the earlier bill in December 2010. We have heard from various speakers on the other side that this is in fact normal practice, that this is what Governments do—Governments just knock out legislation they do not like and replace it with something, even if it is almost exactly the same, because they want to have their own name on it. That is not the case. It may be the case when there has been a change of Government and the incoming Government has campaigned on an issue where it has a different set of policies than are reflected in the current legislation before the House. Often that will mean that the Government will introduce its own legislation to replace that. But this is not what we had happen in this case. We actually had a bill picked up by the Government of the day. It was referred to the select committee. Submissions were called for, people made submissions in good faith, and, in fact, there was general support right across the board for the development of local alcohol plans. In fact, really the only objections came from those who felt that they might be disadvantaged by the amount of community control that the Minister quite rightly identified as developing as a result of this process.

There is a sense of something—and I do not know whether anyone has actually said it out loud, but I am going to say it and put it on the table, because it kind of feels to me like there is an elephant in the room—that is, there are some people who feel that it is their God-given right to sell alcohol, and that it does not matter that it would be a restricted drug in any other environment. That is why we have legislation that surrounds the sale and purchase of alcohol. It is because alcohol is, in fact, a drug. In order to sell drugs, normally one has to have a degree in pharmacology of some sort and practise as a pharmacist, and pharmaceuticals can be sold only from certain premises under very strict conditions. In fact, not just anyone who works in a pharmacy can dispense pharmaceuticals. They have to be dispensed by somebody properly qualified, trained to do so, and, actually, subject to quite stringent professional standards and ethics, certain models of supervision, and ongoing training and development. So there are all of these things that are normally around the sale of a drug.

With the sale of liquor, we have said that, OK, it has a recreational use. Therefore, we as a country have allowed for the sale of liquor. In fact, we used to ballot. We used to let the people decide whether we were going to have national continuance, national prohibition, or State purchase and control. I think I have informed the House on other occasions that on the couple of occasions when I got to vote on that, it was for State purchase and control that I voted, but that was not ever going to be the case.

💬 Charles Chauvel: Good old socialist.

I must be a socialist at heart. But the truth is that as soon as the prohibition referendum went off the agenda—and it came off the agenda for obvious reasons; it was dominated by the results for national continuance—there was no appetite for prohibition. Actually, if you look at some of the information that is coming out about recreational drug use, some of the issues around prohibition are just as relevant to the issues around prohibition as far as alcohol goes.

I agree with the Minister that it is a question of balance, and that we as a country have decided that it is not prohibition that we are seeking, but it is important that communities are empowered to stand up to those who think that it is their right to sell as much alcohol as often as they like whenever they like to whomever they like, with the two restrictions that they cannot sell to somebody who is under the age of 18 years and they cannot sell to somebody who is already intoxicated. The trouble is that when we are talking about off-licences and the impact that they have on our communities, often when people go late to the off-licence they are already intoxicated, but the person who is serving them will not know, or, in fact, they may feel threatened by them. That was the one example that did come up in the submissions. People working in those small, 24/7 dairies that masquerade as grocery stores do feel threatened. I know an individual, whom I have spoken to, who personally sold alcohol to somebody who he knew was intoxicated, because the threat was sufficient that if he had not sold it to him, the place would have been burglarised anyway. This is an intolerable situation. Our communities are saying “No more. We do not want these in our communities.”

There is a difference between the local alcohol plans in the original legislation that the Government discharged in 2010 and this bill, which establishes local alcohol policies. I would like the Minister to perhaps take a call on the differences between the two. There were specific provisions we put into the legislation originally that were actually designed to make it clear that when a community was being asked to look at a local alcohol plan, the community would be able to require information that might be specific to their particular area to be submitted with the applications for the granting or renewal of a licence—so the submission with applications for the granting or renewal of a licence of a social impact report—and that is quite different, I think, from the reference in the Minister’s bill around the question of a draft local policy, which talks about “the nature and severity of the alcohol-related problems arising in the district.” I believe that social impact actually looks at a much broader analysis than that, which was one of the reasons why we specifically had that in the legislation, and we had the kinds of people who would have to prepare that kind of social impact report.

It did seem, certainly to me and to my colleagues at the time, that a lot of people set up the sale of alcohol in particular areas because they wanted to target the area. They do not actually think about the impact that it has on people; they are thinking purely of the profits they can make. That is why there has been resistance to some of these policies. I recall some of the industry being quite concerned about local alcohol plans as they were originally introduced. Some of that has quietened down, and I wonder whether they can see that some of the more responsible elements of the legislation are not actually there any more and they are not so worried about it.

Also, they were worried that there would be different rules in different parts of the city. Well, I agree with the Minister that it is actually important that communities have a real say about what is suitable for their own community. I think it is really important that we think about local alcohol plans from an empowerment perspective, and how this really does relate to how local government is much more closely related to the community in these sorts of matters.

I just want to say that there have been 2 years wasted in terms of this. We could have had local alcohol plans in place 2 years ago, if that bill had not been discharged. But I want to make the point that that was not the decision of this Minister of Justice; it was her predecessor. It was he who promised to work collaboratively with the Labour Party on this vital issue—and the Government itself had agreed that it was a vital issue, because it is one of the major drivers of crime—and it was he who decided unilaterally to discharge that bill and introduce the one that we have today.

I think it is really important that we understand that community engagement lies at the heart of local alcohol plans. I think it is imperative that all communities have local alcohol plans, and that communities are directly engaged—

I would like to speak on Supplementary Order Paper 109, in the name of Charles Chauvel, and I want to begin by repeating that New Zealand First has full faith in local democracy with regard to local alcohol policies. We therefore think that it is important that they be mandatory. In that respect I would like to say that I listened carefully to what the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Justice, said, and I did not hear any real argument as to why they should not be mandatory. I did agree with a lot of what she said about the need for local policy-making, as far as a local alcohol regime is concerned. As far as small local authorities are concerned, I am absolutely convinced that each and every one of them could easily handle this function. After all, they would have the support of Local Government New Zealand, which often helps small local authorities with many things, and it would certainly help them with these particular plans.

Small local authorities can also look at what larger local authorities are doing, and perhaps even work collaboratively with other local authorities in the development of their plans. Of course, smaller authorities can, in fact, have smaller and simpler local policies. That would probably be quite appropriate for many of them. So I do not think it is any great imposition at all that we should make the development of local alcohol policies mandatory for smaller, larger, and, in fact, each and every one of New Zealand’s territorial local authorities.

The situation regarding trading hours is a very good example of why local authorities must set them and why they must not be done by Parliament through the clause 44 default provision. If that is the case, then there would be no need for any amendment to those default hours as proposed by some members. New Zealand First thinks that those default hours are far too liberal and should be more restrictive, but we would not wish to do so by amending this legislation. Instead, we would like to see local authority alcohol policies be mandatory. The fact that those liberal hours are liberal will encourage those local authorities to have a good look at what they think is appropriate for their particular districts. They need to reflect local needs. For example, if you look at Queenstown, you would expect that they would want local policies regarding trading hours to be more liberal, whereas, for example, you might expect a city like Invercargill to have more restrictive hours. One would understand why, and that would be very appropriate. But it is important that those two and all other local authorities actually set those hours themselves and not rely on default provisions as set out in clause 44.

With regard to Supplementary Order Paper 109, I fully agree with Mr Chauvel’s proposal regarding clause 45. It would simply be redundant if the requirement for local authority alcohol policies was mandatory. The proposals he makes for clause 46 would also be appropriate. They are consequential. I note also he proposes the same amendment to clause 75 as Kevin Hague has proposed, replacing in that clause the word “may” with the word “must”. That is, as I said before, all it takes and is most appropriate.

