Ardern JacindaSALE AND SUPPLY OF ALCOHOL (DISPLAY OF LOW-ALCOHOL BEVERAGES AND OTHER REMEDIAL MATTERS) AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteeClauses 1 to 5JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): Given that this is my first opportunity to stand in this Chamber since the events of late Sunday evening and early Monday morning I just want to join with the House in adding my concern and thoughts for all those who are still dealing with the ramifications of our recent earthquakes.I think the bill that we are debating in the Committee today clearly demonstrates the effect of drafting errors. That is probably how I would describe—not necessarily drafting errors even but potentially small oversights and the ramifications that they can have. I would certainly not describe the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Display of Low-alcohol Beverages and Other Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill as being substantive. In fact it deals primarily with only two issues one of which there was very little discussion about in the Justice and Electoral Committee and that was the use of holding on-licences or off-licences or special licences by companies. That warranted very little discussion at the select committee. In fact I will leave that to my colleague Peeni Henare—I know he had a great interest in that aspect of the bill—to expand on in more detail.The clause that did cause some discussion was the title clause and that was around the display of low-alcohol beverages. All of our alcohol legislation defines very clearly what alcohol is considered to be. Of course as a layperson you would just consider beer mead wine and spirits all to be under the classification of alcohol but there are some very specific definitions that for parliamentary purposes we need to build into what alcohol is and is not. This is for good reason: if you are going to have a requirement that someone for instance under 18 cannot purchase alcohol you need to define what alcohol is. So by definition in our legislation the thing that we are obviously most concerned about is the content of ethanol because of course that defines whether or not something is going to have an effect on someone when it is consumed. That means by definition something that may label itself as alcohol—say a low-alcohol beer—would in probably all of our minds fall under the definition of alcohol. It is a beer it is advertising itself as a beer it is branding itself as a beer but if it does not meet the threshold of what alcohol is—the ethanol level must be 1.15 percent of more by volume—then technically by law it is not considered to be alcohol.Why is this of interest to this House? Well of course Parliament not too long ago a few years ago—3 years ago now in 2013—passed some of the most substantive alcohol reforms this Parliament has seen in some time. A significant part of that piece of legislation was to try to acknowledge that the availability of alcohol in our supermarkets—which we legislated to occur in I believe 1999—meant that some people for good reason felt that we were now over-advertising and making alcohol far too freely available in public areas. For instance young people who are not meant to be purchasing alcohol or be exposed to its advertising were being exposed to it and you had to walk through alcohol sections to access other things like bread and milk. In fact I heard a number of submissions during that legislation which I sat on the select committee for where people who may have had some issue with alcohol abuse pointed out that they found it very confronting to constantly be exposed to displays in that way.In 2013 Parliament tried to remedy that by creating areas where alcohol displays and promotions could occur and it would be a single area in a supermarket. All of us will be familiar now with areas of a supermarket that are just alcohol. They are confined. They are able to be partitioned off of course. Because of our hours of display you needed to be able to partition them off particularly if you have a store that would be open outside those hours.So look all well and good. Parliament passed that legislation I have no doubt with the expectation that everything we would consider to be alcohol—regardless of ethanol level if it advertised itself as such—would be in that area. But it was not because by definition the alcohol areas were only for alcohol and a low-alcohol beer for instance did not meet that definition. So here we clearly had something that Parliament intended to occur but by definition it had not quite met its own test. Look these things happen. It was nobody's fault. It is absolutely why on this side of the House we are without hesitation supporting this bill. We are in a sense just putting out there what Parliament always intended to do—that is if people want a low-alcohol beer product most people are going to seek that product in an alcohol area.I want to give some credit here because the grocery stores would have been within their rights to put those products in non-alcohol areas but sensed that that was not what Parliament intended and did not. So as a result we effectively had supermarkets who were not selling those products at all because they were in this grey area.That has given rise to the one issue that was of substantive debate by the select committee and it was this question: if we are legislating—enabling now—low-alcohol beer products to be advertised in alcohol areas do we need to create legislation that partitions them off and by law will not allow those products to be displayed anywhere else? Technically a low-alcohol beer can now be displayed in those alcohol areas but technically it could still be displayed next to the soda as well.So that then became a question for the select committee. The select committee gave it good thought because submitters did raise the question of whether we could put in parameters that said that these are the only areas where they could be displayed. Obviously that is our intent. The question the test for this House becomes: can you easily draft that intent? Could you for instance find a way to make sure that a branded beer product was not displayed in a non-alcohol area if it did not meet the ethanol test? What if for instance it was ginger beer? It does not meet the ethanol test but brands itself as a beer. Would you then have to explicitly say ginger beer was not included? What if the ethanol test was met by a ginger beer? What if you said alcohol companies—well most of our alcohol companies produce non-alcoholic products so that does not work either. We ran through a range of scenarios and it became obvious to us that we were going to have further unintended consequences and we did not want to end up back here in a slow process to try to rectify that.I want it put on record though that Parliament's intention the select committee's intention and I am sure the Minister's intention is that products that for all intents and purposes are trying to mimic the look feel and brand of alcohol but simply have low alcohol levels in them should never be displayed in the general areas of a supermarket and should only be displayed in alcohol areas. That is what we have intended here and in fact we gave strong encouragement to officials and very proactively they have already indicated there would be guidance drafted to that effect. So let us leave no question that even though we have not drafted in the reverse we have simply been permissive around low-alcohol products going into the alcohol areas. We do not intend for that to happen in the reverse.That was probably the most substantive debate that was had amongst many other discussions because the select committee of course was drawn to a certain extent back into a debate around the alcohol culture of New Zealand. What benefit have low-alcohol products had? Have they reduced alcohol consumption in New Zealand? Have they become a substitute or have they become just add-ons at the end? We were interested in these issues as any Parliament should be when it is clear that we have a binge culture in New Zealand. So it was good to have had that discussion.The discussion we should have been having either alongside this bill or after it though is the discussion that Simon Power flagged that this Parliament would eventually have. He indicated that eventually he wanted there to be a discussion on issues around pricing but claimed at the time—in 2013 when the Act went through—that we did not have the data from supermarkets to fully understand the way that they were using alcohol to draw people in. He said that once we had the data we would have that discussion. Three years have passed. It is time for that discussion. Price matters. We know that supermarkets have had a role in heavily discounting alcohol. I would say that this is the perfect opportunity for us to raise that question so that this important debate does not end here with a discussion around low-alcohol products.