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:6163. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I want to talk about Supplementary Order Paper 113 in my name which is a regulation-making power for minimum pricing in off-licences. I have written to all members of the House and asked them to support this amendment because this amendment does not actually introduce minimum pricing; it simply creates the power for the Government to introduce a regulation for minimum pricing when it has reached the position that it says it wishes to adopt post the work that it is doing in this area. The reason that I want to bring this into effect now by way of a regulation-making power is to ensure that the process for delivering a minimum price should the decision be made is actually available at the time the decision is made rather than having to come back to Parliament and ask Parliament to then vote on a change to legislation that we have just passed in order to implement a minimum pricing regime. There is no way that the Government will be able under the existing Alcohol Reform Bill to introduce a minimum price without a regulation-making power within the legislation to do so. 
What this regulation does not do is state a minimum price. That minimum price must be evidence-based and that is why I have chosen a regulation-making process. That would enable proper consultation over the establishment of the correct level to be undertaken. Some people have taken an unscripted reference in a parliamentary debate last year to $2 per standard drink which is a statement that I did use in a speech as a position that I have adopted. But I really want to say—as I have said to the Minister of Justice personally although I know that she has continued to repeat it; I have said it to her personally and I will repeat it to the Committee—I do not want to implement a $2 per drink minimum price for alcohol. The Labour Party does not have a position on this at all. It is a conscience vote on this side of the Chamber. There is no position that Labour has adopted and I personally have not adopted a position of $2 per standard drink. 
I want to explain what I said in the Chamber and as I say it was unscripted. For some time we have not been allowed to use speeches that we have pre-written when we come down to the Chamber. We are not allowed to read out speeches. I made a reference to an amount per standard drink. I should have said it was an example of a minimum price. It certainly is not the position I have adopted. It was based on my mistaken view that there are six standard drinks in a bottle of wine. That is my mistake—apparently there are 7.2 standard drinks in a bottle of wine. Regarding the $6 bottle of wine which I was seeking to target—because people can buy $6 bottles of wine; that is well under a dollar per standard drink—I said that that bottle of wine should be around double that price. So that is where the $2 per standard drink came from. It was based on my mistaken view that there were six standard drinks in a bottle of wine which I thought should be sold for $12 not for $6. 
The reason I said they should not be sold for $6 is that people were essentially doing a cost-benefit analysis when purchasing alcohol although I described it with young people as a “cost-trash analysis”—that is how little can someone pay for the amount of alcohol required to get them trashed. We are talking about people who will determine whether they have had a good night out by how little they can remember of it not by the good time they actually had. So I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not believe that politicians should set the price based on what they think as I have proved that what they think may in fact be mistaken. It should be done by regulation a proper regulation-making process and that is all this Supplementary Order Paper proposes. I do ask the Committee to consider it seriously. It means a lot I think to the people who have been advocating for substantive change to the law. It does not bind anyone to any particular position. It just facilitates change in the law once the research comes in and backs that change which I believe it will. 
The Law Commission had a section on pricing and recommended that work be undertaken which the Government is doing and I acknowledge that. It referred to the recently released draft guidance from the UK Government’s expert advisory body on medical treatment the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and this is a quote from that report: “Making alcohol less affordable appears to be the most effective way of reducing alcohol-related harm. There is sufficient evidence (within the published literature and from the economic analysis) to justify the introduction of a minimum price per unit. The evidence suggests that young people who drink and people who drink harmful amounts of alcohol tend to choose cheaper drinks. Establishing a minimum price per unit would limit the ability of these groups to ‘trade down’ to cheaper products.” 
The Law Commission also discussed excise tax over minimum pricing and had this to say: “However the difficulty with using excise tax to establish an implicit minimum price is that all alcohol products go up in price including premium products. There is also the risk that given the purchasing power of the supermarkets and the highly competitive market retailers will not pass on the excise tax in full or will pass it on for some beverages but not others depending on the profit margins associated with different products.” This has been my argument all the way along around minimum pricing. This is not about increasing the overall price of alcohol. This is about increasing the price of just the dirt-cheap alcohol the extremely cheap alcohol the alcohol that is cheaper than buying a bottle of Coca-Cola or a bottle of milk. But in the end the Law Commission felt that more research should be done and it recommended an immediate increase in the excise tax of 50 percent. 