Finally, I would like to mention the amendments to clause 77 that Mr Chauvel has proposed. I believe they should be adopted as well. I like very much what he has done in respect of the policies that would be mandatory, especially those in subclause (1), relating to the location of licensed premises with regard to broad areas, and, secondly, the location of licensed premises by reference to proximity to premises or facilities of particular kinds. There has already been some debate about that. I also note the process for managing intoxicated people.

I am very pleased to speak on Part 3 of the Alcohol Reform Bill. It is the most substantial part of the bill. It is where the rubber hits the road. Just before I start I would like to record that I actually was passionate about increasing the purchase age to 20 years old. Unfortunately, that did not happen. That is democracy; that is the will of the House.

On local alcohol polices I could not agree more with the Hon Lianne Dalziel. Engagement and empowering communities are so critical. You just cannot prescribe something or cut and paste someone else’s plan into another community’s plan, and that is so true. The community is in the best position to decide where those outlets should be and how many it should have. I will give you the example that happened in the community that I work in, in Mount Roskill, in the last term of Parliament. Molley Green is an area in Mount Roskill, and an outlet was threatening to open up. It had been given the go-ahead. In fact, there was a lot of density of alcohol outlets in that particular area. There was a kindergarten and there were a number of schools. The community was absolutely outraged that this outlet was going to open up opposite an intermediate school. It took people who were passionate about the community to rally support, and they protested.

I joined that protest. I was very happy to. It was actually a very uplifting experience knowing that the community was being galvanised like a lightning rod. It was a glue. It brought the whole community together, and there was a huge amount of passion. Well, they really did not have much show in the sense that this outlet had already been given the go-ahead, and so there were not a lot of remedies they could follow, but they decided they would protest anyway, and they did. They got loud hailers there, we had placards, and we got toots from cars. That is when I realised there is a real public activism happening out there. There is a real passion and concern about how alcohol is impacting on our communities.

I am just going to sidetrack a wee bit: that is why we have got the FebFast, and we have got the different initiatives like Dry July and Hello Sunday Morning, where people—celebrities, high-profile New Zealanders—are saying “Look, I’m giving up alcohol. I’m going to review how it affects my life.”, and good on them, because they are becoming role models. This legislation is going to go a long way, but it is no magic bullet, and we know that. There are some excellent, excellent parts to this Alcohol Reform Bill, which I believe will go a long, long way, and local alcohol plans will be part of that. Students would have been walking past the outlet. The concern was that there were kindergartens, there were greens, and there were reserves where, if people had easy access to alcohol—there was already pretty easy access, but this would make it easier—we would have glass bottles and broken glass in parks and reserves, near kindergartens, and so forth.

I am really pleased to say that that outlet decided not to go ahead. I am not sure of the reasons why. Maybe it saw the outpouring of emotion and concern from the community, and realised it was on a hiding to nothing, and I am pleased it did not go ahead. So it was a win for the community, and I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was an excellent suggestion by the Minister of Justice, Judith Collins, that local body election candidates could actually campaign on this. If we can get this bill through in a timely way and on the statute book, our candidates for the local bodies next year could go out and campaign on this. Boy, it would be like a lightning rod. I know it would be, because I sense it and I feel it. There is a real undercurrent there. For any candidate worth their salt, if they want to actually get votes and actually engage people—it is all about engaging; I know we are very concerned about the voter turnout in local body elections—that would be an absolute issue of concern. I think we all feel it, because as MPs we walk through the community and we discuss it; we know the severe impact that alcohol has.

The other part to this Alcohol Reform Bill that I am really pleased about is supermarket displays, in that supermarkets will be able to display alcohol only in the single non-prominent area of their store. It will not be at entrances. It will not be at checkouts. It will not be at the end of aisles. There will be no grandparenting laws, which someone did tell me about the other day. They thought that was going to be OK for their local supermarket, and it was all OK—they were going to be grandparented in. Well, that is not going to happen. I think that is excellent. There are also going to be much tighter restrictions on alcohol advertising. Unacceptable practices will no longer be allowed. We will not be able to encourage people to drink heavily. There will not be any advertising of free alcohol, advertising discounts of 25 percent or more on alcohol, or offering free gifts with the purchase of alcohol. Thank you.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. Kia ora tātou katoa. I wanted to take an opportunity to look at a fair chunk of Supplementary Order Paper 81, which I have presented to the Committee. But to set the scene and to make sure that it is in a context: one in five Māori will have an alcohol-abuse disorder at some stage in their lives. One in 10 will become dependent on alcohol. Those most likely to have alcohol abuse and dependence issues are those living in the very poorest households and communities. Alcohol use in low socio-economic communities is associated with high levels of crime, educational underachievement, poor economic prospects, and chronic welfare dependency. That is where the Māori Party does not want our people to be. Lifting the standard of living in these communities means addressing alcohol issues.

Māori make up a disproportionate number of the clients in alcohol and drug treatment services. Māori tamariki and rangatahi are seen by alcohol and drug treatment services at a rate of at least three times the rate of non-Māori the same age. So from the Māori Party perspective we have much to do. Although the Alcohol Reform Bill does go some way towards addressing some of those issues, clearly, across the Committee, as we have had the debate over the last 2 days, there are some of us who feel we could go a little bit further.

There are a number of key clauses that I wanted to identify to the Committee in my opportunity to speak. Pretty much most of them are captured in this part, Part 3. The first one is relatively straightforward, and it is talking about the notion of a sinking-lid policy, if you like, on off-licences. What we are talking about here is starting to bring down the number of liquor stores, while allowing relocation of existing premises, not to disadvantage those who are already there, but certainly to look toward the sinking-lid policy, if you want to call it that.

When I was a young fellow in my home town of Ngongotahā, which is just north of Rotorua, there was one pub, full stop—one pub. Whether that is a good thing or bad thing I will not say, but it was a vital part of the community. I listened to the Hon Judith Collins talk about her circumstances when she was younger, and pretty much—my mother, in particular, visited that place, and it was good for the community. It was good for the community. My dad, I can be proud to say, bless his soul, was known as a sly-grogger at Mangakino at the power station at a time when Maori were not allowed to buy alcohol. So there is a bit of a context there. But coming back to Ngongotahā, there was one pub for that small community. If you go through Rotorua heading to Tauranga on the back road, you will find it. Now there are two bottle stores, two pubs, and a supermarket, all selling alcohol.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: And the good singer has gone too.

And the what?

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: The good singer has gone.

Oh, well, the point is—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: That was Howard’s pub.

Oh, no, was it? You are joking. It was not the Ngongotahā pub, no. He was up at the lake house. I digress from the topic.

What I am saying, and other speakers have talked about this, is that the proliferation of venues that sell alcohol has grown. I am talking about my small home town that, as I said, had one small pub, which was a central focus. Now it has five places where you can buy alcohol. It just does not seem right. We have heard other stories. Louisa Wall talked about Manurewa, her electorate, or Ōtara, those smaller places where you can walk around and at every corner you will find a liquor outlet—small outlets that can even fit in half the size or even a quarter of the size of this Chamber, set up to sell alcohol. We have got to do something about that, and my amendment is about moving in that direction, and bringing a sinking-lid policy while not disadvantaging those who are already in that business, I suppose. So that is the first point, and I hope that the Committee gives some serious consideration to that.

