Dalziel Lianne: Alcohol Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Alcohol Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 24 October 2012. Volume:685;Page:6155. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 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. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: 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—