Chauvel Charles: Alcohol Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Chauvel Charles: Alcohol Reform Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 September 2011. Volume:675;Page:21199. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) 
: 
 I begin by acknowledging the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee Chester Borrows for the diligent chairing that he undertook during the exercise that he has just described and by paying tribute to all the members of the select committee who heard submissions on the Alcohol Reform Bill. 
The first thing I want to say is that this bill is better than the legislation that we have at the present time and much of that is down to the hard work of the officials some of whom I see are in the Speaker’s gallery. I acknowledge their input into making the legislation better than what we have on the statute book at the moment. I acknowledge each of the members of the select committee for the work that they did in looking at the provisions of the bill and trying to work out how to make the law better. That is the best exercise that any parliamentarian can involve themselves in in this place. 
There are a number of really important recommendations from the Law Commission’s report that are incorporated in the bill and they are incorporated well. There is much harsher regulation of the irresponsible promotion of alcohol and that has been a long time coming. It is good to see it in the legislation. There is a regulation-making power to ban dangerous alcohol products and to restrict the alcoholic content of ready-to-drink beverages. There are better and new enforcement provisions around alcohol offences and there are tougher penalties for those who breach them. 
So that is progress. It was for that reason that members on this side of the House in response to answers given at the select committee by submitters asked them whether although the bill did not go as far as we would like it was enough of an improvement on the status quo for them to want us to support it. Unanimously the community groups said that yes the bill was better than what there was at the moment and would we please support it as far as it went. So in the second reading debate Labour members will vote to read the bill a second time. 
I mentioned that the officials are in the Speaker’s gallery and that is an unusual thing as members will know. Normally we have officials in the well of the House ready to assist us in the Committee stage. There will be no Committee stage for this bill in this Parliament because there is not enough time to progress the legislation through that stage so we will not be able to scrutinise it fully. Expectations were raised amongst the nearly 10000 submitters who expressed their views to the committee. They had their hopes raised that this much better bill would actually become law prior to the election but those hopes have been dashed because there will not be time and we will not have a detailed level of scrutiny in the House itself as to the provisions of the bill. That is a real shame. 
The other real shame is one that has already been alluded to by my friend and colleague the Labour spokesperson on this issue Lianne Dalziel. That issue is that we did what we do far too often in New Zealand at the moment: we or at least the previous Government sent this issue off to the Law Commission for an expert dispassionate review of the law on this subject. The Law Commission was asked to hurry its review such that it did not produce as it normally does a draft bill for Parliament to consider. But none the less the commission came back with its recommendations. 
They were comprehensive recommendations they were good recommendations and they were carefully thought-out and backed up by the evidence. If we had done what we should do as a matter of course with Law Commission reports which is to model legislation on the entirety of the report bring it into the House have it read a first time as per the Law Commission’s recommendations and have a good old debate about what the Law Commission said we should do and why we should do it then we might be in a different position. 
But as usual the executive thought it knew better. It rejected the idea of bringing forward a number of the Law Commission’s recommendations into legislation. Many of them did not make it as far as the bill. So what we are looking at today in the House is a much-truncated version of what the Law Commission asked us to do and said would be necessary to make a real change to our binge drinking culture. 
In his earlier contribution Chester Burrows very properly recognised that we do have a problem with alcohol consumption in New Zealand—we do have a binge drinking culture. He said that legislation should not be the only solution that we apply to that sort of thing and of course he is right. But it is a necessary if not a sufficient thing to apply to this sort of problem. 
If anybody needs evidence of that they just need to think about the difference in New Zealand now compared with 25 years ago on issues like drink driving or smoking in public places. The huge culture change we have undergone in this country over questions like those has not all been because of the law but changing the law was what kicked things off. 
Those changes made it safe for example in the case of the smoking question for people to say they did not want people smoking next to them or in their workplaces. With the drink-driving question they made it OK for people to say “Hey look you’ve had too many drinks. How about you just stop there and if not take a taxi home?”. The law plays an incredibly important part in these matters. 
What we have failed to do is make the law comprehensive. The Law Commission said that we should have looked at four important areas where this bill fails to address any questions whatsoever. The first is a lack of minimum pricing. In its final report the Law Commission said: “We regard pricing policies as the central plank of any reform package aimed at reducing alcohol-related harm.” It is very clear that inexpensive readily available alcohol is one of the key drivers of alcohol harm yet there is no action on the table to deal with this issue. 
The international evidence is unambiguous: price is one of the most effective ways to combat alcohol harm. Just as we saw with the smoking issue price makes a difference. If we do not deal with price we fail as a Parliament to address the sort of culture change that we all know we need in this area. 
The second issue on which the Law Commission urged action was the availability of alcohol. We have had an experiment going on in New Zealand since we last had a comprehensive reform of alcohol law. Essentially we have had laissez-faire—basically very free availability of alcohol on very few conditions. It has not worked because we have this binge drinking culture in place. We needed to address the excessively free availability of alcohol in this country and the bill does not do it. 
The third issue is advertising and sponsorship. Ninety-four percent of submitters to the select committee wanted greater restrictions on advertising and the bill just does not go there. Seventy-nine percent actually advocated a complete ban on alcohol sponsorship. Labour agrees that those three steps—dealing with price dealing with availability and dealing with advertising and sponsorship—would have made this bill so much better. 
I mentioned a fourth issue and it is the issue of the legal alcohol limit for driving. I will not go into that in any detail but it is a matter that Parliament will just have to address if it wants to get serious about these questions. 
I conclude my remarks by saying that yes this is better legislation. It is a shame it will not pass in this Parliament. But it is legislation that could have been so much better if politicians did not think they knew better than the Law Commission and if they did not pay excessive heed to the interests of the industry. Failing to address those issues of availability price and advertising and sponsorship means that this bill is truly a lost opportunity for us to address the binge drinking culture that we see causing so much damage in the daily lives of so many New Zealanders.