Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to foreshadow an amendment to the amendment but not to move it at this stage. In so many regional areas, the issue surrounding the excise is closely related to the viability of local hotels, local restaurants and suchlike. I believe that, to maintain the viability of these crucial parts of local communities and to support the hospitality venues struggling under the growing burden of government regulation, we should be eliminating the alcohol excise duty on any alcoholic product sold for consumption on premises in a hospitality venue.

In a local area such as Walcha Road or right out west in Thargomindah, if you didn't have a hotel you'd have nothing at all. In so many instances, you wouldn't have that fabric; you wouldn't have that community involvement. The local hotel is also the cornerstone of the local cricket club. It's the cornerstone, for many people, of any social outing. But it is beyond the scope of people to be able to recreate, commune or be part of their community with the price of alcohol as it currently is within those premises. There are other things in regional areas where we can find the offset for this. Obviously, in balancing the books, the offset can easily be found in such things as the 'intermittent power swindle', where the hundreds of billions of dollars are floating out the door to support billionaires—domestically and overseas—and foreign companies. Rather than sponsor them, we should be sponsoring local communities.

If we do not solve this, another string of hotels will close down. It is just beyond the scope of a working person's budget to be able to take a family out, or to actually take themselves out, to a hotel and drink at the bar, so what they do is grab a case of beer—grab a slab—and take it home. This is a very unhealthy way to live, and it would be a lot better if people were with other people rather than taking a case of beer home, sitting on the verandah and working their way steadily through it. You're seeing this more and more and more. If you look at the difference between buying a beer at the bottle shop as opposed to buying it out of the tap in the hotel you can see why people are making an economic choice to basically move to takeaways. Our local hotel is iconic in Australia, and here in this place we have to make a statement about standing up for those local hotels.

In the past, we have just kept on increasing excises to the point where the product basically became unviable. A classic example of that, to the detriment of Australia and to the detriment of many towns, is illicit tobacco. It's just everywhere. We've successfully created the new Al Capones of 2026 with the illicit tobacco industry. How have we created them? We've created them by putting the tobacco excise and price up so high. We sort of had a foot in both camps—we wanted the money from it yet we told people they shouldn't do it—and we created the criminal gangs that now operate it. If you keep on putting up the excise on beer and keep on putting up the excise on wines and think that you're not going to double up on that process, well, you will, and this is not conducive to a healthy society or to a society that allows communities to bind together at one common point.

In the past in a lot of country towns we used to have post offices. They were closed. We used to have train stations. They were closed. We used to have police stations. Sometimes they get them; mostly they are closed. Many medical facilities are not there, and the one thing that's sort of been maintained is the local hotel. But what we are seeing now is a rolling of new owners into these hotels. As each one turns up, they think they are going to make a buck out of it but, unfortunately, they then have to peel out after a short period of time because the tragic reality of their commercial circumstances become apparent—that they just can't survive. You're not going to survive in a local hotel in a country town with two or three patrons. You have to have that capacity, especially during the 4.30 to 8.00 session—I used to work in a hotel—to get those customers through, who are basically working families—working men and women—who have their four or five pots then they're out; they've gone home. It's easy. It's clean. They're a great clientele, so you're happy to have them within the premises because you know that they're going to go home, that they're going to go to bed. This is their recreation. This is the time where they spend just a short period of time with their friends. But now we're seeing less and less of that because the costs have become exorbitant in this cost-of-living crisis. The cost-of-living crisis has exacerbated the pressure that's been put on these hotels. Once more, if you go out to some of these regional areas like Foxtrap—west of Charleville—or Adavale, without a hotel, there's just nothing. There is nothing there at all. A part of the cultural fabric of this nation will be removed.

So, yes, this amendment is substantial. It's removing the excise in total for what's been consumed in a hospitality venue—a removal in total. I fervently believe that we have the capacity to pay for this by the offsets in other areas, such as the fanciful idea—

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