Members' Day

Today is a Members' Day, and its getting down to the wire. There are only four more members' days remaining in the Parliamentary calendar, so there's only a limited amount of time to pass Sue Bradford's Corrections (Mothers With babies) Amendment Bill and Nandor Tanczo's Russel Norman's Waste Minimisation Bill through their final stages. Unfortunately, today the House looks like it could be spending most of its time on some local trivia, and on George Hawkins' latest exercise in wowserism. The latter would widen the scope for objections to liquor licenses, allowing anyone to object if they claim an adverse impact, require applicants to provide an evaluation of the social impacts if their licence is granted, and make the social impact or "any new matter relating to the impact of alcohol consumption on the wider community" a factor to criteria for granting a licence. The upshot: rather than being a procedural question of no criminal record, health & safety, and not serving drunk people, every application for a liquor licence will become a political question determined by whether or not other people want people to be able to buy it. Which is getting very intrusive indeed. Quite apart from the ideological objection that it is no business of George Hawkins and his ilk how much booze I buy, the overall effect is likely to be to favour large, deep-pocketed, litigious applicants over smaller ones, driving out local cafes and ensuring that wine and beer sales are restricted to supermarkets rather than minimarkets. Which is basically turning the clock back on two decades of social progress towards a more mature drinking culture. But then again, it is election year...