10 minute read
Advocating Against Liquor Store Placement
The red tape involved in objecting to a liquor store being located in your local community is a David vs Goliath fight. Ana Ika, policy analyst and advocate at the Army’s Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit, highlights the historic context involved in advocating for protections for people against exploitation and availability of alcohol.
William Booth, the co-founder of The Salvation Army wrote in his book, In Darkest England and the Way Out: ‘Ninetenths of our poverty, squalor, vice and crime spring from this poisonous tap-root. Many of our social evils, which overshadow the land, would dwindle away and die if they were not constantly watered with strong drink.’
Grim statistics
The challenges Booth highlighted in respect to alcohol in the nineteenth century continue to this very day. In New Zealand, alcohol harm costs society $7.85 billion every year. More than 50 percent of family harm offenders are under the influence of alcohol—to put that into context, police report a family harm incident every three minutes. Thirty percent of vehicle incidents are caused by drunk drivers. Twenty-five percent of suicides are alcohol related. People who have pre-natal exposure to alcohol are often diagnosed with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD); it is estimated that up to 36 percent of inmates in prisons have FASD, compared with two to five percent in the general population.
Some examples closer to home show that 60 percent of our whānau (families) who come through Salvation Army Community Ministries are impacted by alcohol harm. The Bridge addiction programme is at the coal face and sees broken families, broken livelihoods and lost freedoms due to alcohol dependency. At the same time, many of our financial mentors report whānau requesting food parcels for their tamariki (children)—despite alcohol purchases making weekly appearances on their bank statements.
Exploitation and profits
Whilst the alcohol industry and the supermarket duopoly rake in billions of dollars in profit every year from alcohol sales, alcohol harm creates havoc in all areas of society. The reality is that everyone has personal choice, but often an individual becomes a product of their environment. The proliferation and density of bottle stores is higher in areas of high social deprivation. These are the communities where our centres and corps are located. These environments predispose our whānau to alcohol harm.
Booth said, ‘There is an infinite potentiality of capacity lying latent in our provincial taprooms and the city gin palaces if you can but get them soundly saved, and even short of that, if you can place them in conditions where they would no longer be liable to be sucked back into their old disastrous habits, you may do great things with them.’
The Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 (SSAA) is the law that governs the sale, supply and consumption of alcohol and ensures that alcohol consumption is undertaken safely and responsibly, with a focus on harm minimisation. SSAA introduced processes that would allow communities to contend for these conditions. Two of these processes are local alcohol policies (LAP) and the district licensing committee (DLC).
The DLC is a governing body commissioned by local councils to approve or decline licences to sell alcohol. When an alcohol licence applicant applies for a licence they are required to notify the public; the public has 15 days to object. The public then attend a DLC hearing where they are required to outline their objections and often need to compile evidence to provide grounds for their objection. The DLC considers these objections only if they fall into section 105 of the Act for new licences and section 131 for renewals.
The LAP allows councils the ability to develop their own alcohol plans. These plans can restrict the hours of alcohol sales, the number of bottle stores, and the minimum distance alcohol licences can be from special sites, such as churches or schools. The council releases a draft plan and the public has an opportunity to give feedback to the draft LAP. The council takes the feedback and develops a Provisional LAP (PLAP). The public has 30 days to appeal to the PLAP—if there are no appeals, the PLAP is adopted. DLC regards the LAP when deciding to issue or decline a licence.
Standing up as a community
The challenge with the DLC system is that it assumes the community and licence applicants are on the same playing field. They are not. An alcohol licence is an economic investment for applicants, therefore they invest heavily in legal representation and time in these processes. Public objectors are often people in the community who see alcohol harm, such as parents, teachers or community workers. Objectors often don’t have the time or the resources to invest into these processes.
Objectors also most likely do not have the legal understanding to package their lived experience of alcohol harm to fit within the statutory requirements of the Act to object. Without legal support from lawyers working pro-bono or from community law offices, objecting to an alcohol licence is challenging.
Despite these challenges, when communities band together and have the support they need, many alcohol licences are declined. These uphill battles are worthy of their time if it means that a new bottle store will not open in their community.
