Help available to licensees
If a licensee wishes to meet to discuss their application, representatives of the Chief Health Officer are available. Such meetings are common.
At the meeting, representatives of the Chief Health Officer are pleased to hear about the vision for the intended liquor application and any other information the applicant wishes to share. The representatives are able to discuss general concerns based on features of the application that research indicates may have the potential to be higher risk for harm and, where appropriate, share strategies that other licensees have put in place to minimise the potential for alcohol-related harm.
At the meeting, representatives of the Chief Health Officer will not provide specific advice about an application or tell a licensee what they should or should not do to get their licence. This is because the Chief Health Officer is not the overall decision maker and there are many other factors that the Licensing Authority considers as part of the decision making process.
Applicants are also often contacted directly for clarification, if it is needed, regarding aspects of their written application.
Is there a list of references used by the Chief Health Officer?
Because the research is always changing and each application is different, there is no generic list of references used by the Chief Health Officer.
However, the Department of Racing, Gaming and Liquor publishes a list of potential references and information sources for licence applicants as part of the Public Interest Assessment Policy. This guide includes a list of reports to which decision makers may have regard.
Regularly used references are included in the list for ease of access to applicants and can be found on the Department of Racing, Gaming and Liquor website (external site).
Why can’t the Chief Health Officer provide some generic guidelines that would be helpful to licensees?
Given that each application and locality is different, it would be impossible to have a set of guidelines which encompasses all harm and ill-health considerations.
This is because each of the application characteristics can interact differently in terms of potential for harm and/or ill-health. For example, some of the characteristics of a venue itself, or the locality, may reduce the risk of harm in one case, while in another situation may increase the risk of harm.
While licence applicants may address each point on a checklist, additional circumstances may be identified, as part of the investigation process, which increase the risk of harm and warrant an Intervention.
Generic guidelines would therefore be of limited use.