Another part of the amendment that I bring to the Committee is changing and adapting the trading hours from 8 a.m. to 4 a.m., to 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. That is a change in the opportunity, again, to sell alcohol. The other element that is brought in here is for on-licence premises to have a one-way door policy, meaning that once you are in the premises, you are stuck there. If you go out, goodbye, do not come back—after 1 o’clock, it is time to go home. Very often, I know from having taken some young adults from home into Rotorua, they tend to move around, for whatever reason, and, in doing so, they consume more alcohol as they go. It is likely they have some in their cars, because they want to visit all of the nightclubs. This is one way of dealing with this particular angle of young people moving from place to place. Once you go in the premises, you are there. You are stuck there, and if you go, it is the end of the story between the hours of 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. We think that this is a good provision that will, hopefully, be supported by the Committee. I noted some of the comments made by the Minister of Justice earlier about the trading hours—many comments, actually—that there are only 3 out of 24 hours when alcohol is not available to be sold, at this point in time. That is wrong. That is wrong.

The third part of the amendments that I have put forward are talking about the proximity to schools in respect of being a part of the deciding factors about whether a licence can be issued. I know that Louisa Wall talked about that, and some have talked about perhaps having a distance. What we are talking about here is making sure that it has a little bit more bite on how those licensing authorities actually go about their work. Again, we think this is a sensible thing. It gives a little more clout to licensing authorities to give more consideration to where schools are, in terms of determining whether the place that is selling the alcohol is allowed to have a licence and, in fact, to set up a premises in that proximity.

The last one that I wanted to touch base on in the bit of time I have got available, without diverting too far, is this question about the appointment to licensing committees within territorial authorities. In a sense, because Māori for all intents and purposes have been at the bad end of some of the statistics—and I opened with some of those comments—the view is that it would be appropriate to have Māori representation as of right, if you like, on those territorial authorities. So the Supplementary Order Paper is asking that there be provisions, or rather that the provisions in respect of the appointment of licensing committees within territorial authorities be amended so as to provide for the appointment of Māori members, by local iwi or hapū, to those committees. In the amendment, it proposes that “3 [members] are appointed by the territorial authority for that ... district; and 1 [member] is appointed by local iwi or hapū ...”.

What we found, even in cases like the Rena—and we spoke about it in the debate on the Mount Maunganui Borough Reclamation and Empowering Act Repeal Bill recently—is that not only the impact but also the ability of Māori to be a part of decision-making processes within those authorities by hapū and by iwi is an important ingredient to getting buy in. It would seem to us, thinking back on the experience of the Rena disaster, that having Māori involvement at that level—at the decision-making level—brings about buy in. Certainly it does at a hapū level, because these appointments would be made by hapū and iwi people, and therefore there must be a link back to the local community. In that regard, we would hope that the Minister looked carefully at this one. It is not a big ask—one person, an iwi or hapū delegate, to be appointed on to the territorial authorities to be able to give some insight, if you like, into not how Māori think about alcohol, because sometimes thinking does not come into it, but certainly to be able to have input about the disastrous effects that it has had on Māori hapū, iwi, and kāinga.

So those are pretty much the main thrusts of the amendments, certainly around the licensing requirements and conditions. I have not touched on minimum pricing, because I think we will hold that one for a little bit longer. But certainly we believe that these amendments that are here are fair, are considered, and may well add or at least contribute in some way to dealing with some of the issues that members across the House have raised. We ask the Minister to give serious consideration to amendments in that order. Thank you very much. Kia ora tātou.

Kia ora, Mr Chair. Thank you very much for the opportunity to just clarify Supplementary Order Paper 107 in my name. It starts from a premise that our schools are the nurturing and learning environments for our children, as are the immediate environments around our schools, which is why the 1-kilometre buffer zone I wanted to create around our schools is so vital. But what I want to add is that I have excluded supermarkets, and I also have highlighted in my Supplementary Order Paper an exclusion for communities to self-regulate. So I have already factored in the opportunity for communities, through the local alcohol policy, to decide whether they do in fact want a liquor outlet within 1 kilometre of a school.

I think the principle that I want to discuss, really, is what the difference or the interface is between central government and local government in terms of ensuring that our children—and especially our children who walk to school—have the protections, and that we as members of Parliament, in our job as legislators, act so that our children do not have to walk to school or to stop into the local superette on the way to school and be confronted with alcohol. It really is a question about alcohol as a commodity, and the relationship that that commodity has with our children.

I agree that the local alcohol policy is going to provide a wonderful platform and opportunity in communities like Papakura and Manurewa, and, in fact, in all of our communities that have strong leadership. I want to acknowledge, as the Minister of Justice did, that we have local board members and leaders within our respective communities who will ensure through the local alcohol policies that such issues are considered. But, in fact, I do not want the Mayor of Auckland to determine, through a local alcohol policy that Auckland City will have, that schools are the learning and nurturing centres for our kids, and that the immediate environment around schools is so vital that we do not want the pollutant of alcohol to inflict and infringe on the ability for our kids to develop—I would like this House and central government to take the responsibility. The principle that my Supplementary Order Paper is trying to address—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for the dinner break. This debate is interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

I would like to recommence my contribution to the Committee stage of Part 3 of the Alcohol Reform Bill by moving to some evidence from the National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis from the University of Waikato. That group is headed by economist Dr Michael Cameron. What I want to do is quote from the Manukau research that I have been using throughout my contributions, which is The Impacts of Liquor Outlets in Manukau City. It was published in January 2012, funded by the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand, which is now the Health Promotion Agency. What this research found is that “off-licence liquor outlets tended to be located in high-population, high-deprivation areas, and were associated with significantly higher levels of crime, including violence, sex, drugs, alcohol and property offences as well as motor vehicle crashes.”

What I want to highlight is section 6 of this particular piece of research. What the group did was look at the indicators of social harm from the New Zealand Transport Agency, Counties Manukau District Health Board, and the New Zealand Police. It looked at accident and emergency event data, alcohol-related admissions, and different categories of police attendances. It included things like antisocial behaviour, dishonesty offences, drug and alcohol offences, family violence, property abuses, property damage, sexual offences, traffic offences, and violent crime. That was part of the methodology.

What they concluded in this section was that, per 10,000 people per annum, they have evidence that says “an additional off-licence outlet is associated with 10.4 to 25.3 additional police events and 2.0 to 3.8 additional motor vehicle accidents.” There is empirical evidence that the density of outlets does contribute to a whole lot of social indicators that actually have a fiscal cost to society. So my advocacy of my Supplementary Order Paper and of the fact that we should treat schools as very special places for our children and treat the environment immediately around them as very important to communities has, I think, some merit.

I also would like to highlight in this report section 4, which deals with the community stakeholder view. This particular research project group carried out 20 interviews, had six focus groups, and completed 11 surveys. If I again focus on what they found was the most problematic outlet type, it was the smaller stand-alone outlet. It is these outlets—these superettes, these dairies that somehow have become entrenched in the suburbs, in our communities, providing liquor to the local people—that are the most problematic. What the group found was that “Their role in increasing the incidence of alcohol-related harm in the community was attributed to a variety of factors that can be summarised as relating to three main themes:”.

The first one was about density, and the reality is we have a problem with density. So whether we like it or not, we have to create mechanisms that are going to address the density issue. Density then correlates to availability, and there is increased consumption in suburbs where people have access to alcohol. So there is clear evidence about that. The second one was co-location: “liquor outlets were observed to be located in areas with vulnerable populations, particularly in areas of lower socioeconomic status.”

The third was the unscrupulous business practices of people who manage and run these particular outlets in communities such as Manurewa. So there is sale of alcohol to minors, and there is the granting of credit to vulnerable people. What I really wanted to highlight was the near unanimity concerning potential policy responses. This is what the community identified as the need; this is the community’s response to that need. These are their policy solutions.

The first was to reduce the number of outlets, which my Supplementary Order Paper would do. I also want to highlight Supplementary Order Paper 81 in the name of the honourable member Te Ururoa Flavell, because his sinking-lid policy would also ensure that we address the supply of liquor outlets. The second solution was restricting and controlling the hours of operation of licensed premises, which is what my colleague Andrew Little’s Supplementary Order Paper 110 wants to do.

