A piece of legislation now currently winding its way through Victorian Parliament gives the Director of Liquor Licensing more flexibility in imposing entry declarations - that is, late night lockouts - on licensed venues, whether individually or as a group.

I’m no lawyer, but is it unusual to declare that “Director is not bound by any of the rules of natural justice”?

With the Liquor Control Reform Amendment Bill 2008, the Victorian government doesn’t appear to have given up on the 2am lockout yet. It would not be surprising to see lockouts be part of the Health Minister’s meeting in late November, which will, apparently have a focus on alcohol. After all, the Victorian government has been eager to tie the law and order problem of late night violence to Canberra’s binge drinking strategy.

This pub promotion - “No Undies Sundie”, where women get free drink cards for removing underwear - makes the pub sound grotesquely bogan, but is that any reason for it to be banned by the government? Moral suasion - as was being applied by the Australian Hotels Association - is a far better way to deal with tasteless promotions like these.

And, let’s be frank, a lot of people like bogan pubs and their cringe-inducing gimmicks - does anybody really believe Sue Mclellan’s claim that they had to ban the promotion merely because it was “encouraging irresponsible drinking”? This is transparently a regulatory decision made on moral grounds, not health grounds.

But Victoria’s liquor regulators are desperately looking to score some runs on the board, so it’s no surprise they swung at this when they read about it in the papers today.

Call me a cynic - and you certainly couldn’t call me a criminologist - but I’m not entirely convinced that the Victorian police’s acquisition of five rental hummers is going to have a huge impact on late night violence in the CBD.

Who would go to the barricades for Melbourne’s Kings St strip clubs? Hot off the widely acknowledged failure of the 2am lockout, the state government is considering imposing special liquor licence conditions upon venues that offer stripping and pole dancing, including the possibility of an outright ban on alcohol.

It is much easier for govenments to target disreputable or ’sinful’ activities that most people would be ashamed or embarrassed to broadcast that they enjoy. Strip clubs no doubt have their supporters - and we know they have staff - but it unlikely they will amass on the steps of state parliament in their thousands to angrily protest the government’s policies.

As this new proposal implicitly admits, the problems of late night alcohol-fueled violence are concentrated on just a few establishments. Such concentration could allow for more targetted policing - that is, if the Victorian government were willing to prioritise getting more police on the streets rather than trying to ride the publicity wave of the federal government’s binge drinking strategy. Remember, in Melbourne, it isn’t alcohol that is the problem, it is violence. It is best solved by law and order, not the liquor code.

After its lockout failure, it is not surprising that Spring Street is falling back on softer targets.

The attitude displayed by deputy chief magistrate Jelena Popovic - that people applying for their L and P plates are a captive audience that the government should take the opportunity to preach to - is a profound example of how far the health paternalists have come.

Note that the issues the magistrate believes should be raised at a driving test don’t actually have anything to do with driving - conspicuously not the dangerous combination of alcohol and driving, which, arguably, would be worth noting at a driving test. Rather, she emphasizes the health and social consequences of alcohol - proposing that applicants for driving licences be subjected to a haranguing about the demon drink.

In this mindset, the state is itself a giant education apparatus, instructing its subordinates about how to live the moral life. The difference between the public health crusaders and the 19th century temperance movement is not so great.

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.

The 80 page Senate Committee report into rude words on television is full of bizarre material. Take for instance Media Standards Australia, which believes that the problem with offensive material isn’t that it offends people, it is that it exists at all:

Sadly, however, the more concerned people do just switch off, the longer the unacceptable levels of offensive material continue unchecked, and uncommented upon. One cannot complain about something that one does not see.

But the Senate committee is not all laughs. One significant regulatory proposal in the report is dumped in at the end of a long discussion on parental responsility - a mandatory “parental lock-out” on all new digital televisions sold in Australia. This sounds similar to the American V-Chip which was made mandatory in new US televisions from 1999 onwards. Read the rest of this entry »

It may well be that a third glass of wine dramatically increases the risk of accident and injury to the drinker. But what good are the federal government’s new healthy drinking guidelines if they deviate so far from the norm of usual social drinking practices?

Surely the purpose of official drinking guidelines are not to represent some unrealistic medical ideal, but to actually convince drinkers to moderate their consumption. Why then lower the definition of ‘binge drinking’ to a level which will be dismissed by most responsible drinkers as absurd? What little power the phrase ‘binge drinking’ had is dramatically reduced by this change.

This sort of makes a mockery of the idea that Melbourne’s new 2am lockout is an experiment, doesn’t it? Extra police are being allocated to the CDB this weekend to enforce the new laws. But those extra police will no doubt have an effect on the level of violence late at night. Says the Assistant Police Commissioner Gary Jamieson: “We’re very excited that we’ve got these new provisions in and we want to make it successful so that means police playing a very active role.”

So if late-night violence decreases, will the government attribute the change to the more numerous and very active police or the lockout?

On top of this, one quarter of the affected venues are exempt from the lockout trial. It is hard to see how this three month period will be a rigorous experiment in public policy.

I’ve been forwarded this list of venues exempt from the 2am lockout, so I can’t personally verify its accuracy. The list is obviously incomplete. There are nearly 100 venues exempt, but I’ve only got a list of the first couple of dozen. If I can find more names, I’ll try to update this list.
Read the rest of this entry »