SpeechHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I'm pleased to take a call on the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Community Participation) Amendment Bill.The Green Party strongly supports this bill. It gives power back to councils and it gives power back to communities to avoid harm from alcohol. I really acknowledge the work of my colleague Chlöe Swarbrick who would like to be here today. As our drug reform spokesperson she has been working alongside Māori health organisations Alcohol Healthwatch Hāpai Hauora and councils around the motu to advance the need to change the law. It was her bill that was pulled from the members' bill ballot earlier this year the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Harm Minimisation) Amendment Bill which has helped inspire Government to put this bill in place because it responds to the concerns of councils around the country. In Ōtautahi Christchurch the Christchurch City Council has spent a million dollars and seven years seeking to develop a local alcohol policy only to abandon it in 2017 because of the aggressive work of the industry in seeking to stymie it through the appeals process.So this bill is a good bill because it means that organisations and individuals can no longer appeal provisional provisions in those local alcohol policies which the councils have been trying to develop to the Alcohol Regulatory and Licensing Authority. Those appeals were fundamentally by supermarkets and bottle stores and the alcohol industry seeking to prevent councils expressing the wishes of their communities to control the proliferation of bottle stores and the proliferation of alcohol. So we also support the widening of the discretion to the district licensing committee so that they can more easily decline applications for licences—they can decline them if they're inconsistent with the local alcohol policy. Previously that discretion was quite restrictive.The justice Minister commented on the intention to widen the scope for individuals and organisations to participate in the licensing process because at the moment the law refers to people with a greater interest than the public generally being able to make submissions and that that had been structured and interpreted narrowly. I was really interested in that because that same phraseology with a greater interest than the public generally is in the Natural and Built Environment Bill. If in the alcohol area it's been used to restrict public participation then there's a very real risk that if it's similarly interpreted by the courts it could be used to restrict participation on natural environment issues. So I hope that that and the experience with this bill is something that the Environment Committee will look at.Mr Woodhouse I think was objecting to issues around trade competition and the inability to appeal on those grounds but that has also been a key part of the Resource Management Act for a long time: supermarkets cannot object on the basis of trade competition. Despite that we've still seen the supermarket laws so the provisions in the bill which put constraints around supermarkets bottle stores and others objecting solely on the grounds of trade competition are useful.Alcohol harm like all drug harm isn't inevitable but we are experiencing it on an enormous scale in Aotearoa. When we've got evidence-based regulation that can make a difference. This bill is responding to the evidence about the difficulties that councils have had in expressing the wishes of their communities through local alcohol policies removing some of the barriers to councils getting those local alcohol policies completed enabling greater participation and enabling a much less legalistic less adversarial process.Now Mr Penk objected to the restraints on cross-examination in those hearings. If individuals are being cross-examined by lawyers in suits representing big companies that is extremely intimidating. I'm hopeful that the panels the licensing committees will be asking questions using more of a mode of inquiry so that all of the information can be surfaced but it does prevent the community being harassed by well-paid lawyers.So we support this bill. We would strongly encourage the Government to pursue the commitment the Minister has made to looking at marketing sponsorship and pricing because the second part of Chlöe Swarbrick's harm minimisation bill is about winding down alcohol advertising and its sponsorship of sports in the broadcast industry to reduce the harm that alcohol does. This bill is a good first step. We encourage the Government to take that second step in this term. Kia ora.