Page 2704 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 1994
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Food and Wine Frolic
MRS GRASSBY: My question is to the Attorney-General. After this year's Food and Wine Frolic there were a number of complaints about the threat to public safety of the event. Is the Government intending to do anything to make next year's event safer?
MR CONNOLLY: The Food and Wine Frolic of the last 12 months is an outstanding example of a major public event that went badly wrong. Previously, we have had difficulties with some of these large outdoor events in Canberra. Summernats has had a chequered history, as has New Year's Eve in Canberra City. Last year we made a major effort - it involved police, Urban Services and other officials, and liquor licensing authorities - to ensure that Summernats went smoothly. That cooperative venture was very successful, and Summernats was a peaceful, well-patronised, successful public spectacle.
We put a lot of effort into a campaign for safer drinking in the city area on New Year's Eve. It was not a Bill Stefaniak inspired, get tough crackdown, with a heavy police presence. It was a very cooperative approach, involving liquor licensees, licensing inspectors, police, industry and Government working together. It was successful. On New Year's Eve last year, there were quite significant breakdowns of public order in a number of other major metropolitan centres throughout Australia.
I am confident that we can do the same with the Food and Wine Frolic. Clearly, this year's event degenerated into something of a bacchanal. The original intention of the Food and Wine Frolic was that local producers could display their foods and their wines and families could go out, enjoy sampling the products and enjoy the day. That has broken down. I know that a number of the local wine producers no longer take exhibit space at the Food and Wine Frolic because they believe that it no longer gives people a genuine chance to sample wines, as opposed to guzzling them.
I understand that American Express has expressed the view that they may not continue. One would hope that, if the organisers, with the very firm assistance of police and licensing inspectors, can get the act together, American Express may in future want to come back and be associated with a genuine public event, where food and wine are sampled in moderation and where people enjoy themselves. In this town in recent years we have had a track record of doing it well. The Food and Wine Frolic has tended to do its own thing in the past.
I can assure the house that we are in the process of getting a working group set up, bringing together police, licensing inspectors, Urban Services officials, people from Mr Wood's departments and all the organisers of the event, so that they can do to that event what we persuaded the Summernats organisers to do with their event and what we were able to achieve in Civic on New Year's Eve and, since then, with the Safer Civic program, the cooperative approach to public drinking. It would be a pity if we lost the event. I mean the event as it was intended originally. If the event were to continue as the drunken bacchanal that it has become, it would be no great loss if it did not proceed.
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