Williamson Maurice: Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:652;Page:1590] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker—[ 
Interruption 
] I thank members of both sides of the House for their warm accolades. I am really happy to take a brief call on the Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill because I think there is some merit to the bill. But I heard some comments while I was in my office that made me come down. As Minister of Customs I am responsible for enforcing some of the excise— 
Hon Annette King 
: What? Are you Minister of Customs? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: So they tell me I say to Mrs King. I thought tonight I would go through some factual bases to give a counterfactual. I say to members that this is not meant to be rude nor meant to be embarrassingly nasty or anything but I heard Sue Kedgley talking before about the damage that the high number of alcohol outlets can do to our society. 
I hope members will listen to this because it really is from the heart. I will give members two absolutely gospel stories and then let them think about whether this makes a difference. I go back to the year of 1981 when I was working for British Airways. I was seconded to work for Aeroflot Soviet Airlines in Moscow. I went to Moscow under the Brezhnev regime and I arrived one grey very cloudy awful day in the afternoon. As we got into downtown Moscow and were pulling into the hotel I asked my driver: “What is that big queue over there? Is that for the Bolshoi Ballet?”. He said: “No sir. That queue right there?” and I said: “Yeah the one that goes round the corner from that big old concrete building.” He said that it was for the liquor outlet. My ears pricked up and I asked whether the shop had a special on today thinking that could be the only reason for a queue. He said no. I ask members to listen. The only alcohol that people could buy in Moscow was from a Government-owned store that opened from 3 in the afternoon until 6. It was open for only 3 hours. 
There were no ads anywhere in Moscow. People would not see ads on TV on billboards or in the newspaper. The existence of alcohol was not even mentioned. Yet while I was there over the next few months I witnessed the worst level of alcohol abuse and drunkenness I have ever seen. People on the bus coming home from Aeroflot flights some nights were so absolutely blotto and throwing up on the bus that one actually got off the bus and tried to get on another one. In the park across the road from the hotel where I was staying people were on the park benches throwing up. It is no good telling me whether it is right or wrong. This is just a factual statement about the fact that booze was available only from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. from a Government outlet and I have never seen such abuse of it in my life. 
Thank God I was then transferred to do some work at Airbus in Toulouse. The difference was stunning. As one drove in from the airport into the city of Toulouse there were billboards as far as the eye could see with beautiful ladies draped over the bonnet of a Daimler or a Bentley drinking Rémy Martin Kahlua or Moët et Chandon. Every newspaper one picked up would have adverts. Every magazine had stunning glossy pictures. In every shop in Toulouse the little town where I was living one could buy alcohol. Every family I knew had alcohol available. Even the kids of the French family that I was staying with at Airbus were allowed a glass of wine— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I have a point of order. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: —and there was no alcoholism whatsoever. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I have called for order. The member heard; he should stop speaking immediately. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: I did. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: Excuse me; the member did not stop speaking. He should not say he did when he did not. 
Stuart Nash 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I thought we were talking about the Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill not about Mr Williamson’s overseas travel experiences in Russia. I am just wondering what the relevance to this bill is. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker) 
: I just say to the member that it has been quite a friendly and wide-ranging debate. We have heard about football matches. We have heard about representation. We have heard all sorts of things. If we were to take that point we would have done it a lot earlier. Let us continue with the debate please. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. I came to the conclusion—and obviously Mr Nash does not like the idea of what the conclusion is—and the conclusion is simply this. In one place alcohol was totally regulated totally controlled limited in access not advertised and not even spoken about and the actual social outcomes were appalling. In the other place it was as freely available as anyone could imagine. It was openly promoted. It was an ordinary everyday product and I never once saw a drunk person in Toulouse—ever. Members can take that story anyway they like. All I am asking is for members to compare those two societies and decide which one they would rather have. 
I know that some of the hard-line lefties on the opposite side of the House still think the Brezhnev regime was great. They still think that Moscow in 1981 with everything locked and regulated was the way to go. I feel sorry that there are still people who think like that in Parliament. But I ask members to think very seriously about that matter. 
The intention of this bill is to get some funding from the excise on alcohol for the Alcohol Advisory Council (ALAC) to do what I think has some merit. Alcohol has a major downside to it—we all know that. While ALAC is involved in promoting harm minimisation in trying to encourage responsible use and in trying to encourage post-intervention and server intervention along with the other programmes it offers I am very willing to sign up to legislation that lets us take a small sum of money as an excise tax from the alcohol being sold and to use that to fund those sensible moderation-type programmes. 
I want members to think about this as a last question. One society—it was not Russia and it was not Toulouse—decided that alcohol was so evil that it would ban it altogether. I want members of this House tonight to give me a score between one and 10 as to how they think prohibition went with one being really awful and shocking and 10 being stunningly successful and the way to go. 
Paul Quinn 
: Zero. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: I hear my friend Paul Quinn say “zero”. I think that zero is too high. I should not say this about some members of the Labour Party but I do not believe that anybody with half a brain in his or her head thinks that prohibition was a successful way to go. 
Hon Phil Heatley 
: Al Capone. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: My good friend and colleague and the member from Whangarei Phil Heatley reminds me that some people did think it was a good idea—Al Capone for example. He thought that prohibition was a cracker. My worry about this whole alcohol debate is that some neo-prohibitionists out there believe— 
Grant Robertson 
: Where? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: I say to Mr “Whatever his name is”—I am hard pressed to give names and electorates for some of the new members; I am not trying to be smart—that there are even some neo-prohibitionists in this Parliament who think that the best thing we could do is to lock up the alcohol and throw away the key and that everything will be all right. 
I say to members of this House that the exact opposite is the truth. The more responsible our attitude is and the more we encourage education server intervention host responsibility and harm minimisation—all the good things associated with the work that ALAC does and I am delighted that it is there and doing that work—then the more likely it is that we can look forward in hope that New Zealanders will have an attitude to alcohol that is sensible and sane. We are more likely to have a good attitude than one of pulling down the blinds going with prohibition and wreaking the worst havoc we can. 
I say again that I support this bill. I think that having the level of excise related to the alcohol content is a sensible way to go. Some alcoholic drinks are very strong and require very small volumes for people to get out of them whatever it is they are seeking. Other drinks have very low volumes of alcohol relative to their volume and I think that such a levy is the right way to go. I repeat just as a counterfactual that if members of this House think this problem will be fixed by locking up the number of outlets and blocking this activity and making it illegal then I ask them to please look at history. It has not ever happened anywhere else. 
Bill read a second time.