Hague Kevin: Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Display of Low-alcohol Beverages and Other Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Display of Low-alcohol Beverages and Other Remedial Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9728. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to begin this contribution by making a bit of a comparison between two bills because the bill that the House considered immediately prior to this the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill is one that also deals with alcohol-related issues. It does so from a health perspective. It actually takes some measures that were in the law and that largely had a justice orientation to them and replaces them with new measures that have a health orientation and specifically a harm-reduction orientation. And yet in the debate on this bill we are back to dealing with alcohol-related issues and back to dealing with trying to reduce the amount of harm associated with alcohol consumption in our community but doing so from a justice lens.I would urge the Government perhaps to think about that because here we have a bill that has been introduced on behalf of the Minister of Justice. It is going to be referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee a select committee that in fact—with all due respect to the members on that committee—does not have expertise around health issues and around harm-reduction issues. The signal that that sends to the community is that the Government has not yet made the shift in thinking from dealing with alcohol as an issue of justice to dealing with alcohol as an issue of harm. It is a shift that the Government ought to have made.The Act that this bill amends came from the Law Commission’s report. The Law Commission’s report is called Alcohol in Our Lives: Curbing the Harm. It set out to reduce harm. The Law Commission in its recommendations believed that the Act that we ought to have set up in 2012—actually the Law Commission thought we ought to have done it prior to that—should have been called the “Alcohol Harm Reduction Act” not the Sale and Supply of Liquor Act. Once again this is an illustration of the failure to actually make that shift in thinking.The evidence about harm reduction is extremely strong. We know pretty much—or at least we do in the health sector—that changes to alcohol-related behaviour do not come about from prohibition. Equally they do not come about from giving people education which is perhaps counterintuitive. It turns out that education—giving people information—may be a necessary prerequisite but the thing that actually changes people’s consumption behaviour is change to the environment. And that is why the Law Commission recommended that we should address the availability of alcohol—where it could be purchased when it could be purchased and the licensing hours. It recommended that we address pricing both minimum pricing and the excise tax and it recommended that we introduce controls around advertising and sponsorship. All of those changes were recommended in order to change the environment in which alcohol purchase and consumption takes place.So this bill is a welcome step forward. It does actually address that issue of a person perhaps in their supermarket or some other shop being confronted with aisles’ worth of alcohol and not actually seeing the low-alcohol options there by providing that direct availability of that low-alcohol option at the point of purchase. I would agree with the point that Chris Bishop made which is it must surely have been an oversight of this Parliament not to have incorporated that change at the time; similarly the change around liquor-licensing and companies. These were oversights of the House and of the Government. I guess my reflection would be that the mood that the Government was in at the time that that bill was making its way through Parliament probably made it not conducive to careful thought about the detail. The Government was not in a mood for looking at the detail or for countenancing any change to the bill that it put in front of the House.I agree with some of the other speakers who have said that it is a shame that the Government has not included some of the other measures that have also become apparent since we passed that bill into law—the changes for example that local government has called out for such as some protection for communities against the bullying behaviour of the industry when they attempt to put in place local alcohol plans. There is the evidence that has come to light since we passed that bill and produced the Act around the balance of minimum pricing and the use of excise tax to actually ensure that we reduce consumption without taking an unbalanced approach. I also think that it is a shame that this bill has not been used to implement the recommendations of the panel that was led by Graham Lowe about restricting sponsorship and marketing activities from the industry. So those were all things that the Government could have used this bill to do given that in fact Parliament was setting out to change the principal Act by this bill. So the opportunity was lost.Ultimately what the House will need to do is stop addressing this kind of issue with piecemeal legislation. What we need instead—and I have spoken on a number of occasions in this House about this—is a piece of legislation that provides a single integrated legal framework for the regulation of all of the drugs both those that are currently legal and those that are currently illegal. This legislation should be health-based not justice-based and the Government clearly has a step further to go in that direction. It should be aimed at reducing harm by using principles around harm reduction that are in the health sector and with which we are extremely familiar. So we should be preventing the harm in the first place if we can; mitigating it if we cannot in a stepwise process; and using the regulatory tools that we have available such as age availability price restricting the marketing licensing or perhaps prescription in some cases. And there is the further principle of proportionality—regulating those substances in proportion to the risk that they might cause health-related harm.A framework like that is the right approach and that approach would be one that pulls together different strands. It would use perhaps a base such as that which the House set up with the Psychoactive Substances Act because that is precisely what that framework does. It would pull in alcohol legislation tobacco legislation and indeed the Misuse of Drugs Act and substances currently controlled using that Act to actually produce for this country a genuinely 21st century framework that minimises the harm to this country and its citizens from drug use. Thank you.