Page 992 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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On that occasion the government gave the community about three weeks notice of huge increases in fees—baseline increases of over $3,000 and rising to extraordinary figures beyond that. That was all on the back of the government saying that it wants to stem alcohol-fuelled violence. Most of the places that experienced huge increases in fees were not the sources of alcohol-fuelled violence. Most of the alcohol-fuelled violence does not happen in venues; it happens on the streets. There is no way of quantifying the extent to which the alcohol-fuelled violence that happens on the streets is caused by people drinking in venues or people who front load and then come to Civic looking for a good night out and possibly a fight.
The message of the Canberra Liberals in relation to addressing alcohol-fuelled violence was that there needed to be more emphasis on the personal responsibility of the people who go out and get drunk. There have been some improvements; there has been a range of extra fines and penalties, but I think a lot more needs to be done about the police ensuring that they pick up those young people who are out drunk looking for a fight before those fights happen.
The issues raised by Mr Rattenbury point to the fact that the government is very bad at providing services to business. This is an admission that the government is bad at this, and this is a small token of acknowledgement that the government is very bad at doing business with people. These provisions will be difficult to implement, and I just take this year for example. We go into caretaker period about the time that this will kick in. This means, of courses that the government will have to announce their decisions on the fee determination before the caretaker period. It also has implications for incoming governments—whether they want to be bound by those fee determinations. The notice provisions for changing those fee determinations will be very difficult for an incoming Liberal government.
These are practical issues that Mr Rattenbury has not raised. I spend my time trying to kick back from the Greens’ approach to drafting legislation, which is to be highly prescriptive all the time about what goes in legislation. It is also the government’s proclivity, which is why we have businesses which do not cause and do not have an impact on alcohol-fuelled violence having to draw up risk assessment management plans—RAMPs—under the Liquor Act, which have the full force of the law in a very prescriptive way. As one licensee said to me only this week, “I suspect that the Queensland government now regrets the fact that it had a dam operation manual that had the full force of the law because of the implications of the Wivenhoe Dam.”
We actually have the same sorts of problems here in the Liquor Act. Every RAMP compiled by everyone from the largest venue down to the local Chinese restaurant has the full force of the law. I suspect that most of the local Chinese restaurants do not understand the implications of what they have signed up to and the fact that if they do not comply to the letter they are in breach of the law. These are draconian provisions which are unnecessary in a large number of cases.
The Liquor Act is extraordinarily problematic. There are a huge number of problems in the Liquor Act and they will only be addressed by an incoming Liberal government, which will be able to deal with small business in a more appropriate way than has
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