Page 2836 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 September 1994
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LIQUOR (AMENDMENT) BILL 1994
Debate resumed from 24 February 1994, on motion by Mr Connolly:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (8.54): Mr Acting Speaker, the purpose of this Bill is to try to tidy up problems with occupancy loadings, ones that have been bubbling along for over 12 months now since the Bill was initially passed. The problems are that determinations of occupancy loadings, that is, the number of people per square metre, are inconsistent, sometimes defy commonsense and currently are not subject to review by the AAT.
For example, you have two clubs with the same floor area. The first one has one exit that just makes the grade. The second one has many wide and clear exits and, in terms of moving people quickly away from an emergency, is twice as safe as the first club. But, because their floor areas are the same, both are granted the same occupancy loading. It simply does not make sense. In this example there is no incentive to install better exits; there is no incentive to make the building safer. The source of the problem is the way the Liquor Act is worded. Under the current Act, the Fire Commissioner assesses the occupancy loading for a public area and then the Registrar of Liquor Licences sets the occupancy loading in conformity with that assessment. In other words, whatever the Fire Commissioner says, the registrar must do. There is no flexibility, no discretion and no provision for review.
The amendment proposed by the Minister in this Bill would enable the Fire Commissioner's assessment to be reviewed by calling it a "recommendation" on which the registrar's decision is based, rather than an assessment with which the registrar must conform; that is, the Bill, if adopted, would allow the registrar to depart from the Fire Commissioner's recommendations. I know that the Minister is well intentioned in proposing this change, but it would still not solve the underlying problem because the registrar has to rely on the Fire Commissioner for technical information and advice. So, at the end of the day, the decision on what is the safe number of people that a public area can accommodate comes back to what the Fire Commissioner says. Hence, even if the registrar wished to set an occupancy loading different from the recommendation by the Fire Commissioner, he or she would have to go back to the Fire Commissioner for advice on the exit capacity of the building in question. In any event, although the effect of this Bill would be to give discretionary power to the registrar, he or she would not want to take the risk of departing from the Fire Commissioner's recommendation, for fear of being held liable in the event of injury or death from fire. To reiterate, the wording of the Act in defining "occupancy loading" is the problem. The Minister's Bill does not address this problem.
As the Act is worded in section 4, the Fire Commissioner must calculate assessments of occupancy loading strictly in accordance with the Building Code of Australia, the BCA. The Act specifies that the Fire Commissioner must not contravene Part D1.13 of the Building Code, which deals with the area per person according to use; neither can he contravene Part D1.6 of the Building Code, which relates to exit capacity.
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