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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-09-30 Daily Xml
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'A SAFER NIGHT OUT'

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS (14:49): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Consumer Affairs questions about the recently released 'A Safer Night Out' document.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS: Police commissioner Mr Mal Hyde has stated that over 60 per cent of people arrested for crime in the city's West End test positive to drugs. The government recently released two discussion papers, 'A Safer Night Out' and a review of the RSA  Code of Practice. The reason for this, claims the minister, is to reduce street crime and violence. My questions to the minister are:

1. Why is it that these two documents barely mention drugs?

2. Why is the overwhelming focus of the Rann government on legitimate businesses in the hospitality industry and not on the drug trade, which is damaging the lives of young South Australians, and on drug users?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for State/Local Government Relations, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Consumer Affairs, Minister for Government Enterprises, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (14:50): I thank the honourable member for his most important questions. Indeed, the management of abusive and antisocial behaviour on our streets, around our entertainment precincts and in our society generally is a very complex matter. Due to a wide range of many different factors—and the honourable member rightly mentions the use of illicit drugs—I believe that, to really address that issue, work needs to be done across all those areas, and I believe that is occurring. Various ministers with different portfolios that carry responsibility for different aspects of antisocial behaviour have their own initiatives and policies in place to deal with those matters.

Being responsible for liquor licensing, I have put forward a number of issues that I believe address problems that could be improved considerably by improving our standards around licensing and other associated behaviours. So, a wide range of different strategies are in place. No-one can refute that the influence of alcohol—which is a legal substance and readily available throughout our community—is responsible for levels of antisocial behaviour, including acts of violence and other inappropriate behaviour.

We have looked at a whole range of initiatives, some of which have been looked at in other jurisdictions, where strategies have been found to have a very positive effect on reducing antisocial behaviour. We have looked at those initiatives and spoken with stakeholders across the industry and put together their ideas into discussion papers that we then put out to the general community for consultation. That consultation period has only just finished, and the agency is now putting together those responses and, from that, we will formulate strategies to take us forward.

The message is clear to me that our community's tolerance of alcohol-related antisocial behaviour has reached a limit. People are saying to me loudly and clearly that we need to do something about improving alcohol-fuelled antisocial behaviour on our streets. They have looked to me to take responsibility for the portfolio or policy areas for which I am responsible to put in place initiatives to try to improve that, and that is exactly what we have done. We have had a very good response from the community, which is not unsurprising from some sections of the community. We will listen to all of the feedback.

The strategies proposed, however, are not directed particularly at one sector of the community but rather look at a range of different initiatives across the sector and explore the possibility of putting in place a number of different new initiatives to reduce alcohol-fuelled, anti-social behaviour, particularly in and around our entertainment precincts.

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