Structures for reducing drug-related harm: the case of the alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand

Abstract

Once hailed as the ‘social laboratory of the world’, voices from New Zealand have been strangely muted in many of the debates about how best to tackle drug-related harm. In relation to alcohol, however, New Zealand offers one of the most interesting case studies of how government responses to drug-related problems are framed. Since the late 1970s, New Zealand has had a stand-alone agency, the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand, with a national mandate to minimise alcohol-related harm. Set up under its own Act of Parliament, and at an arms-length distance from government, this body was also given a dedicated source of funding from a special levy on beverage alcohol products. Despite this seemingly unique constellation of features (a national organisation, established by statute, with an alcohol-only focus and a mandate to lead alcohol-related harm minimisation, directly funded by a ‘tied-tax’ on alcohol), the Alcohol Advisory Council model has received little attention in the published literature. This paper seeks to introduce the Alcohol Advisory Council model to a wider audience. After backgrounding the establishment of the Council in the late 1970s, and its reconfiguration following a Ministerial review in the early 1990s, the paper assesses recent changes to the Council's empowering legislation. A number of criticisms that have been made against the Council are also canvassed, along with a brief discussion of the Council's future prospects. The paper concludes that, while questions remain about the extent to which an entity like the Alcohol Advisory Council can remain truly independent from government, it is a model that usefully brings together a critical mass of people working to minimise the harm associated with alcohol, and sharpens the focus of debates in both the public and political arenas about alcohol's effects in the community.