Page 2317 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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Mr Speaker, the Liquor Amendment Bill 2012, which you know only too well, talks about the amount of notice that businesses get when you have a regulatory regime change. The committee wanted to lend their support to that bill. If the chamber does not pass that particular legislation, for whatever reason—time may very well be one reason, as we may not have enough time left in this Assembly to actually deal with it; I am not sure whether that is true or false—if it does not get dealt with or it does not get passed, we are urging the government to introduce legislation with a similar effect as soon as it can.
One of the witnesses urged us to support the notion of having a marking on a glass so that you can determine the number of standard drinks. Whilst that sounds like a bit of a fun thing, people will notice that if you go to the club and ask for a glass of wine you will see a little white mark on it. In a lot of pubs the AHA recommends that a certain line be used to determine what a standard drink is. The thing is, and this was the evidence given to the committee, that if you have five glasses of wine but they are full to the brim rather than to the particular line, you will have actually, quite likely, consumed seven. You would be counting the number of glasses of spirit, wine or beer and saying, “I am now under that limit that I believe to be the case,” whereas you could very well be over the limit, and substantially so, because there is no standard.
People are trained, when they do bar service, to fill a glass to a certain point. But we did notice, and we were advised, that, particularly in wine glasses, there are different sizes. There are different sized glasses. Some are made out of glass; some are made out of crystal. Some are more elaborate and ornate than others. There is no way of knowing whether or not you have got a full glass. It was pointed out by the chair at one point that when people go out to an official dinner, quite often the waiting staff will keep the glass full, so you do not get to complete one glass. You will find that over the course of an evening you have not got the faintest idea how much wine you have had presented to you.
If we had standard measures, said the witness, that would be fine. It does not have to be a big white line around the edge of the glass. It can be a dot; it can be an etching; it can be any number of things. It can be an advertising brand. It can be anything, just as long as it is something which indicates to the pourer and to the purchaser that that is a standard drink.
We also believe that we should have some sort of consistency in the framework for responsible service of alcohol—we talk about that in recommendation 7—across the Australian jurisdictions. We know that there are different training regimes in Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT, but people are required to have a certain level of training. Very shortly that will become the law.
When a person is employing somebody from interstate, they will say, “Are you qualified in RSA?” They will say, “Yes, I am.” But the regime applicable in that particular jurisdiction may be less than the standard that applies here in the ACT, and you do not have any guarantee that the training that we expect in the ACT is delivered to that particular person. So we are asking for consideration of a consistent framework being applied. It may very well be a conversation at a ministerial council level that might affect that.
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