But the solution is also about implementing planning measures that restrict the number of outlets in particular locations. The contention of my Supplementary Order Paper, of new clause 38A, which I want inserted into the legislation, is that we will not allow off-licence liquor outlets within 1 kilometre of a school or an early childhood centre. What are we talking about? We are talking about our children who are aged under 5—the 2, 3, 4, and 5-year-olds. We are talking about young kids—primary school children—who walk to school not being exposed to alcohol. And it is not only alcohol in the dairies and the superettes that I am worried about; it is also the paraphernalia around alcohol. It is the bottles, it is the cans, and it is the whole culture associated with excessive consumption that I think we also have to be mindful of.

I am really passionate about this issue, and I am passionate because the communities and the people in South Auckland are incredibly passionate about it. So I am asking that the Minister of Justice seriously look at whether or not it is central government’s responsibility to create a safe place for our kids. If we want to put children at the centre of policy and children at the centre of the Alcohol Reform Bill, this is one way that we can do that.

This is the one way that we can actually say to the people of New Zealand that we value our schools, we value our children, and we will protect our children and ensure that they are not subject to the ill consequences of alcohol. We will make sure that the immediate environment around our schools—because they are nurturing, learning centres for our children—will be protected and we will have a buffer zone. The only people who will change that, who can change that, are local people through their local alcohol policies, which is what my Supplementary Order Paper is proposing. As a first-principles response, as an ethical response, I think it is incumbent on all of us to protect not only the children in South Auckland, actually—the principle is to protect all children. Kia ora. Thank you.

I want to talk about Supplementary Order Paper 113 in my name, which is a regulation-making power for minimum pricing in off-licences. I have written to all members of the House and asked them to support this amendment, because this amendment does not actually introduce minimum pricing; it simply creates the power for the Government to introduce a regulation for minimum pricing when it has reached the position that it says it wishes to adopt post the work that it is doing in this area. The reason that I want to bring this into effect now by way of a regulation-making power is to ensure that the process for delivering a minimum price, should the decision be made, is actually available at the time the decision is made, rather than having to come back to Parliament and ask Parliament to then vote on a change to legislation that we have just passed, in order to implement a minimum pricing regime. There is no way that the Government will be able, under the existing Alcohol Reform Bill, to introduce a minimum price without a regulation-making power within the legislation to do so.

What this regulation does not do is state a minimum price. That minimum price must be evidence-based, and that is why I have chosen a regulation-making process. That would enable proper consultation over the establishment of the correct level to be undertaken. Some people have taken an unscripted reference in a parliamentary debate last year to $2 per standard drink, which is a statement that I did use in a speech, as a position that I have adopted. But I really want to say—as I have said to the Minister of Justice personally, although I know that she has continued to repeat it; I have said it to her personally, and I will repeat it to the Committee—I do not want to implement a $2 per drink minimum price for alcohol. The Labour Party does not have a position on this at all. It is a conscience vote on this side of the Chamber. There is no position that Labour has adopted, and I personally have not adopted a position of $2 per standard drink.

I want to explain what I said in the Chamber, and, as I say, it was unscripted. For some time we have not been allowed to use speeches that we have pre-written when we come down to the Chamber. We are not allowed to read out speeches. I made a reference to an amount per standard drink. I should have said it was an example of a minimum price. It certainly is not the position I have adopted. It was based on my mistaken view that there are six standard drinks in a bottle of wine. That is my mistake—apparently there are 7.2 standard drinks in a bottle of wine. Regarding the $6 bottle of wine, which I was seeking to target—because people can buy $6 bottles of wine; that is well under a dollar per standard drink—I said that that bottle of wine should be around double that price. So that is where the $2 per standard drink came from. It was based on my mistaken view that there were six standard drinks in a bottle of wine, which I thought should be sold for $12, not for $6.

The reason I said they should not be sold for $6 is that people were essentially doing a cost-benefit analysis when purchasing alcohol, although I described it with young people as a “cost-trash analysis”—that is, how little can someone pay for the amount of alcohol required to get them trashed. We are talking about people who will determine whether they have had a good night out by how little they can remember of it, not by the good time they actually had. So I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not believe that politicians should set the price based on what they think, as I have proved that what they think may in fact be mistaken. It should be done by regulation, a proper regulation-making process, and that is all this Supplementary Order Paper proposes. I do ask the Committee to consider it seriously. It means a lot, I think, to the people who have been advocating for substantive change to the law. It does not bind anyone to any particular position. It just facilitates change in the law once the research comes in and backs that change, which, I believe, it will.

The Law Commission had a section on pricing and recommended that work be undertaken, which the Government is doing, and I acknowledge that. It referred to the recently released draft guidance from the UK Government’s expert advisory body on medical treatment, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, and this is a quote from that report: “Making alcohol less affordable appears to be the most effective way of reducing alcohol-related harm. There is sufficient evidence (within the published literature and from the economic analysis) to justify the introduction of a minimum price per unit. The evidence suggests that young people who drink and people who drink harmful amounts of alcohol tend to choose cheaper drinks. Establishing a minimum price per unit would limit the ability of these groups to ‘trade down’ to cheaper products.”

The Law Commission also discussed excise tax over minimum pricing and had this to say: “However, the difficulty with using excise tax to establish an implicit minimum price is that all alcohol products go up in price, including premium products. There is also the risk that, given the purchasing power of the supermarkets and the highly competitive market, retailers will not pass on the excise tax in full, or will pass it on for some beverages but not others, depending on the profit margins associated with different products.” This has been my argument all the way along around minimum pricing. This is not about increasing the overall price of alcohol. This is about increasing the price of just the dirt-cheap alcohol, the extremely cheap alcohol, the alcohol that is cheaper than buying a bottle of Coca-Cola or a bottle of milk. But in the end, the Law Commission felt that more research should be done, and it recommended an immediate increase in the excise tax of 50 percent.

I have not actually supported that as a position, because I know not only about the example the UK report identifies but that supermarkets require suppliers to absorb much of the increases themselves so it never impacts on the price that they retail for, and it does flow on to the high-end as well. High-priced wine and spirits are not the problem; it is the dirt-cheap alcohol that is the problem, and minimum pricing has no real impact on moderate drinking. After all, if you are drinking only a bottle of wine a week, then an extra $6 is not going to make any difference if you were buying the $6 bottle, but if you were already paying more than $12 for a bottle of wine, you would not be paying a cent more. So it does not impact on the people whom we say would be affected by it. The only reason that the Ministry of Justice has given the Minister as to why it opposes the Supplementary Order Paper is that it is investigating minimum pricing. The Supplementary Order Paper relieves the Government of the need to return to the House for an amendment to the Act when the work produces a result, which I believe will support minimum pricing.

In my letter to MPs in the House I referred to a comment made by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron. He said that they needed to get to grips with the problem of super-cheap alcohol, which is fuelling violence on their streets and causing mayhem in their accident and emergency units. He believed that minimum unit pricing is a big part of the answer, and he ends his comments by saying: “this shows a radical government, not frightened of taking big decisions, rolling up its sleeves and getting on with the job,”. I never thought for a minute that I would be quoting positively a Tory Prime Minister in this Parliament here in New Zealand, but he is right. It is time for the Government to roll up its sleeves and get on with the job, without coming back to Parliament to amend the Act, and that is what my Supplementary Order Paper will do.

