Hague Kevin: Alcohol Reform Bill — Procedure In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Alcohol Reform Bill — Procedure In Committee 
[Sitting date: 23 October 2012. Volume:685;Page:6053. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I would like to begin by picking up on a comment made by the Minister of Justice in her first remarks where she mentioned the benefits associated with the alcohol industry and named specifically the jobs associated with that industry. I just want to bring the attention of the Committee to the fact that the benefits are not mentioned in the object clause of this bill the Alcohol Reform Bill. What is instead mentioned is the requirement to minimise the harm caused by excessive or inappropriate consumption of alcohol and that is indeed where my comments are focused. 
I want to come next to draw the Committee’s attention in these preliminary remarks to the fact that probably roughly 1000 New Zealanders each year lose their lives due to the consumption of alcohol—1000 per year. That is quite a few and it is certainly one of the harms that the enumerated provision here listing the types of harms covers. In addition to those 1000 deaths something like 70 percent of the presentations to emergency departments in our hospitals each weekend are from people who have been consuming alcohol. So this is a very major driver of injury in particular and indeed of illness and death in this country and I will come back to some more detail on this in later parts of the debate. 
In addition we have this very major problem with binge drinking. Others have already referred to that and I just want to enumerate some statistics about it that I have sourced from the New Zealand Drug Foundation. It states that 275000 adult New Zealanders set out to get drunk on their last drinking occasion and 450000 adults were binge drinking on their last drinking occasion. Seven hundred thousand New Zealanders have been categorised as binge-drinkers—that is consuming seven or more standard drinks per session—and 1.2 million adult drinkers are OK with binge drinking or accepting of binge drinking and regularly do so. What that says is that the harm associated with alcohol consumption in this country is of a very major league indeed. I am going to come back to the match of the Government’s response to the scale of that harm because there is a complete mismatch. 
In addition to those health-related statistics and statistics about the nature of binge drinking there is also some information available from the New Zealand Police about the association of alcohol consumption with offending. For example the police attribute to the consumption of alcohol one in four property offences one in five sexual offences one in four traffic offences one in five traffic crashes one in two drug and antisocial offences one in three family violence offences and one in three violence offences—and as an illustration of alcohol as a magnifier one in three violence offences but one in two serious violence offences. Alcohol is absolutely wrapped up in the offending and in the drivers of crime that the Hon Lianne Dalziel has referred to already in her contribution today. The police estimate that overall a third of all police-recorded offences are committed by an offender who has consumed alcohol prior to the offence and 18 percent of the police budget is wrapped up in responding to alcohol-fuelled offending. So the harm that this Alcohol Reform Bill ought to be setting out to respond to is very considerable indeed. 
I have in this House on several occasions over the last couple of years referred to the Ottawa Charter. The Ottawa Charter is an international agreement which New Zealand is party to that sets out a formula for responding to health issues in our societies and recognises that those health issues of disease injury and premature death are associated with socio-environmental factors. They are not purely problems related to the individuals who experience those issues. What the Ottawa Charter says is that if we want to address the burdens of disease and injury in our societies then we need to do a few things: we need to promote healthy public policy we need to create supportive environments we need to strengthen community responses we need to develop personal skills and we need to reorientate health services. I often speak about these five actions collapsing into two basic things: the empowerment of communities and the individuals within them and the creation of supportive environments—political environments social environments and physical environments—around those communities. That is the challenge that we ought to be responding to around alcohol. That is the challenge that this bill ought to rise to and does not. 
I have referred several times to the opportunity presented by the Law Commission’s report. It presents the Government of the day and this House with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get alcohol policy right to strengthen our community responses to alcohol to empower communities to deal with those issues and to create supportive environments around those communities that facilitate those responses. That is what this bill ought to be doing and does not. When we come to the more detailed debate over the parts of this bill we will talk about those things. Although the Government sets out in all of the right directions the progress that the measures it proposes make in those directions is pitifully small. That is why other parties in the House—the Maori Party the Labour Party and the Green Party—have all been advancing measures that would implement the recommendations of the Law Commission and that would give this House the opportunity to take up that once-in-a-generation opportunity to seriously minimise the harm that is created in our communities by alcohol. Thank you.