Page 2318 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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Finally, we are recommending that the government find ways to foster cooperative arrangements between licensed venues so that patrons who are identified for inappropriate behaviour and are promptly banned from that particular establishment will find themselves banned from everything in that particular precinct.
This would be a variation on the scheme applicable in the United Kingdom called Pubwatch. If a person is banned in one pub, the rest of the pubs in the village, the town or the city are notified that this particular individual has been banned, for whatever reason, and that ban applies right across the system. That would be a proactive approach, telling people, “This is what happens to you if you engage in violent behaviour which is alcohol induced.” It puts the responsibility back on the individual. You take them out of the game. If, for example, you get involved in a violent altercation outside a nightclub here in the city and you get banned from that nightclub, you can turn up the next day at another one. If you are the type of person that gets yourself preloaded and goes into town looking for a rumble, it has not been effective. But if there is a cooperative arrangement between the establishments to do that, we are away.
This was a very good report. It was quite an interesting inquiry too, I might say. I commend the report to the chamber.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (10.43): I will only speak briefly because Mr Hargreaves covered off the recommendations. I would also like to thank the chair of the committee, Mrs Vicki Dunne, Mr John Hargreaves, Dr Brian Lloyd and Lydia Chung for putting this report together.
It was quite interesting that in this inquiry we heard quite a lot about whether or not we have the balance right between the on-licences and the off-licences. That is why the first recommendation asks the government to consider this issue. I note that the minister picked up on that and made some comments in that regard. We know that, as Mr Hargreaves said, there is a lot of preloading going on. It means that people quite often are coming into the entertainment precincts, places like Civic, already quite drunk; then, if they go into a venue and cause some trouble, that incident is pegged to that venue. We do need to be looking at this issue of what the balance is between the on-licences and the off-licences and how we can mitigate risk.
That raised the issue of responsibility and self-responsibility. That was raised by quite a number of people who came in to talk to the inquiry. Yes, there is a role to play for the nightclubs, the bars and so forth. They do need to ensure that they have their staff trained in RSA—that that has been carried out and all the rest of it. But there also is a place for self-responsibility. That comes back to ongoing campaigns around alcohol, around the harm of binge drinking. That is really what we are seeing here—an ongoing culture of binge drinking that unfortunately quite often leads to really poor outcomes for people who went out for a good night out but it did not end up that way. Quite often these people end up in our police stations or in our hospitals. More can be done in that space around the importance that needs to be placed on the education campaigns around the responsibility people need to take for their own actions.
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