Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We are seeing here the first cracks in the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Amendment (Alcohol) Bill 2007. Unfortunately, many of us predicted that this would occur, as it does when legislation is rushed through and when you do not adequately consult with the community or adequately subject it to the proper review processes of this place. Although we had the oft-quoted 27 hours of debate in this place, these were five separate pieces of very important legislation and with many details included in that legislation. We were only given one day to review them in the Senate committee, and we barely touched on the alcohol provisions. The alcohol provisions were one of the three areas that the Greens did not oppose in this place. I will come back to that a little later. We did not oppose them because we thought that they were at least a step in the right direction. However, we said at the time that we did not think that they would work properly because they were ill-conceived, they had not been adequately discussed with the community and the community did not have any ownership of the provisions. It is hardly surprising that we are back here, and I fully expect that we are going to be seeing more problems with this legislation as it is rolled out.

Unfortunately, these changes seem to be driven more by industry concerns, in particular the tourism industry—and that is why we are back here so urgently—rather than by the government going out and speaking to alcohol experts and the community to see what actually works in a community, what works overseas and what changes could be put in place which might be unpopular but which need to be put in place. The Greens have, in the limited time we have had available, taken the opportunity to talk to experts in alcohol and alcohol consumption reduction, Aboriginal communities and people working with communities to see what they think would work better and to use that opportunity to try and finetune this legislation. Perhaps I should say ‘coarse-tune’, because it is going to need an awful lot of tuning to get this legislation to deliver what the government wants it to deliver and which of course we all want—that is, a reduction in child abuse and violence in the Northern Territory and a reduction in alcohol consumption.

The question we are asking ourselves is really quite simple. What alcohol reduction strategies actually work? What strategies are there to prevent excessive alcohol consumption and the harm caused by excessive drinking? This must, we believe, be strongly evidence based. There is plenty of evidence internationally, within the Northern Territory and in Australia that shows what could work and what is likely to have the most chance of success. The international evidence that we have looked at is quite clear and is confirmed by the success or failure of measures and pilot programs in the Territory in the past. Unfortunately, what the evidence shows is that, by and large, the popular measures do not work and what works is not popular—which you could probably understand if people are reducing their consumption. The evidence has found that alcohol education programs and demand reduction programs—which are popular with the hotel industry, the hotel industry lobby and some governments—have largely had no impact on alcohol consumption. This comes from 300 independent international studies.

The one thing that has been shown to have a direct and significant impact is reducing the supply of alcohol. Supply reduction strategies have an immediate impact on heavy drinkers and provide a circuit-breaker that offers a breathing space while other strategies, like education and employment programs, can begin to work. This is exactly the same strategy that we have talked about from the findings of the Senate’s recent inquiry into petrol sniffing. The Senate has recently heard some success stories of how reducing the supply of sniffable fuel through the Opal roll-out has dramatically reduced petrol sniffing and created a space in which youth diversionary programs can give people an opportunity to turn their lives around. We have articulated some of those very successful stories in this place.

The international evidence shows that the most effective way to reduce alcohol consumption and harm is through a price mechanism. The review by the World Health Organisation’s international experts group looked at 53 appropriate studies across 17 countries and data spanning 121 years. They all showed that increasing the price decreased consumption. Price is the only intervention strategy to which the WHO report gave three stars for all of its outcome measures. Price based interventions have been successfully trialled in the NT and have been shown to be effective. This is why, any moment now, the Greens will be introducing an amendment to this bill which directly targets—