Craig Liz; Mallard TrevorDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's an absolute privilege to speak on this bill and congratulations to Louisa Wall for putting it forward. I'm happy to support the bill right through to the select committee process for further scrutiny but I must admit that earlier today I did have some reservations and I'll come to those shortly.First of all I just want to talk about the huge impact alcohol-related harm has in our community. As a junior doctor back in the day I used to work in A & E and I guess the main thing I actually remember about that was that smell of alcohol mixed with vomit mixed with a bit of disinfectant thrown in. You know that smell now brings me back to those days. But what used to happen is about 11 o'clock on a Saturday night I used to be sitting there waiting for stuff to come in and what we would be seeing was just large numbers of young people coming in with head injuries because they got intoxicated been involved in a fight and it's really really hard to tell whether somebody's got a concussion and they've got ongoing issues with damage from that or whether they're just intoxicated. We also saw huge numbers of fractures—the punch fracture where you get a fracture across here. [Points to hand] Some nights we were particularly unlucky because we got both sides of the fight coming into the waiting room at the same time and thank goodness for our triage nurses who used to sort that out.That was back in the 1990s but fast forward 20-odd years and when I was monitoring youth health for our district health boards we were also seeing hundreds of alcohol-related hospital admissions coming in: things like car crashes intoxication fractures and head injuries. So it's having a huge impact all around our regions. So when the original Act the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act came in in 2012 it was actually intended to reduce that alcohol-related harm. What it did was it put more control back in the communities so that local authorities could introduce local alcohol policies and what they could do was they could talk about where licensed premises could be put—you know should they be put next to schools playgrounds churches—and so there were some restrictions on that. It also looked at the total number of licences granted and the density in the community. It looked at maximum trading hours and also one-way door policies. So what the Act specified was that those local authorities had to consult with the police about what was happening and with the medical officers of health and once they designed their policies they had to also consult with and run them by the community. When they were doing that they had to take into account the demographics in the community and the extent of existing alcohol-related harm.So what the current Act does is that when you're granting new licences it allows that to be considered and weighed up so that you don't get that proliferation of density. But the problem is that it's slightly different if you've got the current licence being renewed because there what it says is that the licensing authority must not take into account" any inconsistency between the relevant local alcohol policy and the renewal of the licence which seems a bit unusual because the fact is that actually when you're thinking about that renewal you're wanting to be thinking about what that impact is on the community and what the community's already said about that.The issue I think—and this is why Louisa Wall's raising it in this bill—is that "must not take into account" is problematic so what's being proposed is to actually turn that on its head. The new wording actually says a licensing authority may refuse to renew a licence if in its opinion it's inconsistent with what's contained in the relevant local alcohol policy. So it makes it possible to actually decline that renewal on the basis of what the local policy says. I think that's really important because the current Act can stop the proliferation of new outlets but for communities that have got significant alcohol-related harm it doesn't allow for those areas where you've got really high density of alcohol outlets to be reduced.The concerns I have though are that we need to be looking at how we mitigate the impact on good businesses that may come up for renewal but they just might be in the wrong place at the wrong time and also looking at whether we need more criteria for determining if we want to decline a renewal. So do they have to provide evidence of harm? Then the other thing is do we need some lag time so that people have got time to adapt their business? I think that we really need to put that through and have a proper discussion at select committee so I commend this bill to the House.SPEAKER: Matt King. No sorry—Stuart Smith."