Boyack RachelRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Madam Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Exemption for Race Meetings) Amendment Bill. I had the pleasure of sitting on the select committee that considered the bill and I do want to acknowledge my colleague Ian McKelvie who is a very fair chair of our committee and whose bill this is. And so I do want to acknowledge him and the work that he has done on the bill and we did consider it throughout the select committee process.The Labour Party is treating this bill as a conscience issue and just as we did in the first reading members will be exercising their vote according to their conscience. I voted in favour of the bill going to the select committee. I wanted to hear submissions and advice from officials before making a decision on whether I would support it further. And before I make some comments on how I'll be voting tonight I wanted to make some comments about the Governance and Administration Committee report that I felt was quite important we put on the record tonight in this second reading because it actually speaks more broadly to conscience issues and the role of the select committee in that process.When it came to the time of adopting our report we actually had some to-ing and fro-ing as a committee in terms of what we would put into the bill about a recommendation. When select committees consider bills one of the requirements of the committee is to consider and make a recommendation about whether the bill should pass. We had quite a conversation about this at select committee because a number of us felt very strongly that it wasn't necessarily the role of the select committee to make a recommendation to the House about how the House should treat a bill given that it was a matter of conscience. So in the end we elected—and I might just read out what we wrote into the commentary. The five of us that sit on this committee were all of a shared view the National and Labour members on the committee. What we noted here was: We note that the vote on the first reading of the bill was treated as a conscience issue. We have therefore made recommendations for amendments to improve the bill's workability but leave broader consideration of the bill's merits to the full membership of the House. We do not consider that it is appropriate for us to make a recommendation to the House about the bill passing given the bill is a conscience issue. We encourage all members of the House to consider the bill and our amendments and form their own conclusions about the bill's passing."On that note we have also written to the Standing Orders Committee as a select committee about this issue more generally. So I did want to give that explanation to the House tonight as to why we hadn't got to a point of making a recommendation in the select committee report. It is ultimately up to members.So I'll just talk a little bit about some of the work that we did do and what we did hear while considering this bill. Mr Woodhouse has already made some comments about restricting some of the work that we did do and that we did hear while considering this bill and Mr Woodhouse has already made some comments about restricting the clubs that this applies to to those that have three or more—Hon Michael Woodhouse: Fewer.RACHEL BOYACK: Three or fewer! Thank you Mr Woodhouse—three or fewer race meetings a year and that we use the definition of "small racing club". One of the questions I had during this process is that a club may be small by that definition of the Act in terms of the number of meetings it holds a year but those meetings in and of themselves may be large in number in the number of people who attend and therefore there is the ability for there to be harm caused by alcohol. Because if you have a very large number of people at an event the potential for harm to be caused does start to be increased somewhat. And so we did ask officials about whether this was an issue that we could rectify but we were having to work within the definitions of the Act and unfortunately we would probably need to have done some further amendments to the Act around the size of the event as well and that proved somewhat difficult at select committee.That is one of the reasons that I won't be able to support this bill further. I want to note that I have in my time attended racing events and do enjoy the social aspect of attending racing events. But for me I'm not convinced—having sat in the select committee—that this bill is actually needed. Clubs that are looking to have a bring-your-own alcohol element are able to apply for a licence for that purpose so there is already a process existing within the law that allows for that. We did hear from the Police and from the Ministry of Health and my understanding is that there are concerns about the potential for more alcohol harm to be caused from allowing people to bring their own alcohol without having some level of oversight in place through the provision of a special licence.I also note that some of the clubs have also told us that they actually rely on bar sales in order to make revenue at their events and that they would be concerned at revenue loss if they saw some form of bring-your-own without that oversight. So I look forward to hearing the rest of the debate tonight and I have enjoyed hearing submissions on this bill I've enjoyed working alongside my colleagues on the Governance and Administration Committee—we did give this bill due consideration and as I note the committee did get to a point where we felt it was up to the House to make the final decision on whether this bill should proceed. Thank you Mr Speaker."