Judge Bill Unwin spoke to a group of 100 representatives of the Hospitality Association New Zealand (Hanz), Public Health South, the Dunedin City Council, and Alcohol Liquor Advisory Council at a breakfast meeting, organised by Hanz and NZ Police, in Dunedin yesterday.
He said Dunedin, for many years, was held up as the epitome of good local licensing governance, until the same problems as other cities faced started creeping in.
By the time the University of Otago and the Dunedin City Council started to act on the problems associated with student drinking, Dunedin was no longer the "top town" in the sense of licensing issues.
However, with alcohol reforms it was about to introduce, a Government nervous of being labelled a nanny state would put the onus back on local authorities, not only to make all the decisions on local liquor licensing and policies,but also to sit in judgement regarding those decisions.
These would be the jobs of proposed three-person panels at local authority level. That was only one of many changes proposed in the alcohol review.
He could understand why licensees might be nervous, Judge Unwin said.
"If I was a licensee right now, I'd be shaking in my boots, if I knew what was coming over the horizon in the form of the new liquor Bill."
An increasingly liberal attitude to alcohol by Parliament over the past 20 years had "created the perfect recipe for the perfect drinking storm".
It was his belief minimum pricing, lowering the drink-driving threshold and increasing the ability to refuse a licence would have achieved the Government's goal of reducing alcohol harm.
Instead, it had ruled out minimum pricing and there was to be a whole new Act with many aspects that would result in licensees having to jump through "all sorts of hoops".
He told those gathered at Pier 24 in St Clair, he expected the friction between what was seen as reasonable, and what was seen as required to achieve the objective of reducing alcohol harm, would be ongoing.
