Dalziel Lianne: Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Dalziel Lianne: Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 17 June 2009. Volume:655;Page:4400. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Labour—Christchurch East) 
: 
 I wish to support the Sale of Liquor (Youth Alcohol Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. I pay tribute to all of those members who have been involved in its travel through this Parliament—my former colleagues Matt Robson and Martin Gallagher and of course my current colleague Brendon Burns—who have really championed an important cause in respect of this legislation. 
On the one hand I was heartened by the comments from Sandra Goudie because we have had here today a very clear statement from National members that they will be supporting the removal of the conscience vote for liquor bills which is fantastic. I really really commend the member for her statements to the House tonight that National will vote as one on this legislation because they agree that the conscience vote is outmoded and that it is time for it to go. Our party has not yet determined its position on the report of the Law Commission. I have been asked by the Leader of the Opposition to prepare a report for our caucus in order to debate what is a very very important issue. But I take great heart that the Government of the day National has decided to eschew the conscience vote on alcohol issues. It is a major step forward for this Parliament and I am very very heartened by it. 
There is a book that I think every member in this House should read. It was prepared by the World Health Organization and has contributions from public health professionals all around the world. It is called  
Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity 
. This book is extremely relevant to the legislation we have in front of us today. It is also why I am disappointed that Sandra Goudie stated that National would vote as one against the continuation of this particular law. The reason why I believe that the member would vote this way is that she has not looked at the evidence around the question of reducing consumption and alcohol-related harm. This book makes it very clear that if we want to have an evidence-based approach to the question of dealing with alcohol issues five very simple steps need to be adopted. The first is to increase the price; second to increase the legal drinking age; third to reduce the availability of alcohol; fourth to reduce the advertising; and fifth to increase drink-driving surveillance. Those five measures are evidence-based internationally as mechanisms or means by which we can reduce alcohol-related harm in this country. 
I presented a submission on the Sale and Supply of Liquor and Liquor Enforcement Bill which the member Sandra Goudie referred to in her comments in the House today. I can say that that bill does not cover the areas that are covered by this bill which is why it is perfectly acceptable that members vote for this bill and also support the Government measure that is currently in front of the select committee. I will tell members why. Two things are covered in this bill that are not covered in the Sale and Supply of Liquor and Liquor Enforcement Bill. One of them is the watershed time issue which my colleague has traversed in some detail. It was a decision of the Advertising Standards Authority to bring back the watershed time to 8.30 p.m. To be honest I was not aware that the authority had brought back that watershed time because the last time I appeared in front of the authority was Wednesday 22 April 1998 when the watershed time was much later than it is today. It is really important that Parliament gets to decide these issues. They are important issues. We know that alcohol advertising has an impact on the environment and on the way that alcohol is being treated as an ordinary commodity in this country. 
The second issue that this legislation deals with is the transfer from the Advertising Standards Authority back to the Broadcasting Standards Authority. Again this issue is not dealt with in the sale of liquor legislation that is before the select committee at the moment. So I reject the previous speaker’s comments that we should vote against this bill because another bill before a select committee deals with other ways of addressing some of the concerns about the type of advertising that the current law allows. 
I believe that this bill must be supported because it is a very positive public health matter. It seemed strange to me and I was a member of Parliament at the time when the then Minister of Broadcasting was also the Associate Minister of Health. I could not quite get that he would be responsible for overseeing the jurisdictional transfer from the Broadcasting Standards Authority to the Advertising Standards Authority. I wonder whether as a Government Minister today he really stands by the decision that he made at that time. 
Sue Moroney 
: Who was it? 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Maurice Williamson was responsible for that decision. Although I very strongly support the need for stronger supervision in this area which is why I very much support the transfer back to the Broadcasting Standards Authority I do not believe that the issue was properly debated at the time. The genie was already out of the bottle to use an expression I have used in another context. The reason the genie was already out of the bottle was that we already had brand advertising on television by the time the transfer was made. That was not something that Parliament had an opportunity to debate. I recall being a brand new member of Parliament and being quite frustrated by this major shift in social policy which was occurring without the opportunity to debate it within the House. The amendment to the broadcasting legislation that my colleague Brendon Burns referred to in his contribution actually occurred some time after the real decision about broadcasting alcohol advertisements on television had already been made. 
I will comment on a few of the things that I said back in 1998 even though in a way nobody wants to be proved to be prophetic in that regard. One of the arguments that was used against reducing limiting or indeed banning—which is my personal preference—alcohol advertising on TV was the question of whether there had been an increase or decrease in consumption. Those who were arguing for the public health message were being asked to prove issues around the question of consumption rates. The industry itself was never asked to prove whether the rate of decline would have been higher had the industry not been able to push those advertising buttons. 
The other issue is the question of aggregate figures hiding the impact on certain groups who are much more exposed. At the time I used the example of the youth unemployment rate which was over three times higher than the New Zealand aggregate. Often the aggregated figures hide the real problem and in this area the youth drinking problem is being hidden. I used the argument that from a public health perspective we had to argue the other side which was about what alcohol advertising does to the environment and what it does to enhance the public health of New Zealand. We know from the Business and Economic Research Ltd estimates that alcohol as a whole causes $5.3 billion worth of damage in terms of the cost to our economy on an annual basis. We are talking about a major harm here. So I ask why we are on the back foot arguing around alcohol advertising when the industry should be defending its right to advertise instead of it being the other way around. 
I mentioned at the time that we had a visiting public health expert in New Zealand. She worked in a busy emergency department in a large city hospital and kept seeing the results of violence. It did not take her long to work out that violence has to be treated as a public health issue. She talked about the different forms of interventions: primary secondary and tertiary. She used the example of smoking. A primary intervention would be a programme designed to prevent people from taking up smoking a secondary intervention would be a smoking cessation programme and a tertiary intervention would be an operation on a cancerous lung. She asked whether health promotion dollars would be best spent on surgeons doing the operations. The point is that no that is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We are spending an awful lot of money at the bottom of the cliff—on prison for the offenders and on hospitals for the victims. This bill deserves support.