Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill.

And a timely bill it is. We would not be here without advocates and organisers like Hāpai te Hauora’s Selah Hart or Alcohol Healthwatch’s indomitable Dr Nicki Jackson. We wouldn’t be here without the community leaders and organisations who fought these battles street corner by street corner: our Māori Wardens and battlers like Communities Against Alcohol Harm. We wouldn’t be here without the researchers like Dr Tim Chambers and Dr Louise Signal. We wouldn’t be here without the leadership of councils up and down this country.

But here we are. What if I told you that we’ve identified a drug that is the leading cause of preventable death and morbidity globally and here in Aotearoa? Leading economists estimate that this drug’s harm costs our country up to $7.85 billion annually. It features significantly in emergency services callouts, often where violence and aggression are found. It’s a leading cause of car crashes. It’s a group 1 carcinogen, substantially increasing the risk of cancer. But we shouldn’t prohibit this drug, because prohibition would not get rid of it. Prohibition has failed miserably at getting rid of any drug, tending only to make those drugs and their consumption far more harmful. Whether it is an unfettered legal free market or criminal prohibition, you’ve got either corporations or criminal organisations doing their best to shift as much of their product as possible, largely comfortable exploiting vulnerable communities to make a fortune.

This drug, our nation’s most harmful, is, of course, alcohol. Like cannabis, it will exist, regardless of whether it is legal or not. It always has. The question before us is whether we want to deal with the evidence sensibly to reduce that harm. Throughout the cannabis referendum debate, opponents told me that alcohol was a failure of drug regulation and that we couldn’t risk dragging another drug out of the shadows and into regulation because alcohol was so poorly regulated. I found, though, that they never really actually wanted to talk about regulating alcohol better, prompting the question of whether those opponents to evidence-based drug regulation actually cared about drug-harm reduction in the first place or just whataboutism.

That whataboutism ends today. We have forced the uncomfortable debate. More than that, evidence is starting to win it. That uncomfortable debate is about how we treat and think about our country’s favourite drug. Alcohol is consumed by around 80 percent of New Zealanders. And of the adults who drank last year, 25.4 percent of us did so hazardously. That is 825,000 New Zealanders drinking harmfully. This isn’t just an issue of physical health but also one of profound mental health. Otago University researchers scoured coronial data from 2007 to 2020, finding that in Aotearoa New Zealand, 26 percent of deaths by suicide involved alcohol.

We drafted this bill to reduce that drug harm. The bill does that with mechanisms long researched and recommended to Governments of both stripes over the past 10 years. Firstly, the bill seeks to restore local democracy to the local alcohol policy process by removing the special appeals process. This process, unique to alcohol regulation alone, has been abused by corporations to steamroll over communities and enable the mushrooming of bottle shops—particularly in our poorer and more structurally marginalised communities.

Around six weeks ago now, four months after this alcohol harm minimisation bill was drawn, the Government announced that it was introducing its own, adopting the first half of this bill. And the Greens are not precious about this stuff. If it takes the Government picking up this as their idea to get it through, we will back it.

I want to acknowledge Minister Kiritapu Allan for her ongoing collaboration on this kaupapa. The Minister fully understands, and, I daresay, expects me to continue to hold her and the Government to account on the second critical part of this alcohol harm minimisation bill, which the Government has not yet adopted.

Part 2 of this bill seeks to tackle the strong tie between alcohol and sports in this country. It does so by implementing three of the many and numerous recommendations of the 2014 ministerial forum, commissioned by the former National Government and chaired by none other than Sir Graham Lowe. It was, however, subsequently ignored.

While the forum ultimately recommended ending all alcohol advertising and sponsorship in sports, I recognised when drafting this member’s bill that the best that we could hope for was the thin end of the wedge. As we all know here, a member’s bill can only hope to do so much.

So I chose to do what I thought would be the last controversial components of that report: namely, ending product-only advertising and sponsorship of alcohol in broadcast sports. Our kids are exposed to alcohol marketing 1.4 times per day via sports sponsorship. Obviously, that’s not just when they are watching the games; it’s the logos on their posters and clothing. Alcohol marketing can be found in classrooms and bedrooms and playgrounds across this country.

Watching broadcast sports, though, viewers are exposed to alcohol marketing between 1.6 and 3.8 times per minute. The alcohol industry gets all of this exposure, all of this saturation of our environment, all of this normalisation and glamorisation for, at 2014 estimates, just $20.1 million a year.

Now, I tried to get the most up-to-date figures from the alcohol industry, from the advertising industry, and even from the sports sector, but they tell me that they cannot—and perhaps it’s simply a matter of they will not—provide that new estimate. Of those who were willing to engage in the conversation, however, they say it’s now worth a lot less than that $20 million.

Regardless, we’ve known how to fill that funding gap since Sir Graham Lowe and his ministerial forum told us to do so in 2014. We did it back in 1990s with the Smokefree transition fund for our sporting clubs. Other researchers have pointed to the pre-existing levy on alcohol, which could be ratcheted up a whole 2c on a can of beer to end alcohol sponsorship and advertising in sports overnight.

Now, the National Party argue that their opposition to this bill is that we won’t extend this to arts and cultural events, which, of course, we could if we wanted to—the Hon Paul Goldsmith—but they don’t, so this is not a good-faith nor a logical argument. If the National Party do want logically consistent, evidence-based policy approaches to drugs, they, of course, are always welcome to nick Green Party policy.

My final remarks tonight are for the Government. I know that with the Minister’s announcement to see the adoption of the first part of this bill, many Labour members, now, have decided to change their vote to oppose the progress of this law. I don’t believe that those who have decided to shift their votes have done so in bad faith; in fact, I believe it is completely in good faith and believing the Government’s publicly committed to a work programme to address marketing in the second tranche of reforms, and, indeed, we are working on that.

But what worries me in this potential, in this good faith, is that best intentions can result in some déjà vu. Back in my first months in this place, five years ago, I’d inherited a medicinal cannabis bill from the Hon Julie Anne Genter, who couldn’t progress the member’s bill, of course, as a Minister. This bill sought to put in place a green card type of system which would standardise and professionalise the pre-existing green fairy network and end the persecution of the quarter of a million medicinal cannabis users in this country. But the Government decided to draft their own bill, far narrower, and as a result, we ended up with a situation where too many Labour members ended up voting against the Greens’ medicinal cannabis bill, banking on the promises of that Government bill. Five years on, as warned then, 94 percent of medicinal cannabis users continue to be made criminals, forced to get their medicine from the black market.

We cannot risk the same intractable mess by turning down the opportunity presented with this bill—to vote for something that is immediately in front of us, not to wait in hope. We have wasted decades waiting in hope, kicking the can proverbially—and literally—down the road. We will hold the Government to account, as I actually hope my Labour colleagues will as well, and the opportunity our 1½-year campaign with this bill has presented. The Government can tackle alcohol marketing, like we did with tobacco 30 years ago.

I’d encourage the Government to just copy and paste section 35(1) of the cannabis legalisation and control bill, exchanging that drug’s name for this one: alcohol. That would be a logically consistent approach to drug harm in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Debate interrupted.

The House is suspended. I will resume the Chair at 9 a.m. tomorrow for the extended sitting. Sleep well, members.

Sitting suspended from 10.01 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)