Goodhew Jo: Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Goodhew Jo: Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:645;Page:14558] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 I rise to take a fairly brief call on the Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill. I think it has been made abundantly clear by my colleague Dr Jonathan Coleman that National will be supporting this bill and the reasons why we will support it. 
This bill is about a method of calculation of the Alcohol Advisory Council (ALAC) levy on alcoholic beverages. The method is a simplification of the current system. We are actually simplifying things for a change rather than making them much more complicated and bureaucratic and that is one of the reasons why National will certainly support the bill. 
As we all know ALAC’s role is to encourage responsible consumption of alcohol and minimise abuse. I want to briefly spend a moment or two on why it is so important that we not only simplify the method of calculating the levy but also maintain our funding of ALAC. We have a pattern of drinking here in New Zealand. We have a binge drinking culture but not only a binge drinking culture; we have a pattern of drinking that is quite damaging and costs this country quite a lot. I would like to quote very briefly from the  
Proposed ALAC Strategic Direction 2007-2012 
 which states: “This pattern of drinking results in a range of harms that is estimated to cost New Zealand in 2002/03 at least $2 billion …”. We know that that harm has escalated since then. ALAC also told us “It has been estimated that 22% of all injuries treated in hospital and the consequent ACC costs are linked to alcohol … New Zealand Police estimate 70% of their work is linked to alcohol and recent Alco-Link data equates this to Police dealing with 258 offenders per day”—every single day of the year—“who have been affected by alcohol.” Regrettably these numbers are not going down; they are going up. 
I want to spend a moment or two talking about the community action that is part of ALAC’s work and also the community action that is part of New Zealand communities working together to overcome the problems associated with alcohol. On many occasions in my previous job working for the Timaru District Safer Community Council and with other people within the Timaru district and Aoraki electorate I have seen ALAC and its partnerships at work. I have attended ALAC’s partnerships conferences and understand some of the ways it tries to lead communities to take action for themselves. I have worked alongside community and public health alcohol educators along with liquor liaison committees within a community where the industry the enforcement agencies and organisations like the safer community councils all get together to come up with good strategies to deal on a local basis with the local harm to local people. 
I tell members that I have taken part in controlled purchase operations commonly referred to as stings. They are part of the arsenal that helps us to address the harm caused by alcohol but those very same stings address only a small part of the problem—that is the sale of alcohol to minors. There is a very much larger problem of alcohol bought legally but then made illegal when passed on to under-18-year-olds to drink. Of course most of the problem around that is the fact that these under-18-year-olds are drinking an inappropriate amount of alcohol. That is in many respects why we have such a lot of harm. 
ALAC works a lot with the local councils with the territorial local authorities and works under the auspices—or I should say alongside—of the various Acts that come into play when we talk about alcohol and its regulation: the Sale of Liquor Act the Local Government Act 2002 and the Resource Management Act. ALAC works in with communities to discover the very best possible arrangements for opening hours for monitoring host responsibility and for days and hours of trade—in fact all monitoring enforcement and indeed prosecutions of those who break the law within communities. 
I finish by touching on one rather more recent endeavour—or shall I say pathway—that ALAC is going down: CPTED or Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. It is about councils designing their communities to be safe—safe from any criminals who are out there but also safe for those young people who are drinking alcohol. One example of how that works is when communities have safe lighting pathways. A young person who had perhaps fallen foul of alcohol and collapsed on a street would always be seen because there would not be dark and shadowy areas for him or her to fall into. That is Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and it is one of the ways communities are looking to make their young people safer. 
Let me tell members that the ALAC helpline which is an alcohol and drug helpline had 15180 valid calls—that is up by 3 percent—in the last year. That is yet one more example of why we need to make the funding mechanism much simpler. National will support this bill’s referral to the select committee for a very good reason. ALAC’s budget for 2007-08 is $12.5 million. Let us make things simpler rather than more complicated for a change. The National Party supports this bill’s referral to the select committee.