Lees-Galloway Iain: Alcohol Reform Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Lees-Galloway Iain: Alcohol Reform Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 13 September 2011. Volume:675;Page:21211. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North) 
: 
 I have enjoyed listening to the debate and the submissions from different speakers around the House on the Alcohol Reform Bill. I acknowledge that the issue of alcohol legislation and alcohol regulation is not an easy one. Alcohol is not the same as tobacco. It has both its positives and its negatives and our response needs to reflect that. 
It is also a deeply political issue. Chester Borrows is absolutely right in saying that everybody agrees that something must be done about the harm caused by alcohol in our country with a little caveat—so long as that something does not affect them. For that reason politicians and political parties can be a little bit nervous about taking bold action on the regulation of alcohol. What disappoints me most about the piecemeal changes that the bill introduces positive as they are—and let me reiterate that Labour is supporting them because the moves contained in this bill are positive—is that this really was an opportunity for all political parties to get together and make some really meaningful change. 
The Government knew full well that Labour would have supported much more meaningful change than this. I think the Greens would have supported it too and the Maori Party would have supported it; the only party that I am sure would not have supported it would have been the ACT Party. Combined almost all of Parliament could have pushed through some really meaningful change—and that in a way would have taken the politics out of it. 
Mr Quinn referred to politics as being the exchange of ideas. Another definition of politics is the art of the possible. Truly meaningful change was entirely possible in this bill because we had near unanimity around the House. If National had got on board with this issue we would have had near unanimity around the House on some of those changes. 
Chester Borrows also said that we could not legislate for culture. Well I think the Smoke-free Environments Act disproves that statement because that Act through a number of different changes over the years has changed our culture around tobacco and it has resulted in a reduction of the use of tobacco and the harm caused by tobacco. Now as I said I am not saying that our response to alcohol should be exactly the same as our response to tobacco; they are two entirely different substances. But it does prove that we can affect the culture around a substance through legislation. 
Chester Borrows was also right in saying that we spend a lot of time pointing fingers at one another rather than getting together and actually coming up with a solution. I think the hospitality industry the liquor industry the supermarkets and the retailers are guilty of that—and political parties are guilty of that as well. 
I go back to my statement that there really was an opportunity here for all political parties to get together to create meaningful change. We would have liked to see a mechanism to increase the price of alcohol because we know—the international evidence is unambiguous as my colleague Charles Chauvel said—that increasing the price reduces consumption and harmful consumption. Again we have seen it with tobacco. In fact just this week—yesterday in fact—I visited my local primary health organisation. I spoke to a smoking cessation coach and I asked whether we had done the right stuff in this term of Parliament. She replied “Absolutely.” I also asked her about putting up the tax and she said that every time the tax was increased more and more people quit. It raises the threshold and captures more and more people every time. 
The same thing would happen with alcohol. There would be less and less harmful consumption of alcohol not by increasing tax—I think that increasing tax captures too many responsible drinkers—but by increasing the minimum price. I think that is the mechanism that we should be using. 
Paul Quinn disputes the fact that the supermarkets loss-lead. The mechanism by which the supermarkets loss-lead is actually quite a simple one. They take the rebate that they get across the entire range of products they receive from one brewery or other supplier of alcohol products and apply that rebate to one particular product on any given week thus drastically reducing the price of that product but at the same time retaining the ability to say they have not been loss-leading across their range of products. That is exactly the mechanism that they use to push one particular product in any given week. 
I remember this from my student days. We would look at what product was the cheapest that week whether it was Tui Rheineck or one of those other quality products on the market and that would be the one we would buy. I remember Rheineck being 50c a can. They did that other wonderful trick of saying— 
Charles Chauvel 
: Ew. 
IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY 
: I know; it was disgusting. That is a prime example of buying something for one purpose only and that is for its alcohol content and its cheapness because no one would buy Rheineck on the taste that is for sure. 
That is what students were doing. They were buying as much of one particular product as possible. The supermarkets also said that customers could only buy 3 dozen at a time so of course we bought 3 dozen and then went back and bought another 3 dozen and went back and bought another 3 dozen. The supermarkets did not stop us because the limit was of course just a marketing ploy to make customers think they had to somehow game them by buying as much as humanly possible. The supermarkets did not mind; they were delighted that their marketing worked absolutely perfectly. So yes we need to increase the price and yes there is loss-leading. We could have taken that opportunity to increase prices through this bill. 
The other thing on which we would like to have seen greater restrictions is the availability of alcohol. We know that reducing the availability of a substance reduces the harm. We know that and that is why we have prohibition on so many substances. I will not debate the merits of prohibition as a policy in and of itself right now but the reason we have so many products prohibited is in the name of reducing availability and we reduce availability in the name of reducing harm. 
So why not apply the same principle to alcohol? Why is alcohol different from those other harmful substances? Nobody has given me a reasonable answer to that question. No one has been able to explain why we treat alcohol so differently from those other substances. 
Louise Upston and Simon Bridges both in a way referred to a spectrum or a pendulum. Louise Upston questioned why the Greens would like to see the pendulum move one way towards the middle for alcohol when they have argued in the past—I do not know whether that is their policy now—for moving the pendulum in the opposite direction towards the middle for other substances like cannabis. But that is what they are trying to achieve I believe by trying to move these different substances towards the middle. I do not oppose that; I think that makes a lot of sense. 
Simon Bridges said we had moved the pendulum a long way towards the middle. That is not true at all. We have squeaked it just a touch from extreme commercialism. I think we are still in the zone of extreme commercialism for alcohol and there is a long long way we could go in terms of bringing that pendulum back towards the middle. No one is advocating prohibition for alcohol but that pendulum could move a lot further back towards the middle. 
I would like to touch briefly on the other side of harm reduction. We have talked a lot about supply limitation; I would like to talk about demand limitation as well. Rahui Katene touched on the fact that we need to see greater availability of addiction treatment services for people addicted to alcohol and other drugs. 
Unfortunately under the current Government we have seen mental health and addiction removed from the list of priorities for district health boards. As a result we have seen some front-line mental health services and addiction services being cut because the district health boards have had to move their funding into the other areas the Government deems to be greater priorities than those. Addiction service provision needs to double. We do need to deal with demand limitation. This bill does not go all the way but the provisions in it are worth supporting so reluctantly Labour supports this bill.