Crikey

Under the new alcohol regime in the NT, any licensee or employee of a take-away bottle shop commits an offence if, when selling alcohol with more than 1,350ml of ‘pure’ alcohol content, they do not verify the purchaser’s identity, name and address and where they intend to consume it.

Licensees face a fine of $37,000 and individual employees are liable to fines of $6,600 per offence. 1,350 ml of alcohol has apparently been taken as the benchmark because it is the total ‘pure’ alcohol content of three cartons of full strength beer.

Woolworths Limited has ten liquor licences in the NT, mainly based in their supermarkets scattered along the Stuart Highway. Many of the NT’s ‘rivers of grog’ start flowing at the doors of Woolies’ supermarkets and other retail liquor outlets.

Of the 70 submissions tabled at the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee Inquiry into the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 only Woolies’ concentrated on money and alcohol.

The problem for Woolies, and all other liquor retailers in the NT, is that calculating the total ‘pure’ alcohol content of a sale is not easy. As Woolies point out in their submission:

The alcohol content of a bottle of wine varies between 5% and 20%, although most bottles are 750ml our stores stock sizes varying between 187ml and 2000ml. In any given 750ml bottle of wine, pure alcohol content can vary between 37.5ml and 150ml. In addition to this the alcohol content of the same brand and variety of wine can vary from vintage to vintage.

This ignores other possible permutations caused by different alcohol volumes and pack sizes. In the case of spirits, alcohol content can vary between 20% and 57% for commonly stocked brands. Common bottle sizes range from 50ml to 1125ml, although a number would fall outside this range. The pure alcohol content of a standard 700ml bottle of spirit could vary between140ml to 400ml. This ignores other possible permutations caused by different alcohol volumes and pack sizes. A typical supermarket liquor store would stock approximately 1,300 different products.

We understand that there is a proposal to produce some kind of “ready reckoner” to calculate the potential alcohol content in any transaction. The number of possible combinations of products in any given transaction makes it difficult to contemplate how this could be achieved.

Woolies is of course not alone in identifying that Brough’s new liquor regime will present real problems for liquor retailers and as Vince Kelly, President of the NT Police Association, has told Crikey, it will also create problems for his members:

This is absurd…The Federal Government has unnecessarily complicated every operational police officer’s life with these changes to the liquor enforcement regime, and, by the sound of it, the working life of everybody who works in a bottle shop. Who honestly thinks that operational police have got the time to run around and do that kind of enforcement?…This has been a pretty ordinary display of governance, policy and legislation and the NT Police will have to do their best with it.

Woolies have sent a task force of its own senior managers to the NT to smooth the way for these new laws.

Maybe they’ll have a discreet chat with their old boss, Roger Corbett who is on Mal Brough’s NT Emergency Response Taskforce?