Mackey Moana: Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction: Purchase Age) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Mackey Moana: Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction: Purchase Age) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:635;Page:6355] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call in this debate and I acknowledge my colleague Martin Gallagher who took over the Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill from Matt Robson. I know that Martin took that bill on from a position of wanting to prevent alcohol-related harm. Even though I do not believe that this Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction: Purchase Age) Amendment Bill is the vehicle to do that I certainly acknowledge the intent and the hard work that he has done on this legislation. 
When the drinking age was lowered at the end of the 1990s I was the president of Young Labour and we made a submission and lobbied many MPs. We did that for many reasons. One reason was that we knew the very aggressive debate that was happening over the drinking age was bringing a lot of attention to the issue of youth drinking. We knew that if the drinking age had been kept at 20 at that stage a great change would have happened to the permissive atmosphere that had actually existed across New Zealand prior to that. Prior to that as anyone who grew up in the 1990s will say 19 18 17 16 15 and—yes I say to Mr Copeland—14-year-olds were drinking when the drinking age was 20. 
The difference between the situation then and now of course is that when attention is drawn to something people notice it. Certainly since the lowering of the drinking age we have noticed the problem we have with youth drinking. No one is saying there is not a problem but attitudes have changed and since the lowering of the drinking age we are far less tolerant of youth drinking than we were 6 or 7 years ago. There are actually more ID checks taking place; I have been checked more in my thirties than when I was an under-ager at high school. I say to those people who say there was no real under-age drinking way back then that I do not know which kind of utopia they lived in. We started to go to parties when I was 15 and we could walk into any bottle store and buy alcohol. 
I also note the irony that Parliament has from time to time debated the age at which young people should be locked up as criminals. Some people were saying that should be happening at 12 years of age. Apparently at 12 years of age someone is old enough to be considered sufficiently responsible to go to jail and serve out a life sentence for the most serious of crimes but now we are also trying to say that someone who is 18 is not responsible enough to buy a beer. Ironically this bill is not about 18 and 19-year-olds at all. It is about 14 15 16 and 17-year-olds who people say have more access to alcohol than previously even though as Metiria Turei has pointed out research has shown there are fewer under-age drinkers now than there were before the lowering of the drinking age. 
Putting the purchasing age back up to 20 will not change anything because it is not illegal for 14 and 15-year-olds to drink now and that will not be illegal even if the purchase age goes up to 20. Fourteen and 15-year-olds will still be allowed to drink legally in this country. That is why I agree with my colleague Damien O’Connor that the issue is about supply. The issue is about the fact that 18-year-olds can hand alcohol on to a 17-year-old and unless it can be proved that they bought the alcohol with the intent of providing it for under-age friends nothing can be done about that. All the 18-year-olds will say is that when they put the drink down in the corner at a party other people took it and they did not know that those people would do that. The work Damien O’Connor is going to do around supply will do far far more than this legislation would do to improve the problem that we have with youth drinking. 
But as many people have pointed out alcohol is not just a youth issue. If members bring up any age group at all we will be able to point to some kind of alcohol-related harm that is stereotypically attached to that age group. Most under-18-year-olds are not responsible for the majority of alcohol-related domestic violence. That is one of the biggest problems we face when it comes to alcohol and this bill will do nothing about it. Focusing on 18 and 19-year-olds as scapegoats for everything that is wrong with drinking alcohol will do nothing about that problem. 
 Many people have said that enacting this legislation would be better than doing nothing and that at least if we did that we would be doing something about the issue. I disagree with that because one point is that the more people are allowed to drink on licensed premises the better it is. A worse problem may be that some people in this Parliament will think that by changing the age to 20 we will have done something. They may think that by putting the age up to 20 we will have wiped our hands of the problem and that we will be able to go back home and say to the voters that we voted to put the age back up to 20 so Parliament has done its bit—and we all know that that is not true. 
In fact binge drinking is a problem around the world; it is not a New Zealand problem. I think that here it probably came from the 6 o’clock swill. We can look at the changes that have happened in the UK at the moment around the liberalisation of alcohol. Anyone who went to pubs when they closed at 11 o’clock in Britain would have seen how people would just throw down three four five or six drinks before the pub closed. All the reports from England now since the liberalisation of the laws allowed the pubs to stay open are that people do not do that any more. They drink because they want to or because they have finished their drink and they feel like another not because they are in a race to get to the bottom of the glass.