Alcohol policy reform in remote Australia: a potential roadmap

                Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.

               Julius Caesar Act 2, scene 1

 

The harm from misuse of alcohol is a national problem, affecting Indigenous and non-Indigenous segments of the Australian community alike. Neither is it subject to geographic limits. Accordingly, there is a strong case for appropriate national policies balancing regulation against  the social, economic, and even cultural benefits arising from alcohol consumption.

 

Nevertheless, a strong case can be made for giving greater weight to the addressing the costs (broadly defined) of alcohol misuse in remote regions, and in particular the costs on remote Indigenous communities. The case for such a regulatory policy focus is based on the extremely high levels of disadvantage across a wide array of social indicators, including many of the social determinants of health, in these remote populations. Moreover, alcohol harm coexists with extremely high rates of disease, self harm, mental illness, suicide, domestic violence, homicide, poor education outcomes, low employment outcomes amongst remote Indigenous communities. Without seeking to demonstrate a direction of causality, there are strong intuitive grounds for assuming that causality may indeed operate in both directions. For example, alcohol misuse will within a household will impact children’s schooling, and poor education will limit opportunities, leading to behavioural issues that individuals seek to ameliorate with alcohol.

 

I don’t propose to elaborate further in this post on the evidence of adverse social and health outcomes of alcohol misuse within Indigenous communities. I refer interested readers to an excellent review of these issues by Dennis Gray et.al. from 2018 titled ‘Review of the harmful use of alcohol among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’, published in the Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet (link here).

 

I have previously (in 2016, and 2021) written about the issues relating to the regulation of alcohol consumption in the NT (link here and link here) and more generally in 2017 (link here). These posts individually and together provide good background on the policy issues around alcohol in remote communities. In this post, I seek to argue that the problems of the NT in relation to the regulation of alcohol consumption are in fact also present in other jurisdictions with remote Indigenous populations (particularly WA), are deeper than commonly understood, and more damaging to the social fabric of remote Australia, particularly its Indigenous communities.

 

Western Australian developments

 

In WA, there is currently underway an inquiry by the Director of Liquor Licencing into Kimberley and Pilbara packaged liquor availability (link here). The following material is extracted (but is not a direct quotation) from the link just cited on the Department’s website.

 

In July 2020 the then Director of Liquor Licensing commenced two separate Inquiries — under section 64 of the Liquor Control Act 1988 — into whether restrictions should be imposed on availability of packaged liquor in nine major towns and surrounding communities across the Pilbara and the Kimberley. The list appears to not cover some major towns such as Port Hedland and South Hedland.

 

The Inquiries followed reports received from the then Police Commissioner highlighting negative impacts of alcohol in the Pilbara and Kimberley, such as crime and anti-social behaviour. Some thirty submissions have been received from “health care and social services providers, local government authorities and academics about reducing the risk of alcohol related harm.”

 

A decision to extend the date for retailers to make submission has recently been announced.

Extra time has been granted for licensees in 9 Pilbara and Kimberley towns to have a say on whether packaged liquor sales should be restricted in those communities of Western Australia.

WA’s Director of Liquor Licensing Lanie Chopping has extended the deadline for industry submissions until 1 September 2022. This is in response to requests from stakeholders, and to allow more time for careful consideration of complex issues around alcohol-related harm and packaged liquor sales.

The consultation process had previously been extended from 30 November 2021 to 1 July 2022 taking into consideration disruptions due to the pandemic and emergency management powers.

 

A section headed Next Steps provides some contextual information on the slow progress of the review:

Lanie Chopping, Director of Liquor Licensing for WA (and also the Director General, Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries) said:

“My Inquiries into whether to restrict packaged liquor sales in the Kimberley and Pilbara are still very much underway and as such I’ve extended the deadline for submissions by alcohol retailers.

“A number of things have changed since these Inquiries began, including the trial of new measures, like the Banned Drinkers Register, and sly-grogging prevention strategy and state of emergency liquor restrictions.

“Our consultation process is under review and development, and we are looking at ways to be more transparent about feedback received and how decisions are made. Updates are being made to our website to convey information currently available.” 

 

So what are we to make of all this?

 

The ongoing attention and activity by the West Australian Government, albeit often framed around issues of youth crime and and antisocial behaviour, suggests the existence of significant issues both amongst drinkers and their families, and also of significant spillover consequences for businesses and the non-drinking community.