I have not actually supported that as a position because I know not only about the example the UK report identifies but that supermarkets require suppliers to absorb much of the increases themselves so it never impacts on the price that they retail for and it does flow on to the high-end as well. High-priced wine and spirits are not the problem; it is the dirt-cheap alcohol that is the problem and minimum pricing has no real impact on moderate drinking. After all if you are drinking only a bottle of wine a week then an extra $6 is not going to make any difference if you were buying the $6 bottle but if you were already paying more than $12 for a bottle of wine you would not be paying a cent more. So it does not impact on the people whom we say would be affected by it. The only reason that the Ministry of Justice has given the Minister as to why it opposes the Supplementary Order Paper is that it is investigating minimum pricing. The Supplementary Order Paper relieves the Government of the need to return to the House for an amendment to the Act when the work produces a result which I believe will support minimum pricing. 
In my letter to MPs in the House I referred to a comment made by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron. He said that they needed to get to grips with the problem of super-cheap alcohol which is fuelling violence on their streets and causing mayhem in their accident and emergency units. He believed that minimum unit pricing is a big part of the answer and he ends his comments by saying: “this shows a radical government not frightened of taking big decisions rolling up its sleeves and getting on with the job”. I never thought for a minute that I would be quoting positively a Tory Prime Minister in this Parliament here in New Zealand but he is right. It is time for the Government to roll up its sleeves and get on with the job without coming back to Parliament to amend the Act and that is what my Supplementary Order Paper will do. 
I want to end by commenting on the Minister’s concerns around what has happened in Scotland. Yes it is true that the Scottish Government has been forced into a situation where it has had to push back the introduction of minimum pricing as the interests find themselves swirling around this topic as has occurred with the tobacco lobby. “… the Scotch Whisky Association is essentially arguing that the commercial interests of its members should take precedence over the health and wellbeing of the people of Scotland.” Essentially “We need to decide if our society is prepared to limit commercial activity to better protect our health and quality of life or alternatively allow powerful corporate interests to dictate health policy.” I think that is what we need to take into account here—that yes there are powerful interests that want to stop the imposition of a minimum price but the argument that they are producing on the other side is that this is a matter of competition and that competition should actually allow pricing to go down to its lowest level for the benefit of the consumer. Well it may well be for the benefit of the individual consumer that he or she can buy an individual bottle of wine for $6 but it is not to the benefit of our country that that dirt-cheap alcohol is fuelling violence and mayhem and is destroying people’s abilities to make confident decisions about the things they are going to do with their lives. 
We have unplanned pregnancies in this country that are the result of people doing what they would not otherwise do other than under the influence of alcohol. We have people making poor decisions or not being capable of making good decisions because they are under the influence of too much alcohol. When the alcohol is so cheap that it is cheaper than a bottle of milk then you have to understand that it is going to have an impact on the wider society. Are we here in this Chamber seriously going to leave our law unable to respond to a report that may produce a result that says that we must act? If that report which the Government has asked for produces a result that says we must act do we then have to come back to Parliament and amend the Act to make a power to give us the power to do the thing that we know is the right thing to do? I think we must continue to see the question of who is trying to influence the result on this vote. 
Let me just quote from the Scottish situation again. The chief executive of Alcohol Focus Scotland stated: “Having failed to use their formidable lobbying power to prevent the passage of the minimum pricing law in Scotland the global corporations now seek to get the legislation struck down by the courts. In taking this action they follow the well-trodden path of the tobacco industry and other transnational corporations who use their considerable financial clout to oppose public health policies that threaten their shareholders’ profits.” Make no mistake about it: that is what this issue is all about. That is why this is the issue that I have chosen for the Supplementary Order Paper that I wanted to bring to this Committee and to have this debate on because it is an issue that was raised in the  
Alcohol in our Lives: Curbing the Harm 
 report that the Law Commission wrote after listening to the people of New Zealand. It is an issue that is subject to misinformation it is subject to an outrageous level of lobbying and attack from a very well-resourced industry and the poor old publicly funded public health institutions are left struggling to compete with the level of pressure that those multinational corporations can bring to bear. 
We were in this House debating this issue on tobacco many many years ago and I know that nobody would want to own being on the wrong side of that. I do not want anyone to own being on the wrong side of this issue. It is simply a regulation-making power which when the evidence is produced enables the Government to take immediate action and to have a proper consultation process about what that minimum price should be. I do not think that anyone in this Chamber who would agree that $6 for a bottle of wine and enabling people to do that “cost-trash analysis” before they go out and expose themselves to an unsafe environment would stand for that.