Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National): This is a sensible bill but I do want to take issue with a couple of comments from Mr O'Rourke. Actually the amount of alcohol being consumed in New Zealand is at record lows. This is quite different from what Mr O'Rourke just said then which is that alcohol consumption is on the rise. The truth is the exact opposite. In fact interestingly I point out to the House that youth drinking is at record lows. The number of young people who say in the various surveys from the best evidence we have through the Ministry of Health surveys that they binge drink on a regular basis that they consume more alcohol than necessary—[Interruption]—that they drink-drive as my good colleague Amy Adams points out that they drink and then drive. Those numbers are at record lows. Actually it ill behoves members to continue to perpetuate the myth which is too often said in this House that we have some radical drinking problem in New Zealand society that is not getting better. Actually the truth is the opposite so I do just want to take issue with those remarks from Mr O'Rourke. This is a sensible bill as I think all the speakers so far in the debate have noted. There are a couple of changes but the most substantive change—if you could call it a substantive change—is to allow low-alcohol and no-alcohol beers to be put into the single area of the supermarket where beer and wine and other alcoholic drinks are put. We had a bit of a debate at the Justice and Electoral Committee about whether or not this should be compulsory or whether or not it should be discretionary. What I mean by that is this: should we give supermarkets the discretion to place these sorts of products in the single area which they are not allowed to do at the moment; should we give them the ability to place them in the area where they are at the moment which is typically with the fruit juice in other areas; or should we make it compulsory and say: No no. If you're going to have these products you must market them in the single area."? We had a generally pretty good debate about that at select committee and I think there are arguments either way. What we eventually came down to was on the basis of discretion and there are actually a few good reasons for that. There are interestingly products that have a low-alcohol content—things like Hardieboys Ginger Beer a great product from the mighty Hutt Valley brewed out in Wainuiōmata—and there are fermented soft drinks. These are things like kombucha which is really increasing in popularity which do have some degree of alcohol in them. You would not market them in the single area; you would want them because they are substitutes for fruit juice and other non-alcoholic products. But there are of course non-alcoholic beers which you would want in the single area because they are substitutes for alcoholic beer. So we decided as a committee to stick with the discretionary formula and I think that met with the approval of most of the submitters—the very small number of submitters the very few submitters—we had before the select committee. This is a sensible bill. I think it is going to make its way through the House. I do not wish to take up any more of the House's time. I commend this bill to the House."