Forty-two out of sixty-seven councils have an LAP. These 42 councils represent 34 percent of the total population. Almost all LAPs were appealed by the supermarket duopoly and the liquor industry. As a result, many of the policies that councils had developed were either abandoned or watered down. Many of the biggest centres in the country do not have LAPs because of the financial costs as a result of the appeals. Christchurch City Council abandoned their LAP after spending over $1 million in court costs due to appeals. Auckland Council’s LAP has been stalled for seven years by appeals by the supermarket duopoly Woolworths (Progressive) and Foodstuffs. The supermarket duopoly has now appealed Auckland Council’s LAP to the Supreme Court.
These processes are biased towards and hamstrung by bureaucracy, legal challenges and corporate influence, meaning that local communities are left to relentlessly fight ‘David vs Goliath’ battles to ensure their voices, needs and realities are actually heard and realised.
Advocacy of The Salvation Army
As we contend against bottle stores and alcohol availability in our communities, the reality is that people find solace at the bottom of the bottle. Booth said: ‘Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers.’
Reducing alcohol harm takes not only reducing alcohol access but ‘outbidding the subsidiary attractions’ of alcohol.
Recovery Church is a prime example of outbidding the subsidiary attractions of alcohol by providing a place of belonging and acceptance which leads people to Christ and helps them grow in the love and knowledge of Jesus. Paul says in Romans 15:13, ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit’. Joy, peace, solace, warmth, light and comfort found temporarily in a bottle can be found permanently in Jesus Christ. The Salvation Army advocate for less alcohol in our communities, but more importantly, that we can outbid the attractions of alcohol by showing people the redeeming love and hope that is in Jesus Christ.
Advocacy in Action
Captain Jocelyn Smith, corps officer at Sydenham Corps
In 2020, Captain Jocelyn Smith, corps officer at Sydenham Corps, received an email drawing her attention to a liquor store licence application that had been submitted in her area. In order to raise an objection, Jocelyn (pictured on right) needed to fill in the application within 24 hours. The area that the liquor store was trying to get permission to move into was within a few metres of a Family Store, and just down the road from the Bridge programme and Addington Supportive Accommodation. Jocelyn was aware that this store would have the potential to negatively affect the lives of those vulnerable to alcohol and their families.
Jocelyn submitted an objection on behalf of The Salvation Army, but the process of going through the courts was much more involved than she could have imagined. The business owner met up with Jocelyn multiple times to try to dissuade her from going through with the process, and eventually legally objected to Jocelyn’s submission as she didn’t personally live in the proposed area.
‘He was continually sending me texts and messages about how I was causing a lot of stress for his wife and family. I tried to maintain a faithbased grace about those calls and messages, and build a relationship with him,’ Jocelyn explained.
Jocelyn’s objection made it to the courts, where a panel of five people considered the case. Michael Douglas, The Salvation Army’s national operations manager for Addictions, Supportive Housing and Reintegration Services, came for the hearing as a representative from the Bridge, to discuss the potential harm of the store placement on those involved in the programme. An Addington Supportive Accommodation representative also attended, as well as an advocacy support person who works with clients at the Bridge.
The hearing ran for five hours, and aside from receiving some advice from Canterbury Law Services in drafting submissions, Jocelyn and The Salvation Army didn’t have any legal representation in the case. ‘We got to the end of the hearing and I just felt absolutely demoralised and brutalised by the [liquor store owner’s] lawyers, who basically tried to intimidate and belittle me, and make it seem like I didn’t know what I was talking about.
‘I’d never been in a courtroom before, and I was the only one who was allowed to speak so I had to represent everyone else. Even if they had a comment to make, they had to whisper it in my ear and then I had to make the comment.’
Jocelyn explained that they never expected to be successful with their objection, and that Michael Douglas had comforted her with the words, ‘we gave it a shot’. They received the verdict from the hearing just before Christmas 2020 and were ‘gobsmacked’, as Jocelyn put it, to find that they won the case!
‘We thought it might just be acknowledged that we submitted an objection, but to win and to win it for others in the future, that was beyond anything we had dreamed.’ Jocelyn explained that ongoing negotiations have meant that another location was found for the liquor store, further away from The Salvation Army services, and the owner agreed to consider his store advertising in relation to alcohol harm in the community.
Near the end of the hearing process, the store owner’s wife became pregnant. Jocelyn visited the family with a gift basket and a prayer for the blessing of their family. ‘It was quite shocking for him, he wasn’t expecting that I would arrive with a gift,’ Jocelyn explained. ‘So there was a mutual respect and almost friendship between us by the end of it, despite the fact that we fought him all the way through court.’
By Holly Morton
