Supermarket booze rules disputed
A small-town supermarket has become the latest battleground for setting limits for displaying alcohol for sale.
Dannevirke New World’s liquor licence was granted with a defined floor plan for alcohol display, but an Alcohol Regulatory and Licensing Authority declined to make rules about where shelves had to be placed, and which way they should face.
Manawatu medical officer of health Rob Weir appealed against a district licensing committee decision two years ago, and then again from an authority decision given in May.
Weir’s lawyer, Chris Browne, told a judge in the High Court at Wellington yesterday that the committee and the authority had the power not just to set the ‘‘footprint’’ of the single area of the store to be used for displaying alcohol, but also to impose other conditions, including whether alcohol could be displayed on the ends of the aisles facing the rest of the shop.
It could also have made conditions for what could be done within the single area for selling alcohol.
The case is the latest attempt to refine the way alcohol licences are controlled since the law changed in 2012.
Last week, the same judge, Justice Karen Clark, heard a case in which a Wellington medical officer of health appealed in a bid to have closing times brought forward from 11pm to 9pm on Friday and Saturdays for a Liquor King store on Kent Terrace in Wellington.
It was an attempt to stop alcohol-related harm to people trying to supplement more expensive alcohol in the Courtenay Place party zone with a cheaper offlicence alternative, especially spirits and ready-mixed drinks.
The judge reserved her decision on that case.
The Dannevirke hearing is to continue for a second day today.
The new law particularly tried to control supermarkets having alcohol displays near their entrances and the checkouts.
Iain Thain, lawyer for Dannevirke New World, said it was one of a series of test cases being used to refine the rules.
He argued that, within the area approved for alcohol, there was no constraint on how the store chose to arrange that space.
The approval process did not include limiting the configuration of the single area for alcohol, in the way Weir suggested.
Dannevirke New World had an alcohol area in one corner of what was not a particularly large supermarket, Thain said.
Supermarkets can sell beer, mead, and wine, containing not more than 15 per cent alcohol.