Hague Kevin: Alcohol Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Alcohol Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 October 2012. Volume:685;Page:6166. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 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.