Page 453 - Week 02 - Thursday, 22 February 1990
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alcohol was the cause of most of the problems. Most of the submissions and evidence given to the committee mentioned alcohol as the base cause. Most things were related to abuse of alcohol. Indeed, that is something that we as a society - and I do not just mean this parliament - need to do something about.
The suggestion that it is a matter of regulation only is untrue. We can attempt to do some things, but this is a matter in which we all need to accept responsibility. Certainly it is true that, as we highlight in our report, parents are role models for children. It is pointless to tell children that they should not drink when they frequently see their parents doing just that. People must accept responsibility.
In our society there has been a trend away from personal responsibility. I believe there has been a trend towards governments taking over more and more individual responsibilities. In government throughout Australia, we tend to churn out program after program that indeed takes away the personal responsibility of the individual. I feel strongly that government should never do anything for people that they can and should do for themselves.
We brought up some useful suggestions on how to handle the alcohol program. One, as Mr Wood mentioned, was server intervention. This simply means the responsibility of the person serving the alcohol to ensure that he or she does not do anything that is causing or adding to the problem - obviously by serving it to people who are underage or to somebody who has already had too much. We were told that this is working very successfully in Queensland, and I look forward to seeing that being done increasingly within training courses for people who are associated with that industry within the ACT.
Mrs Nolan mentioned that drunkenness can be witnessed in the early morning, and indeed it can. The police in their submission highlighted the point. They said:
It is well recognised by senior police that apart from some major public festivals, the majority of antisocial activity occurs between the hours of 2 am and approximately 9.30 am, the early morning, on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays in the main business areas of Civic, Woden and Belconnen.
They instanced one situation where they had been called to a fight outside premises at 8.30 on Saturday morning and inside were some 30 to 40 patrons who were drunk - at 8.30 on Saturday morning! These people did not start at that time; they had been going all night. The police indicated that occurrences such as this were by no means rare.
They believed that most of this unacceptable behaviour would be contained if licensed premises were prohibited from remaining open until such late hours, but they did not
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