Page 5665 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
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that 12 o’clock was the magic number? 12 o’clock is a hangover from the days when I was a teenager—and that day has been gone for more than 30 years—when everything shut at midnight. Your curfew was: be home at midnight. The buses would stop. There were no taxis. So you had to get home at 12 o’clock.
But young people these days often do not go out for a drink until 10 o’clock or later. So what we are doing is compressing the risk into an even tighter area. We all know that area will be Civic because that is the area where most of the larger venues are, the venues that can afford to carry this cost. So the risk will be a risk-induced response and it will be the minister who is responsible for that.
The minister says, “We want to send a price signal.” Okay. How does the price increase to the Tharwa general store send a signal? Or how does it send a signal to an off-licence that deals in mail order? How much mail-order alcohol fuels violence in Civic on a Saturday night, on a Friday night, on a Thursday night? Very little because I suspect the people that buy their alcohol by mail order are not the ones that should be targeted. We have a number of mail-order firms which will now pay enormously for their licences. How much do they contribute and where is the data that says mail-order alcohol is at the heart of alcohol-related violence?
I do not think there is a report like that. I certainly could not find one. Maybe the minister has got one. And it is interesting that firms like that, which operate in a niche market, are being penalised. I will give the minister leave to speak again if he wants to tell me how much of a risk they pose and where his analysis is.
Then, of course, there is this one-size-fits-all approach in this. If you are over $100,000, you pay the same price. If you have got a mail order business that turns over $200,000 or $300,000, you are paying the same as the Dan Murphy’s of the world which might be turning over $2 million or $3 million.
Mr Corbell: No, you are not. You are wrong.
MR SMYTH: The minister says, “No, you are not.” That is fine. You can explain that.
Mr Corbell: You are wrong. Just read the fee structure. You do not know what you are talking about.
MR SMYTH: I have read the fee structure. There are concerns out there about this.
If we want to really talk about the small venues, there is only one bar in this. What the minister is doing is picking up a lot of small businesses that do not, in the main, contribute to this problem. So we are sending a price signal. For “price signal”, read “higher taxes”. That is all this is about.
The minister has said, “It is all about how late you trade, the greater the risk.” What about distance? What is somebody who stays open late in Tuggeranong contributing to these problems as opposed to somebody in Kingston or Manuka? And is there a relationship between the distance you are from Civic and the centre of these problems to the amount of violence that is generated? We have heard nothing from the minister on that.
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