 

Concurrently, the Commonwealth has recently introduced legislation to remove the previous Government’s Cashless Debit Card (CDC) (link here), a geographically focussed policy  which had been justified at least in part on the basis of reducing alcohol harm. Evaluations of the program produced mixed findings in relation to alcohol (link here and link here). Whatever its other policy merits and defects, the WA focus on further regulatory change suggests that the CDC program’s operation in the East Kimberley since 2017 has not made earth shattering breakthroughs in reducing alcohol harm.

 

I propose to focus on two major points. The first points to the sensitivity of government in relation to the influence of the alcohol industry. The second relates to issues of regulatory independence and transparency. These issues may not be entirely independent of each other.

 

The influence of alcohol interests

A recent article in the National Indigenous Times (link here) mentions that the WA Police Commissioner has made some rather equivocal comments on the issue of controls on the sale of alcohol:

 Earlier this week new West Australian police commissioner Col Blanch said he would support a ban on takeaway alcohol apart from light beer in the Pilbara and Kimberley if it is deemed to be the most effective option for reducing alcohol-related harm.

 

The same article mentions that the Premier has stated that he does not support the proposed bans. Responding to a submission by the previous Police Commissioner in January 2020, the Premier argued a ban on takeaway sales would be too far reaching (link here):

"The problem with a blanket alcohol restriction is it impacts those people who do the right thing ... and to a degree, it removes self-determination from people as to what decisions individual communities want to make," Mr McGowan told reporters on Thursday.

"Some communities have made the decision to go dry and I support them in that. "But if you just have a blanket approach, you are going to hurt the tourism industry and we will hurt jobs across the northwest."

 

The article just cited went on to note that full-strength alcohol would still be available at pubs and restaurants under the proposal, and that Mr McGowan has previously suggested he would prefer a banned-drinkers register as a means of tackling alcohol abuse.

 

The article also noted that the previous Police Commissioner had pointed out that a ban on the sale of full-strength takeaway alcohol in the Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing, driven by local Aboriginal leaders, had led to fewer hospital presentations and road deaths:

"There's a number of very, very senior Aboriginal leaders who are loudly saying 'we need to interrupt this'," Mr Dawson told Nine Radio.

"How do we provide the best possible care to vulnerable people when there is so much consumption of alcohol? "The volumes that are being sold are astronomical."

 

So on the one hand, we have the Premier, clearly an astute and accomplished politician, arguing against takeaway restrictions, while two Police Commissioners are on the record expressing support for restrictions.

 

Clearly, this is an issue that is crying out for a comprehensive and independent inquiry which documents the extent of alcohol use and misuse, identifies the social and health consequences (and costs), considers the wider ramifications to community welfare, including suicide, education, mental health, domestic and family violence, as well as the costs to tourism and other businesses in regional areas.

Such an Inquiry would then be in a position to suggest policy reforms from a position of robust policy analysis.

 

This raises the question: is the current inquiry by the WA Director of Liquor Licencing up to this task?

 

Regulatory independence and transparency

 

The publicly available details for the inquiries currently underway are to be found on the departmental web site (link here). The terms of reference for the inquiries are not publicly accessible. Nor are details of the process used to invite submissions, nor indeed are the submissions so far received. We might surmise however that the inquiry will be relatively narrow in scope, and at best will limit itself to addressing the matters raised in submissions. The delays to date are explained as arising from the pandemic and the introduction of new policy measures, both plausible explanations. It seems somewhat strange however that the extension of time for submissions is limited to alcohol retailers, on its face, a case of preferencing industry interests over community and service provider interests. A cynic might speculatively surmise that the reason for the extension is to ensure that industry viewpoints are formally on the table for the review to assess and utilise. Of course, the obverse of such an observation would be that industry interests saw no need to make formal submissions, presumably because they utilised other avenues to have their views considered and heard.

 

The Department has explained that the submissions received so far will not be made public for the following reasons:

A lot of these submissions are hard copy documents and some are very lengthy. They also contain personal information that would need to be redacted before being shared. For these reasons we intend to publish a summary of the submissions — for example themes — once all relevant parties have had an opportunity to comment.

 

Apart from its ‘dog ate my homework’ tone, this is far from best practice, and means that the arguments and views that contribute to the Inquiry are never transparently available to the public.

