Page 5669 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
for no useful purpose.
Mr Murphy went on:
This added to the other regulatory costs and substantial increases in red tape and Government fees and charges is making it increasingly difficult for small clubs … to survive.
This is the tenor of much of what is being said. Mr Murphy also wrote:
We are also concerned that these measures comprise yet another nail in the coffin of small sporting clubs whose core business is the provision of recreational facilities rather than bar or poker machine trading. We are not in the business of providing an opportunity for an alcohol fuelled ‘night out’ and find it difficult to accept that we should be subject to the same level of regulation as those businesses whose primary aim is to do just that.
I have spoken about the impacts on one commercial Canberra supermarket owner who owns supermarkets and off-licences in the suburbs and I would like to draw your attention to the issues of one bar owner of a fairly large bar in my own electorate of Belconnen. They do trade late but they actually use their late trading to use discretion about when they close. They currently have a licence that allows them to trade until 5 am but they usually close much earlier than that.
They use that discretion to call last drinks, depending on how many patrons they have and what is going on elsewhere. For instance, they said to me that, if there were trouble in the car park outside, they would not call last drinks and then put more people out into the car park where there was trouble. They would wait for that trouble to die down, to be dealt with, and then call last drinks. This is what they call risk management. They said to me, “We manage the risk every night and we do it by exercising our judgement and our discretion.”
This was the message that was given to me over and over again by liquor licensees who have been liquor licensees in this town for 10, 15, 20 years, who have never had a police call to their establishments and who say: “We care about our patrons. We care and we act in the best interests of our patrons and the safety of our patrons.” Somebody that I have known for many years, long before he was a liquor licensee, said to me that he worries about the safety of his patrons, because he will not be able to afford to stay open and, if he closes his doors in Civic, his patrons will be faced with a de facto lockout and they will be put onto the streets when there are a whole lot of other people marauding around the city.
It goes back to the point that Mr Smyth made and that I made as well. This is not a fix to the problem in Civic. This is not a fix to alcohol-fuelled violence in Civic. I predict that this will increase alcohol-fuelled violence in Civic. It will put more people on the ground in Civic. I hope that I am wrong but I am pretty much convinced that I am right. In a few months times we will be back here trying to fix this mess that Simon Corbell and Shane Rattenbury have created today.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video