Hague Kevin: Alcohol Reform Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: Alcohol Reform Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 30 August 2012. Volume:683;Page:5001. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party has devoted a lot of time to considering and analysing the evidence and arguments that have been made on the various sides of this debate. We believe that much of the support for raising the age has arisen from the inadequacy of other measures in the Alcohol Reform Bill but we do not believe that that is a good basis for changing this part of the law. Today 13 of us will vote to retain the current purchase age of 18 while Kennedy Graham will cast a proxy vote for 20. None of us support the split age that is currently provided for in the bill. It started out no doubt as a way to find a politically acceptable compromise between 18 and 20 in a politically hot debate between those two. But what has happened is that political solutions also have practical consequences and over the time that this option has been on the table members of this House have I think started to think through what those practical consequences have been or will be. That is why support for the split age has been steadily falling. 
Rather than being a common-sense compromise the proposed split age is actually muddled. There is no evidence at all to support it. It does not seem to have been successful anywhere. It has enforcement problems. It will force new drinkers into licensed premises where their role model for drinking will be the dysfunctional drinking culture of the rest of us. Of particular concern to me as a member who lives in a rural area is that it will create the likelihood of increased drink-driving as young people are forced to go to licensed premises that are some distance away from their homes in order to drink. 
This business of evidence is important to us. We believe in evidence-based policy and in approaching all drugs including alcohol in a consistent way with regulation appropriate to the harms caused. We are concerned to reduce alcohol-related harm as I am sure everyone is but New Zealand’s drinking problem is not specifically a youth drinking problem as Tau Henare has said. It is a problem of culture shared by us all. The issue has been cast as a youth problem to divert attention away from the wider culture and to facilitate the denial of older New Zealanders like me that we have a problem. That is called scapegoating. The evidence is that less than 10 percent of the binge drinking that occurs in New Zealand occurs in the young people we are discussing today—less than 10 percent. That drinking by young people is in fact on the wane. Drinking by 18 and 19-year-olds is in fact lower than it was before the age was dropped from 20. 
Denis O’Rourke 
: It’s not what the Law Commission found. 
KEVIN HAGUE 
: It is not what the Law Commission found but it is what the researchers found. If we approach the issues with clear heads ourselves and are not swayed by the moral panic around young people which characterises much of the public debate we must conclude that the problem is a broad societal one and solutions must address that. That is what public health thinking tells us too. Public health thinking says that if we want to change something we have more effective interventions by changing the norms of the whole of the population rather than trying to target a specific sector of the population. There is very solid evidence behind interventions to increase price restrict location and hours and restrict advertising and sponsorship. Those interventions will reduce harm across the whole population including the harm caused to young people. In fact they will be more effective than reducing the purchase age. 
Almost everyone says that they do not believe in prohibition but what this bill proposes is in fact to impose a form of prohibition on a particular selected group. That is just wrong. What we need to do instead is actually cast a balance between the freedom of individuals—between individual autonomy and harm reduction. If I at 52 can make a decision to engage in behaviour that causes me some harm why ought not the 18-year-old able to do that? Those who oppose that will say: “Well yes but you have got all of this experience and wisdom at your age.” But the reality is that Denis O’Rourke has already given a list of things that we already allow those 18 and 19-year-olds to do.