Page 5695 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Premises with an occupancy loading of 300 or more generally have several liquor serving stations and it would be sufficient for water to be available at each of those serving stations. This provision poses yet another piece of red tape, an unnecessary risk and an operational burden, plus a safety risk for businesses and patrons.
Amendment No 12 merely creates a dictionary signpost consequent upon amendments Nos 5 and 6 that I have talked about before.
There are a huge number of problems with the whole package of liquor legislation, as I have said before. This will by no means address all of the concerns and all of the problems faced by the liquor and hospitality industry in the ACT but it is a step towards making the liquor regulations better. I foresee that we will be revisiting this Liquor Act many times in the next few years to take away the unintended consequences, to sharpen up provisions, and this will be an ongoing exercise.
This is what an opposition can do when it listens to people and takes account of people’s concerns. It would have been much better for the government to have listened and to have provided the Assembly with this package of regulations at the time that the bill was debated. We may have been able to deal with them in a much more comprehensive way. But in saying that, I commend these amendments as a sensible way forward for the industry in the ACT.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Before you rise, minister, on a point of clarification, Mrs Dunne, it is a motion and now you also seek to divide those amendments?
MRS DUNNE: Yes.
MR SPEAKER: I think you need leave to do that. We can do that at the end of the debate or we can do it now. It does not matter.
Mr Corbell: When we vote.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Okay. Proceed, Mr Corbell. You have the call.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (3.11): The government will support a number of Mrs Dunne’s amendments and will be opposing others. We will oppose some amendments because they are not needed, such as specifying that the information contained in a risk assessment management plan does not apply to non-commercial permits, and others because they detract from the harm minimisation and community safety aspects of the scheme.
Where the government is supporting amendments, we do so because they do not detract from the harm minimisation and community safety aspects of the scheme. Some of the supported amendments remove requirements which have simply been uplifted from the liquor licensing standard manual but which might still be seen as overly onerous.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video