Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, $19.1 million was provided to intervene early to assist young people and ensure that they assume personal responsibility for their binge drinking and $20 million was provided to fund advertisements that confront young people with the costs and consequences of binge drinking. The National Preventative Health Taskforce has been assigned alcohol as one of its three priority areas and released a discussion paper, an alcohol technical paper, last year. It will report back to the government in mid 2009.

Senator Xenophon also asked about new money. I can say that the government is taking action on binge drinking and preventative health. When the alcopops measure was announced, Minister Roxon said that this change ‘will see the single biggest investment ever by a Commonwealth government into preventative health measures’. And behold, at COAG the government announced the largest ever investment in preventative health of $872 million. This is all new money. Tackling alcohol abuse will figure highly in the national partnership. That is a significant proportion of the revenue to be collected, which we will be making public in the near future. The government was always realistic about the fact that significant prevention funding would be provided through COAG and that it would take, of course, some time to finalise. (Time expired)