12 October 2011
Mr MORRIS (Mornington) — I am pleased to support the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation Bill 2011, which will create a single, integrated regulator for both liquor and gambling.
This legislation represents another election commitment which will be delivered in the first year of this government. It will create a commission structure to deal with liquor licensing decisions, it will create an expert commission, it will improve consistency and it will improve transparency. It will replace the director of liquor licensing, the Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation and the liquor licensing panel.
I congratulate the minister on the bill. It will make a substantive and long‑overdue change to a system which, with the best will in the world, has been patched up again and again and again.
Clearly the system, for whatever reason, has been failing for a very long time. Licensing has always been recognised as a problematic area. In the past it was a tightly regulated area. Perhaps some would say, and I tend to agree, that it was overregulated — overregulated to a point where the controls impacted on people’s businesses, impacted on people’s leisure choices and impacted on tourism opportunities.
It was not all that long ago — I am sure, Speaker, it is in your memory, as it is in mine — that alcohol could not be purchased between 10.00 p.m. on Saturday night and 9.00 a.m. on Monday morning. Life is very different in Victoria these days.
Unfortunately the deregulation process led to a mindset in which alcohol was treated as just another product. I think it would have been much better to find some middle ground here. Clearly alcohol is not just another product; it is a drug.
For some people it is a drug of dependence, and in the stricter sense it is a poison. Even when taken in small quantities it can cause some serious physiological effects, and when used to excess it often leads to violent acts and antisocial behaviour.
Yet the former government for far too long ignored the problem, and when it acted too often it came up with one bandaid approach after the other. Not all of them were useless, but even those measures that — to continue the analogy — stemmed the blood flow unfortunately failed to close the wound. I believe the measures proposed by this bill will deal with those issues in an appropriate and systemic manner.
In addition to the legislative changes proposed by the bill, far broader organisational changes are under way in terms of structure, business processes and, importantly, cultural change. These changes will progress in parallel to the legislative reform.
The reform will create a new, modern, adaptive — which is very important, considering the change of pace in the industry — and focused regulator. It is not a merger, it is not a rebranding, it is not a restructure; it will create a new, modern and world‑class regulator.
The bill does many things. It creates the commission, of course. It prescribes the appointment requirements and arrangements for removal from office. It prescribes the functions of the commission, including exercising the powers and duties that were formerly conferred on the director of liquor licensing in the Liquor Control Reform Act 1998 and those that were conferred on the Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation in the Gambling Regulation Act 2003, the Casino Control Act 1991 and so on.
The bill also empowers the minister to issue a statement of policy principles to the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation (VCGLR). It imposes a quorum requirement of three commissioners and requires hearings of the commission —this is important — to be held in public unless special circumstances apply. It also empowers the chair of the commission to appoint gambling and liquor licensing inspectors, who will become authorised officers under the respective acts.
Taking that last subject a little bit further, currently both the gambling and liquor legislation provides for inspectors. They have an important role in both liquor and gambling regulation. In terms of liquor regulation, Victoria Police has a significant role as well, which will continue. The currently separate offices of gambling inspector and licensing inspector will be integrated. As we know, the venues that provide gaming generally provide alcohol and are licensed venues, and often vice versa.
It allows an integrated approach to compliance, in terms of both the licensing and gaming aspects.
The opposition, and in particular the member for Geelong, raised an issue relating to the jurisdictions of VCAT (Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal) and the Supreme Court. I am not sure where the member got his information from, but he certainly seemed to have the wrong end of the stick.
The Liquor Control Reform Act 1998 currently gives VCAT the authority to undertake a merits review of nominated liquor licensing decisions. This bill removes the power for VCAT to conduct a merits review; it removes the jurisdiction. However, in its place the bill provides for three or more commissioners, excluding the original decision‑maker, to act to review a decision on an application.
Rather than having a member from VCAT coming in cold, there will be three people who have not previously heard the application who will be empowered to deal with it as a fresh decision, but they will be doing it in the context of their knowledge and their experience of the industry and the regulations that surround it.
So rather than simply saying that appeals have to go to the Supreme Court, in fact what this bill will be doing is putting in place a far more effective appeal process for licensing decisions and also providing a far more expert base from which those decisions can be made.
The current structure requires a liquor licensing panel to hear submissions in terms of contested applications, and then it reports up the line to the director of liquor licensing, who makes the decision. The new arrangements will put in place a regime whereby the commission, generally sitting as one member, as I understand it, will hear the submissions in public and will then make the decision. The decision‑maker will be the person who has actually heard the evidence and is fully informed on the matter.
There will be a new regime for disciplinary action. Currently VCAT is the responsible authority for disciplinary action. That function will be transferred to the new commission, which will certainly bolster the authority of the commission within the industry. It will enable disciplinary matters to be dealt with in a far more expeditious manner than is currently possible, and it will create a much greater opportunity for coordinated compliance, which my observations of the process indicate is certainly not optimum at the moment.
The commission structure will facilitate better systems, it will enable the development of commissioners’ expert knowledge and it will enable problem licensed venues to be dealt with quickly and decisively. It is excellent legislation, and I commend the bill to the house.
Legislative Assembly 12 October 2011
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