19 October 2012

Alcohol Reform Bill

Next week the Alcohol Reform Bill is due to begin its final reading in Parliament. This Bill represents this National-led government’s response to the considerable harm alcohol is continuing to inflict on ordinary New Zealanders, and causing enormous costs to the country.

There are at least 700,000 heavy drinkers in NZ according to scientific measurement, and the heavy drinking culture is essentially the alcohol attitudes and drinking behaviour of these fellow citizens. Not only are they bringing about short- and long-term harms, but alcohol’s harm to others may well be greater than the harm they are doing to themselves. Here are some of the key statistics:

- up to a half of criminal offences involve someone who has been drinking;
- self-reported violence involves a drinking perpetrator in about half of cases;
- about 40% of people injured and 25% of people killed in alcohol-related traffic crashes are not the drinker responsible;
- an estimated 200 alcohol-related physical and sexual assaults every day
- up to 3000 children borne every year in NZ brain-damaged by the alcohol use of their mothers.
But much of the harm to the families of heavy drinkers is hard to measure and often ignored, including the contribution to overall economic costs, already estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

The Law Commission produced an evidence-based blueprint for change in April 2010 following the most comprehensive reviews of alcohol ever undertaken in New Zealand.

Alcohol Action NZ’s 5+ Solution, an easy-to-remember summary of the international evidence for what policy strategies work, is well represented in the Law Commission’s major recommendations:
1. Raise alcohol prices
2. Raise the purchase age
3. Reduce alcohol accessibility
4. Reduce advertising and sponsorship
5. Increase drink-driving countermeasures
PLUS: Increase treatment opportunities for heavy drinkers

It is indisputable that governments can reduce alcohol harm by enacting a suite of bold regulations involving pricing, marketing, alcohol accessibility, drink-driving, and purchase age.

The World Health Organisation, in the Global Strategy to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol (2010), supported these strategies, and so do the New Zealand public.

It is also indisputable that alcohol education and just hoping that people will become more responsible in the absence of new regulations are not effective alcohol strategies supported by scientific evidence.

The most rigorous scientific survey of public attitudes conducted by the Health Sponsorship Council in 2010 showed that more three-quarters of ordinary New Zealanders (15 years and over) would not oppose strong alcohol reforms:
- banning all alcohol advertising or promotion (77%)
- raising the price of cheap alcohol (76%)
- banning alcohol for sporting and cultural events that young people attend (80%)
- reducing the hours that alcohol can be sold (84%)
- raising the minimum price of alcohol to 20 years (87%)
- only 2% of New Zealanders thought there were too few liquor outlets.

While the effective strategies for reducing alcohol-related harm are largely those that regulate the environment in which alcohol is marketed, the alcohol industries are successfully doing their job of increasing consumption, normalising and glorifying heavy drinking, and expanding new markets. Obviously regulation is opposed by the industry as forcefully as possible, and the industry will not willingly contribute to reduction of harmful drinking because more than half of their profit comes from heavy drinking.

Internal documents show that the industry has identified a number of key threats to business. Not surprisingly these are the precise opposite of what effective alcohol reform is, and what the Law Commission has recommended that the government enacts:
- increases in alcohol taxes
- restrictions on alcohol advertising and enforced health warnings
- lowering blood alcohol concentrations for driving
- restrictions on alcohol sales
- increases in legal drinking ages

The industry’s strategy to counter alcohol reforms is not to argue against reforms in public, but rather to: “Stress alcohol education programs and messages so as to develop public policy from a framework of education and responsible drinking, as opposed to one of control”.

This National-led government is fully aware of the extent of harm that alcohol is causing and what needs to be done to alleviate these harms in terms of new alcohol reforms. The Law Commission has recommended new alcohol policies, the Chief Science Advisor has advised new alcohol policies, national experts all back new alcohol policies, and the public of New Zealand are highly supportive of these reforms.

But the National Party is on the brink of leading a government Bill, the Alcohol Reform Bill, through its final reading which doesn’t contain any of these new alcohol policies that would make a substantial difference to reducing alcohol-related harm.

Labour, in the absence of coherent reformative alcohol policy as a Party, is on the brink of being simply an observer of the process, leaving it up to a number of individual Labour MPs to argue for new alcohol reforms in Parliament as personal Supplementary Order Papers (SOPs). The Greens have excellent Party policy on alcohol (except for not supporting raising the purchase age) but are too small to make a Parliamentary difference.

There are in fact 22 SOPs that have been lodged in preparation for the final debate on the Alcohol NON-Reform Bill. These can be found at:

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/0236/22.0/versions.aspx

There are ten (for the most part excellent) SOPs from Labour Party MPs (numbers 107 – 116) but none of these are from the Labour Party representing party policy. Despite Sir Geoffrey Palmer’s first plea to Parliament at the outset of his Law Commission team’s review of the liquor laws (2009/2010) for political parties to dispense with the conscience vote, the Labour Party has not been able to do it yet. Conscience voting perpetuates alcohol as a moral issue, rather than primarily a health issue based on science.

There are three SOPs related to pricing - from Labour’s Hon Lianne Dalziel (SOP 113 on minimum pricing), Green’s Kevin Hague (SOP 130 on excise tax) and Maori’s Te Ururoa Flavell (as part of SOP 81 on minimum pricing), which theoretically could motivate an excellent reform on alcohol pricing to be added to the Bill. Raising the price is the single most effective and easily enacted measure that a government can do.

The best chance of the Alcohol Reform Bill now being passed with some new alcohol reforms in it come from the Māori Party, as part of government, which has a SOP (81) advocating:
1. Minimum pricing
2. Dismantling of all alcohol advertising and sponsorship
3. Putting a cap on liquor licences and establishing a sinking lid the existing ones
4. Establishing decent trading hours as the default (Off-licence 10am-10pm, On-licence 10am-1am with an additional two-hour one-way door policy)

But the word is that there is simply no appetite from Hon Judith Collins or her Cabinet colleagues to add any proper reforms to the Alcohol Reform Bill, which is likely to be passed posing as a genuine reform Bill, and the alcohol industry will continue its reign in New Zealand – for the time being.

ends

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