I want to end by commenting on the Minister’s concerns around what has happened in Scotland. Yes, it is true that the Scottish Government has been forced into a situation where it has had to push back the introduction of minimum pricing as the interests find themselves swirling around this topic, as has occurred with the tobacco lobby. “… the Scotch Whisky Association is essentially arguing that the commercial interests of its members should take precedence over the health and wellbeing of the people of Scotland.” Essentially, “We need to decide if our society is prepared to limit commercial activity to better protect our health and quality of life, or alternatively, allow powerful corporate interests to dictate health policy.” I think that is what we need to take into account here—that, yes, there are powerful interests that want to stop the imposition of a minimum price, but the argument that they are producing on the other side is that this is a matter of competition, and that competition should actually allow pricing to go down to its lowest level for the benefit of the consumer. Well, it may well be for the benefit of the individual consumer that he or she can buy an individual bottle of wine for $6, but it is not to the benefit of our country that that dirt-cheap alcohol is fuelling violence and mayhem and is destroying people’s abilities to make confident decisions about the things they are going to do with their lives.

We have unplanned pregnancies in this country that are the result of people doing what they would not otherwise do other than under the influence of alcohol. We have people making poor decisions or not being capable of making good decisions because they are under the influence of too much alcohol. When the alcohol is so cheap that it is cheaper than a bottle of milk, then you have to understand that it is going to have an impact on the wider society. Are we here in this Chamber seriously going to leave our law unable to respond to a report that may produce a result that says that we must act? If that report, which the Government has asked for, produces a result that says we must act, do we then have to come back to Parliament and amend the Act to make a power, to give us the power to do the thing that we know is the right thing to do? I think we must continue to see the question of who is trying to influence the result on this vote.

Let me just quote from the Scottish situation again. The chief executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland stated: “Having failed to use their formidable lobbying power to prevent the passage of the minimum pricing law in Scotland, the global corporations now seek to get the legislation struck down by the courts. In taking this action, they follow the well-trodden path of the tobacco industry and other transnational corporations who use their considerable financial clout to oppose public health policies that threaten their shareholders’ profits.” Make no mistake about it: that is what this issue is all about. That is why this is the issue that I have chosen for the Supplementary Order Paper that I wanted to bring to this Committee and to have this debate on, because it is an issue that was raised in the Alcohol in our Lives: Curbing the Harm report that the Law Commission wrote after listening to the people of New Zealand. It is an issue that is subject to misinformation, it is subject to an outrageous level of lobbying and attack from a very well-resourced industry, and the poor old publicly funded public health institutions are left struggling to compete with the level of pressure that those multinational corporations can bring to bear.

We were in this House debating this issue on tobacco many, many years ago, and I know that nobody would want to own being on the wrong side of that. I do not want anyone to own being on the wrong side of this issue. It is simply a regulation-making power, which, when the evidence is produced, enables the Government to take immediate action and to have a proper consultation process about what that minimum price should be. I do not think that anyone in this Chamber who would agree that $6 for a bottle of wine, and enabling people to do that “cost-trash analysis” before they go out and expose themselves to an unsafe environment, would stand for that.

I want to begin by expressing my support for remarks made by the Minister of Justice from the chair earlier today around the tone of the debate today, because it has been a constructive tone. It has been good to see Government members taking calls, and that is the kind of exchange of ideas that I think the Alcohol Reform Bill will benefit from.

I am going to take some calls on price issues later on, but I want to take this call specifically on local alcohol policies. Members will be aware that I have been giving a rolling lecture on health promotion theory during the debate on this bill and others, and local alcohol policies are a great way of putting into place health promotion theory. But in this call I want to focus a little bit on health promotion practice, because best practice in health promotion involves health promoters—experts—getting alongside communities and becoming resources to them. That is assisting them with money, potentially, to implement programmes, but, perhaps more important, with information, research, knowledge about what has worked in other places, and access to decision makers and to policy-making processes with the objective of assisting that community, certainly, to influence the environment that surrounds it and in which it must live—and I guess this is where local alcohol policies come in—but also, critically, to take ownership of identifying the issues that that community wants to work on, and the kinds of solutions that will work for that community. That is critically important because each individual community has the expert knowledge about culture, values, and ways of doing things within a particular community, and they are the ones who will know what will work and will not work.

So I want to support the basic idea of local alcohol policies. I think it is a fundamentally important idea, because it is about both of those things. It is about empowering communities, and it is also about specifically addressing the environment that surrounds those communities. I have already discussed that, as have other speakers in this debate.

The issue that I want to come to is the issue that is addressed in my Supplementary Order Paper 80, which is around making these local alcohol policies mandatory rather than voluntary. The Minister has addressed that in her remarks, and I thank in particular my colleague Denis O’Rourke for his contributions. He has probably explained my Supplementary Order Paper better than I am going to have the opportunity to do.

The particular point that I want to address, which responds in part to the Minister’s comments, is this: in many of our territorial local authorities the authority represents not just one particular community, but rather a multitude of communities. Take a territorial local authority like Auckland Council, for example. I guess that is the example we are all going to think of. One could not really say that Auckland is simply one community. Certainly from a health promotion point of view it is not; it is a multiplicity of different communities with different interests. The Minister, in her own remarks, noted that the environment around alcohol and, indeed, community motivations around alcohol in different parts of Auckland would be different, and therefore a voluntary regime runs the risk that particular communities that are heavily impacted by alcohol and desperately want to have local alcohol policies may be thwarted by other communities within that territorial local authority. We need in this Chamber to empower those communities and to ensure that they do get the say that everyone, I think, wants them to have, and the way to do that is through making local alcohol policies mandatory. Thank you.

I would like to echo the sentiments of the speaker who has resumed his seat, Kevin Hague. After I spoke about the local alcohol policy issue the Minister of Justice got to her feet and explained the Government’s position, but I think, notwithstanding what was said on that occasion, the reality is this: communities that are most at risk from alcohol abuse are going to contain people who are the least equipped and the least motivated to get involved at local government level and to try to make a difference. That is the reality. It is a sad reality, but that was the evidence that the Justice and Electoral Committee heard.

To say we are not going to require local government authorities to act responsibly by considering the issue of the content of what sort of policy should exist in their region, submitted on exhaustively by the public, and containing rules that are appropriate to that region, but that we are simply going to make it optional as to whether they have those rules that will influence their licensing decisions is, frankly, the height of irresponsibility. And if we are serious about trying to address the harm that alcohol can cause in our communities when it is used irresponsibly, we would require the next tier of government down from this House to address the issue. That is all we would be doing. We would not be telling them how to do it. It would be up to them, if we were to follow the approach in either Supplementary Order Paper 109 in my name or Supplementary Order Paper 80 in Mr Hague’s name. We would simply be saying: “Here are the criteria that you can address, here is the consultative procedure that you should adopt, ask your communities what rules you should follow when you make a licensing decision, and then follow them.” Probably the worst abdication of responsibility that we could undertake in this debate if we fail to consider those Supplementary Order Papers seriously is that failure.

I want to address another Supplementary Order Paper that has been spoken to by its sponsor already in the debate, and that is Supplementary Order Paper 113, which stands in the name of my dear friend and colleague Lianne Dalziel. She spoke to this paper only some minutes ago, and I found it, as I always do when I listen to her contributions, a compelling speech. She made a couple of points that were very important. They bear repeating, given the lies, frankly, that have circulated about what her Supplementary Order Paper would do. The fact that those lies have circulated indicates the force and the power of the vested interests that stand against sensible regulation in this area.

What her Supplementary Order Paper would do, as we heard Lianne Dalziel tell the Committee, is this. It would simply insert a one or two-line clause into the bill that would give the Minister in the chair a particular power. That power would be that when she receives the report that she has already asked officials for—that is, a report on the merits of whether there ought to be a minimum alcohol price and whether it would make a difference to binge drinking, particularly in respect of the very cheap, $6 wine - type products that she mentioned in her contribution—then the Minister would be able to make regulations that bring into effect a minimum pricing regime to address those very low-end products.

