Today the government introduced a new Sale and Supply of Liquor and Liquor Enforcement Bill, intended to address "the drinking problem". The bill would do a number of useful things, such as imposing a zero blood-alcohol limit on young drivers (justifiable discrimination IMHO in the light of high accident rates), explicitly criminalising buying alcohol for other people's kids without their parent's permission, and imposing a mandatory cancellation of a manager's certificate if they are caught serving alcohol to minors too often. It also allows the police to seize alcohol where there is "reasonable ground to suppose" it is intended to be illegally provided to minors or consumed in a public place - something which at first glance seems reasonable, but the standard of evidence is so low as to be non-existent. While the most likely victims will be minors (for whom one can think of few reasons for them to be transporting alcohol in public), it will also allow police to seize alcohol from people travelling on buses and trains (or rather, from people they have "reasonable grounds to suspect" might be going to travel on a bus or train) - which if you've ever gone shopping without a car, might cause some concern. The legal theory that we can just hand the police power to do whatever they want and it'll all work out OK because we can trust such fine, upstanding people is not a sensible one, and I would like to see a higher barrier here, just to prevent them from being dicks in uniform.
That's a minor problem, however. The real problem is the changes to licensing laws. These would see every local authority empowered to create a "local alcohol plan", specifying conditions such as hours of sale, location and density of outlets, and business practices which must be complied with by anyone wanting to sell alcohol. To see what will happen with this, we have only to look at the local body response to the Prostitution Reform Act, where local body wowsers and fundies sought to abuse the RMA in an effort to place a de facto ban on a perfectly legal activity. This is an invitation for the same sort of behaviour. At the end of the day, its no business of my local community how much booze I buy, and I would rather central government protected me from interfering local-body busybodies.
There's also an interesting clause which would effectively ban small grocery stores - defined as anything under 150 square metres - from selling wine and beer. So, no more wine from the corner shop. The government, it seems, has decided that selling alcohol is big business, and only big business should be allowed to profit from it. Like George Hawkins' wowser bill, this turns the clock back on two decades of progress towards a more mature drinking culture. But I suppose these things happen in an election year.