 

The major structural issue with this Inquiry however is the lack of independence. The Director of Liquor Licencing is simultaneously the CEO of the relevant Department. The department has been at pains to make clear that these dual roles exist, and asserts on the relevant website page that Inquiries by the Director of Liquor Licensing are independent of the Minister for Racing, Gaming and Liquor. Nevertheless, this disclosure does not amount to being independent.  Media releases from bodies such as the Liquor Stores Association of WA applauding the Director’s recent appointment as CEO of the Department do not help either (link here).

 

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the WA legislation is almost bizarre insofar as it provides for a Licencing Commission, but effectively makes it subservient to the instructions and directives of the Director of Liquor Licencing. Thus particularly sensitive matters are not put before the Licencing Commission, but are dealt with by the Director of Liquor Licencing. This reverses normal practice elsewhere where the Commissions are independent, and public servnats are not involved in making licencing related decisions.

 

For all these reasons, the current WA Inquiry is likely to lead to minimal substantive change, more incremental adjustment, more fine tuning, providing the appearance of action while leaving the underlying determinants of the adverse impacts of alcohol misuse in Pilbara and the Kimberley in place. What is needed is some sort of significant circuit breaker, but the likelihood of that arising endogenously within the Western Australian political system seems miniscule.

 

Conclusion

The social harm of alcohol across remote Australia has been apparent for decades. The issues being confronted in the north of WA are paralleled in the Northern Territory. It is clear that the Commonwealth has effectively vacated this policy sector, leaving states and the NT to grapple with addressing the huge levels of social harm and distress that accompanies alcohol misuse.

 

Unfortunately, as I have argued in my previous posts (link here and link here), corporate alcohol interests have a stranglehold or veto over policy initiatives designed to address or mitigate the consequences of alcohol misuse.

 

Notwithstanding the Commonwealth’s reluctance to engage with these issues, the Commonwealth does have a policy responsibility. It is clear that the issues involved are structural and extend beyond any one state or territory. On its own this suggests that Commonwealth action may be necessary.

 

Second, the Commonwealth is picking up a substantial proportion of the costs which flow from alcohol misuse: it is the major funder of the health system, the social security system, and the disability sector which deals with the significant numbers of newborns suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome (FASD). The fact that the states and territories do not pay the full cost of the consequences of their alcohol policies incentivises them to adopt (sub-optimal) policies that shift those costs to the Commonwealth.

 

Third, the Commonwealth has a concurrent constitutional jurisdiction to legislate for Indigenous citizens, and it is Indigenous citizens who are the most vulnerable and worst affected by alcohol misuse in remote Australia. Remind me: what was the point of the 1967 referendum if the Commonwealth just sits on its hands when structural issues imposing lifelong costs and constraints on the life opportunities of countless remote citizens are in play?

 

It is clear that the Commonwealth has a potential role in this policy space. What then should it do. There are a myriad of policy options available. They range from across the board reforms affecting all Australian drinkers, to regionally focussed reforms or special measures directed to Indigenous communities. These include, inter alia, the establishment of a unit price on alcohol, the use of the tax system to nudge consumers away from alcohol consumption, the establishment of sustained and well-resourced educational programs designed to change the levels of social acceptance of alcohol misuse across the community, and the use of health warnings similar to those in place for smoking.

 

Given this range of policy choice, the reluctance of the states and territories to initiate major policy reforms, the political sensitivity of driving substantive policy reform, and the complexity of the issues facing remote communities, the momentum for Commonwealth action appears to be absent. In these circumstances, for socially progressive interests concerned at the ongoing social destruction arising form alcohol across remote Australia, the best course of action in my view would be to advocate for a comprehensive and robustly independent policy review focussed particularly on remote Australia, with broad terms of reference and a tight time frame. I can think of no such comprehensive inquiry into these issues in recent times, although the recent Gilbert review into the proposal for a Dan Murphy super store in Darwin (link here) provides an excellent template and model.

 

Of course the Commonwealth too is subject to pressure and co-option by the alcohol industry. An independent review would threaten those interests and would be opposed. Nevertheless, with sustained pressure from an alliance of Indigenous service providers, and mainstream health advocates, and the assistance of the cross bench, the time might arrive where a Government would initiate such an Inquiry.

 

There is a risk is that these issues are seen as abstract policy issues, without relevance to the lives of ordinary citizens or voters. The reality is that the current policy settings are facilitating increased family violence, contributing to youth suicide, fuelling the rise in our prison population, destroying the lives of drinkers, shortening lifespans, and adversely impacting newborns by substantially and permanently constraining their life opportunities. The case for policy reform is overwhelming. How is it that governments wont act?