The point about those low-end products is this, and I am sure that this will be borne out in the evidence that the Minister receives from her working group. When people pre-load—which is a term we learnt at the select committee; it is in the Law Commission report as well; before people go out to drink, they drink at home and get drunk before they go out and get drunker, which is the essence of this binge drinking culture that I think we all agree we need to address—one of the beverages of choice for doing that is those very, very cheap loss-leading bottles of wine that are able to be purchased at the supermarket. If we were able to raise the price at that very low end of the market, through the sort of regime that the Minister would be free to introduce under the powers that Lianne Dalziel’s Supplementary Order Paper would confer on her, then we would make a big difference to at least one important aspect of our binge drinking culture.

That is all that the Supplementary Order Paper does: it just confers a power on the Minister. Who knows? If the Minister is able to overcome the enormous pressure that has clearly been brought to bear on her and others by the industry, at the time that the report on minimum pricing is received by her, and does determine to introduce such a regime, then she is going to have to come back to the House anyway and request that we give her powers to do so. She will have to take powers; they are not already on the statute book. What we are trying to do, what Lianne Dalziel is trying to do, is simply save her the need to do that. We are the Opposition: we are here to help. What we are doing is simply saying to the Minister that rather than having to go to the Leader of the House and ask for yet more time to take up with the parliamentary agenda on alcohol law reform, she could simply have the power now. She would not have to use it. It would never have to be brought into force either if the evidence does not support it, which I doubt, or if she chooses to bow to the status quo and not bring in the minimum pricing regime. But should she choose to do so, then my colleague’s Supplementary Order Paper would empower her to do it.

There would be the usual checks and balances that surround the exercise of such powers. The Minister would bring in a scheme by regulation. The scheme would be laid on the Table. It would be presented to the Regulations Review Committee and scrutinised. It would be open to complaint, so if the industry or anybody else did not like it, or if the punters felt that it was putting up the cost of their harmless leisure drinking—drinking with food, the occasional tipple—they would be able to complain to the committee and seek to have the scheme set aside. And any member of the Regulations Review Committee, as you know, could come along to the House with a disallowance motion. So there would be all sorts of safeguards in place. There would be all sorts of scrutiny that would apply to this sort of scheme, but there would be enormous freedom for the Minister to use the evidence to come up with the sort of regulatory regime that we heard in the select committee would make a real difference, along with the sorts of changes that we have seen proposed in Supplementary Order Papers around advertising, and the sorts of Supplementary Order Papers that we have seen around availability. The final leg in that trifecta is pricing.

All that Lianne Dalziel is trying to do here is empower the Minister to deal with this issue, to give her one of the essential tools that we heard the experts tell us is required if this matter of binge drinking is to be finally and properly addressed by this Parliament. If National Party members decide to vote this Supplementary Order Paper down by accepting the whip, as we anticipate they will, then they will be doing a major disservice to the cause of alcohol law reform in New Zealand. It will be a major lost opportunity.

I remember that when the Minister was addressing the question of local alcohol policies and whether or not they ought to be required by territorial local authorities, she said something like this—and she will forgive me if I am not paraphrasing her exactly—“Members of local authorities will be punished through an electoral reckoning if they fail to live up to their responsibilities.” Well, I want to remind the Minister and National Party members of those words now, because if National Party members fail in this fundamental duty to keep New Zealanders safe by addressing the issue of price, as we were told by the experts that we should on this occasion, then there will be an electoral reckoning. Every member on this side of the Chamber who supports Lianne Dalziel’s Supplementary Order Paper and like measures that are before the Committee will be reminding the electorate of that failure. It is our duty to do that. If members do support the objects and purposes of the bill, which are to try to bring in better controls to combat the problems we have around the unfortunate aspects of misuse of alcohol in our society, then price is a fundamental mechanism. I, for the life of me, cannot see why a Minister would decline powers that would allow her to act in the event that she receives recommendations from a review that is already on foot and could report at any time soon, and that would prevent her from having to come back to the House and seek time on the Order Paper. This is a sensible Supplementary Order Paper—

I just want to address some of the issues that have been raised by the previous speakers since the dinner break. One of the suggestions that the member who has just resumed his seat, Charles Chauvel, has made is that I am under some particularly difficult and powerful pressure from the alcohol industry. I have to say that the member clearly does not know me that well if he thinks I would actually really care a fig, frankly, about any pressure at all—

💬 Charles Chauvel: I know you too well.

No, I do not actually think the member does, really. I think he has got a very short memory, but no doubt he is going to find out differently. One of the things that I found very interesting is that the only people who I can recall lobbying me to bring in a minimum price have been the Opposition parties, which, of course, they are completely entitled to do, and also the alcohol industry. In fact, the hospitality industry has actually come to me and said that it—and, of course, it sells alcohol—

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: There’s a difference between the hospitality industry and the alcohol industry.

Miss Dalziel says that the hospitality industry is different from the alcohol industry. I am sorry but it actually sells alcohol. It has lobbied me to say that it would like—

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: They’ve got different interests.

Oh, it has got different interests. So it is not selling alcohol? So it is selling alcohol?

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: What did Katherine Rich say?

💬 Charles Chauvel: What did the grocers say, Judith?

Actually, they have not been to see me.

💬 Charles Chauvel: You just let them see Margaret instead.

Well, actually, I think one of the things is that there has been an accusation in the Committee tonight that I am under tremendous pressure and giving into pressure from the alcohol industry. I hope that that was not the real accusation. That is the way I heard it, and I would just like to put that to bed.

The hospitality industry has been and said to me that it wants minimum pricing, and we know why. It is to get maximum profits—that is what it means. That means as well that the people who have actually been lobbying me against minimum pricing are not the alcohol industry.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: They’re not affected by it.

No, no, not at all. Actually, the people who have been lobbying me are people from my electorate, people from around the country, and particularly people who say “Hang on, I’m a responsible drinker. Why should the price of my alcohol go up?”. People who are, for instance, over 65 years old and on a pension say to me “If I can get a bottle of alcohol or wine or something at $6 or $7 on special in the supermarket, why should I not be able to buy it? Why should I be penalised?”. They say to me “Why should the price of my alcohol go up because of the irresponsibility of others?”. If anyone seriously thinks that young people are going into supermarkets and buying up wine at $6 a bottle and then getting drunk, I have to say that I do not think that is actually borne out by the facts. It is a different brand, it is a different style, and it is a different age group. It is just like when Jim Anderton, with the very best of intentions, brought in some extra taxes around ready-to-drinks, and it eventually ended up being a sherry tax. The people who actually did end up paying were the elderly who were buying sherry.

What we have is a situation where people think that this is the alcohol industry against minimum pricing. Why would the hospitality industry want minimum pricing?

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: Because they make nothing out of it. They get nothing out of it.

Miss Dalziel says it gets nothing out of it. I am sorry—

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: They charge above the minimum price. The hospitality industry pays above the minimum price. These are on-licence premises, not off-licence premises.

Miss Dalziel, you have had your chance. You have had five calls on this—

💬 Charles Chauvel: More to come.

That is just fine. I am looking forward to it. I think, Mr Chauvel, you should let Miss Dalziel get on and do her own, because she is quite capable of speaking for herself. She does not need to be protected.

I think it is important to understand that a minimum price is a very blunt instrument. The Ministry of Justice is working on a paper, a report, about how it has worked. We were told this year that this was all going to be fabulous because Scotland had done it. Now we find out that Scotland has not done this. It has actually stopped it. In fact, what we are finding is that a lot of the things that we have been told are not actually quite correct. I think we do need to be very sensible about this.

