Henderson EmilyDr EMILY HENDERSON (Labour—Whangārei): I rise to speak on this bill and I have to first congratulate the member Ian McKelvie for the luck of the draw. I have to also say to him that I have a very limited acquaintance with racecourses. In fact my acquaintanceship with racecourses is limited to a brief and rather rocky love affair with a retired racehorse called Sir Tain—do you get it; certain"—and the only thing about Sir Tain that was certain was that (a) he wasn't going to win any races at all—nada from nine starts from recollection—and (b) you could never be certain what temper he was going to be in when you got on. Our relationship ended abruptly when he threw me off in a very decisive manner on a very steep and may I say very hard hillside and I'm afraid that Mr McKelvie is about to find that I am probably going to return the favour to Sir Tain in my response to this bill.Although Mr McKelvie's description of what it should be when you go to the races with a family—the odd flutter and the odd beer was another of the descriptions that was given—my concerns are threefold. The first is that that's not always accurate in our country and while my colleague Mr Greg O'Connor made a heartfelt and eloquent plea for the reduction in drinking I come from a reasonably rural place and I worry about the fact that there is still a high level of drink-driving. If we have families and young people out on the racecourse drinking after a long day then I worry about carnage. I don't think that is appropriate. I think what is appropriate is to leave it to the local people to make this decision—the local police and the local council. I do not believe in further tying local hands from make decisions according to local circumstances.I guess that brings me to my next concern with this bill which is that I don't feel like it's appropriate to spend large amounts of public money as we all do as we stand here when there isn't a truly demonstrable problem and I'm not yet convinced by the argument that there is. I have done a little bit of looking back and I noticed that it was the Hon Paula Bennett who seems to have first raised the hackles that resulted in this bill back in 2017 and that was because there were actual problems in racecourses. The police were bringing that to her as an issue and that seems to have caused a bit of a panic amongst the racing fraternity but I have to say that I am not convinced that the panic has really been well realised in actuality. I have not been able to pin down a wide swath of racecourses going out of business because they can't be BYO. Therefore I am afraid that for me the bill fails the test of whether we ought to be spending our time and money on it and I'm sorry for that.But I think it is wrong necessarily to link people's willingness to attend races with BYO. I am worried about binge drinking and rural drinking and that this is actually encouraging that and that is a part of our culture which we do need to address. Alcohol is not necessary to happiness. I do firmly agree that local alcohol licensing provisions do need tightening but in my view we need to give councils more power to regulate access to alcohol in their communities not tie their hands and the hands of the police and thus I cannot commend this bill to the House."