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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (28 November) . . Page.. 3253 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The other little kick in this is that this is not just for New Year's Eve. This permits the minister to make a regulation dealing with consumption of alcohol at specified times of the year. He or she can do it every day if he or she wants. They can say, "Today is a good day to ban the sale of alcohol, so we will put in a regulation and we will not allow shops to sell it today." Are they going to do this on Anzac Day?

Ms Tucker: The regulation can be disallowed.

MR KAINE: That is not the point, Ms Tucker. The government has not justified doing it in the first place. The fact that it can be disallowed does not alter my argument one jot. Are they going to do this on Anzac Day? On the day before Anzac Day is the minister going to say, "It is a bit unfortunate but the old diggers might get out and break a few beer bottles tomorrow, so we will ban the sale of alcohol on Anzac Day"? Or will they ban it on Remembrance Day, Christmas Day, Good Friday or any other day that the minister or some public servant takes it into his or her head that this is a good thing to do? It is very non-specific. It says "at specified times of the year". What are the specified times of the year? They do not tell us.

As I said, the bill is a half-baked idea that will achieve nothing except upsetting a lot of people who are in the business of selling alcohol. It will not achieve the objective that the minister is seeking-and that is to help avoid the repetition of smashed glasses and consequent injury, whatever the incidence of those events is-and it has not been justified one jot. Mr Speaker, it is poor legislation. It has not been thought through. It should not be on the table here for debate, and I will vote against it.

MR QUINLAN (11.00): I would like to advise the house that I have been known to have a few people around my place on festive occasions like New Year's Eve, Christmas Eve and other days. Like many people, on such a day I have lost control of my refrigerator to the food and the prepared salad, and usually there are very few containers of alcohol in the fridge by the time the event is about to start. Part of the solution to that recurring problem is to hold back purchasing the bottles of beer until the last moment. Buy them cold. Then it does not take much to keep them cold for the occasion.

A lot of people are going to have functions at their house on New Year's Eve. Like it or not, most people in the suburbs do not take a lot of notice of what we do. Unless this legislation is promulgated very well, I suspect that a number of people are going to be caught by it. I refer to people who have planned to have a function at home and who wander down to the local liquor store to buy a half-dozen or dozen bottles of beer that they intend to serve and find that the sale of beer is banned. It is banned because there are a couple of hot spots in town and the government has made a decision without much research, as Mr Kaine has pointed out.

A feature of some of the regulation that has come through in recent times is that it has been based on anecdotal evidence received by government as opposed to any rational or reasoned statistics that one would normally expect from a government for its support. This legislation will inconvenience people who are not aware of it.

As I said earlier, a lot of people do not take a lot of notice of what is happening here. It might be reported in the newspaper. We know there are a lot of people who do not read the local newspaper. There are people in this place who regularly assert that they do not

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