The previous Labour Government obviously, along with Miss Dalziel, took this very seriously and brought in a bill. Unfortunately, it was in the last few days or months of when Labour was in power, after the 9 years it was in power. But my predecessor took over this bill and then changed it. Having said that—

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: You adopted it. You sent it to select committee.

Miss Dalziel says we sort of took it over. Well, we did, in a way, in that the Sale and Supply of Liquor and Liquor Enforcement Bill, which was her bill, had local alcohol policies of a sort.

💬 Hon Lianne Dalziel: Plans.

Plans, sorry. It dealt with dairies by stopping any stores with fewer than 150 metres of floor space from selling alcohol. It had a kind of three-strikes regime for the sellers who were out of order, which is something we have kept in. There was some stronger stuff around advertising of alcohol, and some stronger stuff on proof of age to buy alcohol, which was good. Almost all of the rest of it has been transferred into the Alcohol Reform Bill.

In addition, what we have done is brought in local decision-makers, the district licensing committees, to be the first decision-makers for licensing, putting licensing decisions in the hands of local people. We have done a lot more around the advertising of alcohol and put restrictions on advertising significant discounts on alcohol. We have done national default maximum trading hours, with much more robust licensing conditions; new rules on responsible supply to minors, requiring parental consent, which is an important step to give parents more control over how young people drink; changes to liquor ban enforcement, bringing in an infringement offence so that the police can give the infringement and get on with their job; and a whole range of little changes to clean up and streamline the law.

This Alcohol Reform Bill is a very comprehensive piece of work. It is something that is significantly better than what there was before, but I do, however, acknowledge the work that the Hon Lianne Dalziel did, and the efforts she made with the then Labour Government. Unfortunately, it was too late in its term of office of 9 years to do anything about it. But that does not mean that we have to, as a Parliament, give in to all the various things and take on all the new ideas that it has got, without saying that we need evidence-based procedures, we need to think very carefully about it, and we also need to bear in mind that the vast majority of New Zealanders who drink, about 85 percent of the population, do not abuse alcohol. It is not the use of alcohol that is the problem; it is the abuse of alcohol that is the problem.

The other thing we were talking about is young people. I think we are all very concerned about young people, and particularly binge drinking. The best place to stop that is in the home. The best place for parents to take responsibility for their young people and to show them the way in which they behave is in the home. If you have a young person in a home where the parents are binge drinking, guess what? You have got more than an 80 percent chance, I would say, of getting that young person thinking that that is the way you drink. If the father goes out and behaves like a complete idiot on alcohol, I am sorry but the kids are going to either completely go that way or go completely the opposite way. That is what happens. If you have got mothers going around drunk at home, that is what you are going to get. In fact, it is all very well saying to the sellers of alcohol “You shouldn’t be selling it.” Actually, maybe we should not be buying it at the levels we do. How about a bit of personal responsibility there? It is all very well to say “Yes, we target particular areas.” Yes, we know that sellers target particular areas. That is because, unfortunately, people are buying it in those areas.

As to the ideas about saying that we are just going to stop this, do we really want to end up like we did years and years ago, until about the 1950s, when the King Country was dry? We want to look at the west Auckland area. They have licensing trusts there. There are very few outlets for alcohol. I can tell this Committee that that is an area of domestic violence, fuelled by alcohol, just like other parts of the country. There is no lack of domestic violence and no lack of drink-driving in west Auckland, and yet there are hardly any liquor outlets. So we need to be responsible, we need to be sensible, and we must not be hysterical.

I would say to this Committee that we have had a great debate about this. Everyone has put a lot of effort into it. I know we are not always going to agree. I know our hearts are all in the right place, but we do need to be moderate. This bill is moderate, it is sensible, it is comprehensive, and it deals with the major issues. Of course it is not going to be the last word on alcohol; it never will be, because we are all very interested in it.

I want to make some comments about the proposed new clause 382 of the Alcohol Reform Bill about pricing. First of all, New Zealand First does not necessarily support the concept of minimum pricing; nor necessarily reject it either. But we do acknowledge that price is relevant to consumption, especially by young people, and that, of course, is what leads to abuse. However, we also acknowledge that there are many problems with minimum pricing as a concept, and many possible loopholes. We do agree with the Government that it needs very comprehensive investigation, and we are very glad to see that the Government has committed itself to a programme of investigation on this issue. I would have to say, however, having just heard the Minister of Justice, that I wonder whether she has in fact already made her decision about this, and whether that investigation would make any difference at all. I hope that is not the case. I hope, like us, the Minister will wait, see the results of that investigation, look at the facts, and then make an assessment—firstly, about whether some means of minimum pricing is appropriate and practical, and, secondly, how that might be implemented in a sensible way.

However, although we do not necessarily support, nor reject, minimum pricing, and will wait for the investigation, we do think that there is absolutely no harm in supporting Supplementary Order Paper 113 in the name of Lianne Dalziel, simply because of the reason she and Charles Chauvel gave, and that is that all it does is insert a provision enabling regulations to be made, if any are to be made in the future. That is a completely harmless provision, and it may actually turn out to be very useful if the results of the investigations do indicate that minimum pricing is worthwhile and that there is a practical and sensible way to do it. So I would not understand why anyone would vote against this, because there is no good reason to do that. The Minister certainly has not given any convincing reason why a provision for regulation should not be included in the bill, so New Zealand First will support it for that reason alone, but as to whether we support regulations in the future, we reserve our position.

I would also like to mention labelling. Set out in Supplementary Order Paper 114 is the provision that I wish to address. In that Supplementary Order Paper the intention is to ensure that alcoholic beverages are no longer exempt from the requirement to provide a label with a nutrition information panel according to the Food Standards Code. Alcoholic beverages—

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member is talking about Part 6. Can you come to Part 3, please.

Sorry? This is section 382? This is clause 382, Supplementary Order Paper 114.

💬 Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: It will be considered in Part 6.

Really? Well, I will reserve my comments until then. Thank you.

Most Monday mornings the staff of Russell School in Porirua East do their security check of their school-grounds after the weekend. Sometimes they have parents joining them. It is not uncommon for them to find pretty clear evidence that some of the locals have used the school-grounds over the weekend to have their party. By solid evidence I mean that they find broken bottles, cans, rubbish, vomit, urine, and, unfortunately, every so often, used condoms and things like that. They have to, in the small time available to them, clean up the school of that kind of rubbish before the kids arrive for their first class. This has been an issue at Russell School for some time, because directly across the road from that school is one of these bottle stores that sell booze quite cheaply.

Russell School has been at the forefront of an effort in Porirua East to try to make sure that we can do something to protect our young children from, you know, the physical evidence of alcohol, and also from exposure to the advertising that they have so close to them. That is why I stand in support of Supplementary Order Paper 107, which is being put forward by my colleague Louisa Wall. I do think that if we are going to make some kind of dramatic culture change, as we keep saying in this House, to try to change the way in which we see alcohol, and which we use alcohol, something needs to be done to reduce the exposure of our young children to alcohol. So that is why I am supporting the Supplementary Order Paper of Louisa Wall—to make sure that there are no off-licences within 1 kilometre of schools, early childhood education centres, and secondary schools.

I do want to add the proviso that, hopefully, there is a local alcohol plan, and that those communities that have just one general store that is obviously quite close to their primary school or to their area school—and I am talking about rural communities, so in my own electorate I am talking about the likes of Pukerua Bay and Pāuatahanui—do actually have the ability to apply for a dispensation from that ban from the radius within 1 kilometre. I think that is a very important aspect of the Supplementary Order Paper that has been put forward by Louisa Wall.

