Kedgley Sue: Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Kedgley Sue: Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this Alcohol Advisory Council Amendment Bill but without huge enthusiasm. The previous speaker Te Ururoa Flavell asked the rhetorical question of what impact the bill would have on the huge problem of alcohol abuse in New Zealand. The answer is sadly very little if any. It seems ironic that we have a huge and growing problem of alcohol abuse and a culture that absolutely tolerates alcohol in New Zealand yet this Parliament rather than addressing that issue has come up with a bill that does some technical amendments to calculate the levy on alcohol content which frankly will have very little if any impact on the consumption of alcohol in New Zealand. 
I certainly agree with the previous speaker that we have a huge culture of abuse in New Zealand particularly amongst our young. One of the issues we raised when this bill was being considered at the Health Committee was alcopops. Why is this bill not dealing with the issue of alcopops? We know they are drinks that are almost predatory in my view. They are targeted at young New Zealanders. They are very very cheap. Young New Zealanders are made to think that they are drinking just lemonade and soda but in fact they are drinking alcohol. If there was one single thing that we could be doing to try to reduce the amount of binge drinking amongst young people it would be dealing with the issue of alcopops. We tried to get this issue dealt with when we were considering this bill and we were told that it was absolutely outside the scope of the bill and we were not able to deal with it. 
The other issue we should be discussing if we are really serious about addressing the culture of alcohol abuse in New Zealand is the fact that alcohol is on sale virtually everywhere we turn in our society—in every supermarket and dairy in the land. So how can we say we are seriously trying to reduce the amount of consumption of alcohol by young people and wring our hands about the culture of abuse if we are going to have alcohol available advertised and on display in every dairy and supermarket everywhere we turn in New Zealand? These are the issues we ought to be addressing today and I am very very sad to say that frankly we have come up with I think a rather irrelevant bill—a technical amendment. All it does is calculate the levy on alcohol content. It is not going to affect the amount of consumption of alcohol in New Zealand. The Green Party is very sad that we are not able to use the opportunity of legislation on an important issue—alcohol abuse—to actually tackle the real problems and the causes of the problems instead of this rather trivial technical amendment. 
Finally there is no question that if we are concerned about drug abuse in New Zealand then we must accept that alcohol is overwhelmingly the issue we should be concerned about. We have to ask ourselves why we have such a culture of tolerance. Why do we encourage young people to drink this stuff and then all wring our hands and carry on about how terrible it is that they get dressed up in togas and get drunk in the streets down in Dunedin? That is the inevitable consequence of our culture of tolerance and of the fact that alcohol is available everywhere we turn and that everything is encouraging the consumption of alcohol. There is no point in being hypocritical. Until we address the causes there is no point in just wringing our hands about alcohol abuse. What a sad day it is that this Parliament could not deal with the real causes of alcohol abuse rather than with just some technical amendment. Thank you.