Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, can I thank the minister for her undertaking. At about 4.30 this afternoon the Treasury and an officer from the minister’s office were kind enough to provide us with a briefing on these amendments. I understand that with many of these Treasury initiated bills there can be unintended consequences because there is not enough time for consultation, either because legislation has been rushed into the House or because people are not easily identified or contactable. So I appreciate the minister’s undertaking in that regard. It would be unfortunate if, in the government’s rush to introduce these amendments, people were caught up in those arrangements. If importers or domestic producers who have not been consulted had products which were captured by this new definition, that would be unfortunate. As the government has said, and as the minister conveyed in her speech a few moments ago, it will undertake to address those anomalies and exclude those people should there be an unintended capture of those people.

The point that really needs to be made as part of this debate—and it is reflected by these amendments, which are being rushed in at the eleventh hour—is that this is a bill that the health department had no involvement in to start with. This was a bill that was initiated by Treasury and by Finance. It was a revenue-raising measure. It was never a health measure. The fact that the government has been forced to rush in these amendments to amend the definitions of beer and wine reflects the fact that this was never a measure designed to address binge drinking. The coalition, as I have said on a number of occasions and as I say publicly again today, do consider the issue of binge drinking to be a major concern that we want to address but we want to address it properly and not through the stunts that have been conducted by this government over the last 12 months.

It is important to note that when this government initially identified this change, this tax-grab measure, in April last year they identified about $2 billion in extra tax revenues. By the time the bill came before us as part of the TLAB process, it went up to about $3 billion. They have since revised that to about $1.6 billion. Despite the fact that this minister says that this is about a health measure and that a drop-off in consumption has taken place, I would ask the minister: does the drop in consumption in particular reflect a drop in high-risk consumption patterns? Further, since the last National Drug Strategy Household Survey in 2007—in the period between that and today—have there been any studies conducted by the government, by the minister’s department or by any third party that she is aware of into the levels of high-risk alcohol consumption by certain groups of Australians? I ask her to table that advice so as to properly inform the House on this matter.

A drop in consumption in and of itself does not reflect a drop in dangerous or undesirable drinking patterns or binge drinking, particularly by the target audience—those of teenage years. There has certainly been a displacement effect and there has been an increase in the number of young teenagers, young adults, who have presented to emergency departments around the country since the introduction of this tax bill. That is because this was never designed to address the issue of binge drinking. So there has been a displacement. Young people are not buying as many RTDs and neither are other people in that market segment. Before this tax was introduced, mature-age people—people in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s—who went to a party or a nightclub who did not want to have their drinks mixed drank premixed drinks, either in bottles or in cans. They did that for a number of reasons and the majority of them drank responsibly.

My question to the minister is: can the government provide advice to this House that the money has to be repatriated? The advice we have received from the Parliamentary Library is that the government is not obliged to repatriate the money to the industry. The minister must table legal advice on which she relies, because it is in stark contrast to all of the advice we have received. If she does not have the guts to do that then she should put on the record the legal advice she has received and confirm here and now, without misleading the House, that the position that she spoke of before stands. This is bad policy. It is a tax grab, a tax binge, and it is not about addressing binge drinking. (Time expired)

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