We do need to make sure that we lessen the effect of alcohol advertising that is so close to our schools. As I mentioned earlier, Russell School is directly across the road from a liquor store, which has the likes of Jim Beam, Woodstock, and every other alcoholic beverage that you can think of, blazing from advertising in its windows and from advertising hoardings outside the shop.

If we are, as I mentioned earlier, really serious about reducing the binge-drinking culture within our community, then I do think we need to lessen the exposure of our young children to alcohol advertising, and that is why banning the ability for off-licences to advertise within 1 kilometre of a school or early childhood education centre is something that I support.

The Porirua East community has had to amp up twice over the last 4 or 5 years to stop bottle stores either being established in their communities or acting in a manner that is harming their communities, and to try to stop the behaviour of some of the people who are drinking the alcohol, and the people who are selling the alcohol, to make sure that their children are safe in their own communities. I do think it is important that we give our communities a local voice, through local alcohol plans. I think there is a Supplementary Order Paper in the name of Kevin Hague to ensure that they are mandatory—he is nodding, so that is correct. The ability for councils to have local alcohol plans is very, very important.

I want to note something that the Minister in the chair, the Hon Judith Collins, did say. I also agree that there is a degree of personal responsibility required from people who are buying the alcohol from these stores. I do not want those people buying the alcohol at these stores and then going across to the likes of Russell School—

I move, That the question be now put.

I very much appreciate the opportunity just to sort of wrap up the contributions that are encompassed in my awesome Supplementary Order Paper, which I think most of the Committee is going to support, and that is on this question about pricing. I appreciated the comments from the Minister in the chair, the Minister of Justice. I was watching up in the office and listening to the debate, and I did acknowledge some of the points that she made, but, as she said, we all come with a view to trying to make some contribution. I think she talked about this bill being a moderate bill. We would hope that we would take “moderate” on to a little bit better than moderate, and that is why all of us are contributing today.

Just to wrap up, in terms of a number of the parts in my Supplementary Order Paper, I wanted to talk about minimum price. There are two parts to this, and I will refer to the explanatory note, which pretty much wraps it all up. I am talking about a new provision that would be added to set a minimum price per unit of alcohol and to outline the offences related to the sale of alcohol below the minimum price. I acknowledge that minimum pricing is a sort of one-shoe-fits-all approach. It certainly targets the younger ones; I think one of the speakers talked about a box of “woodies”. That is not anything that I know too much about—a box of “woodies”—but I hear our young people talking about it a lot. It is so easy to go in and just get those sorts of drinks, and there are others, of course. There are all sorts of mixtures that I do not see too much of.

And then, of course, at the other end of the scale you have got the older people, and I think the Minister referred to those who have their regular bottle of sherry every week. They might be hit by really exorbitant prices and costings, which would be unfair to them. One of the best days that I have ever had in this Chamber was one night when we were talking on a bill that I forget the name of. The best thing about this day was that the Hon Simon Power was the Minister in charge of a particular bill and he took the time out that night—it was one of the few times I have seen this in the Chamber—and he listened to the debate. It was obviously a controversial issue that I cannot remember. One of the other members may be able to recall it. Was it related to justice?

💬 Kevin Hague: It was Kennedy’s.

Oh, OK. It was one night when he actually came down and made a change, and I suppose the point I am trying to make is that there is opportunity to make change to this bill. Although I understand the concept of one shoe not necessarily fitting both situations—dealing with the young ones, yet possibly disadvantaging the older group—I think there may be room for movement. If it was good enough for Simon Power on that particular occasion, I would kind of like to hope that it is good enough for the Minister to make adjustments, if appropriate, to deal with this issue.

Someone mentioned how you actually apply some sort of formula to recognising and dealing with the whole notion of minimum pricing. And, lo and behold, I can help you out, because in my Supplementary Order Paper there is a formula that is based on a minimum price per unit versus the strength of the alcohol versus the volume of the alcohol in litres. How we got to that formula, I am not exactly sure, but I think we were given advice by those far more knowledgeable than me about working out formulas. But if the Minister was looking for a formula, well, there is a starting point at least. So it is possible to work it out.

The question about minimum price is one question, but another one is talking about raising the price of alcohol and whether that does contribute in any way, shape, or form to minimising the harm. The evidence that I have come across, and other speakers have talked about, is that raising the price of alcohol is internationally evidenced as the best strategy for reducing alcohol-related harm. It stands to reason because it is the same philosophy, the same drive, that has moved the Minister, the Hon Tariana Turia, in respect of cigarettes. So there has got to be something in there. Clearly, as was also evidenced by a number of speakers, cheap products are favoured by younger drinkers, who are more likely to spend some of the pocket money they might get from their parents on those cheaper drinks. The evidence shows that widespread availability of cheap alcohol products encourages excessive and harmful drinking. In the last decade alcohol has clearly become more affordable relative to income, with the cheapest alcohol available at around 74c per standard drink.

I move, That the question be now put.

The question is that the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Leave was sought before we came into this in order to allow a nominated member from each of the parties to take six calls in this debate, and I know that—

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): Order! I am quite aware of that. It was up to six calls. It was not any guarantee of six calls.

In accordance with an instruction from the Speaker the next three votes may be personal votes if the Committee calls it. In that case there will be 1-minute bells. It may assist members to stay in the Chamber if the outcome is to have personal votes. So we move to the next question, which is Louisa Wall’s amendments imposing a ban on off-licences—[Interruption] Sorry, unlock the doors. My apologies. I am a bit rusty as well.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 107 in the name of Louisa Wall to Part 3 be agreed to.

Consistent with the Standing Orders regarding personal votes and with the proxy held by the National Party on behalf of the Māori Party, I seek leave to amend the vote on Supplementary Order Papers 81 and 107 and cast a vote on behalf of Tariana Turia in favour of both of those Supplementary Order Papers.

The member seeks leave. Is there any objection to that course of action being taken? There is none. The votes will be corrected.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 110 in the name of Andrew Little to clause 44 be agreed to.

Honourable members, we now have votes on amendments relating to minimum pricing—Subpart 1. The first one is in the name of the member Te Ururoa Flavell.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 81 in the name of Te Ururoa Flavell to insert new clauses 43A and 230A and to clause 267 be agreed to.

Honourable members, we come to votes on amendments relating to local alcohol policies—Subpart 2, clauses 75 to 92. The first amendment is in the name of the member Charles Chauvel.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 109 in the name of Charles Chauvel to Part 3 be agreed to.

The amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 80 in the name of Kevin Hague to Part 3 are out of order because they are inconsistent with an earlier decision of the Committee. Honourable members, we now come to votes on amendments relating to licence process and licensing bodies—Subparts 3 to 7, clauses 93 to 215A. The amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 81 in the name of Te Ururoa Flavell to clause 105A is out of order because it is inconsistent with an earlier decision of the Committee.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 81 in the name of Te Ururoa Flavell to clause 100 be agreed to.

Honourable members, we now come to votes on amendments relating to offences and enforcement—Subparts 8 and 9, clauses 216 to 284.

The question was put that the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 79 in the name of Kevin Hague to clause 222 be agreed to.

[Interruption] Order! Order! The amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 91 in the name of Iain Lees-Galloway to clause 220 and the amendment set out on Supplementary Order Paper 115 in the name of Dr David Clark have already been dealt with under Part 2A.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I am sorry, but it is difficult to follow the specific clauses that you are referring to. So these were ones that were dealt with under the advertising and sponsorship provisions that got transferred to the debate on Part 2—is that right?

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): That is correct.

Thank you.

Part 3 as amended agreed to.

Part 6 Licensing trusts, community trusts, and other matters