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Councils on liquor licences August 23rd, 2008
Unless they have been misreported - and assuming my googling skills haven’t let me down, I don’t think the submission is anywhere online yet - local councils are asking for a big shakeup of liquor licencing practices.
The reported proposals range from the self-interested to the absurd. Alcohol licence holders would be subject to unprecedented regulatory interference - including probation periods, annual licence renewals (which, if recent changes are anything to go by, would allow councils to alter conditions each year).
The proposal that private parties larger than 100 people would be required to obtain a liquor licence is bizarre and a bit depressing - even if it wasn’t obviously a grab for extra revenue, how on earth would they plan on monitoring it? Councils have already made street parties hard enough. If they have their way, private parties will head down the same track.
Without seeing the full submission, it isn’t hard to guess at the origin of the demand that licence conditions be ‘harmonised’ across the country. Jurisdications with high regulatory burdens do not particularly like seeing their revenue base disappear across the border to jurisdictions with lower regulations. When you have competing jurisdications setting their own standards, it makes it harder to implement high cost regulations - this applies just as much to pubs and bottle shops as it does to wealthy individuals fleeing their high tax home countries.
Nevertheless, no doubt that many of the council bureaucrats advocating for such policies believe that they have only the community’s best interests at heart - local councils have little power but lots ambition for social change. It just goes to remind us that the nanny state was not invented in Canberra.
As a libertarian do you believe power is best held by people closest to the general population?
If so, you shouldn’t have a problem with local councils having more power in this area.
Indeed I understand it is the hotels association position that liquor licence rules should be made a the local community level. Given some of the social consequences of alcohol abuse effect more than just the individual, surely it is best that small areas have a say in this area.
Libertarians surely don’t just advocate for no government but for government that in some way reflects and addresses the various problems affecting different communities. A one size fits all approach which covers an entire state must be more nanny-state than individual communities having different rules. (Liquor licences were included in NCP payments and so are reasonably similar across the country)
Comment by Sally — 3/9/2008 @ 6:30 pm
Sally, there are diminishing returns to how close governments are to voters - arguably, the lack of media attention given to local governments is a harmful function of the size of their jurisdictions. Anyway you may not have a full hold on all strands of libertarian philosophy - most libertarians would oppose expansion of government power regardless of what level of government is expanding.
Nevertheless, this is academic. if you reread the post, you will notice that one of the things I am criticizing local governments for is wanting to ‘harmonise’ regulations across the country, the opposite of localisation.
Comment by Chris Berg — 3/9/2008 @ 8:55 pm