LICENSING LEGISLATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3113, 11 February 1909, Page 5

LICENSING LEGISLATION.

SYSTEMS OP VICTORIA, NEW SOUTH WALES AND NEW ZEALAND COMPARED. VICTORIAN SYSI EM FAVOURED.

Received February 10, 6.30 p.m. PERTH, February 10. Mr Carson's report on the licers ; ng legislation ot Victoria, Now South Walts and New Zealand has tee-i prsssntej to Parliament. The report says that the Victorian sys'.em thoigh bureaucratic in form, has proved an admirable work in machine, closing up the worst houses. Thesa ha e to go from districts where licensed houses are thickest, while under the New South Wdle3 system of i-'al option, reduction is carried i-- districts where there are so few pir.lic houses that o-ie more or less hardly aflhets the temperance or intempara 'ce of the community. As regards New Zealand, Mr Carson acknowledges the rapid strides made by the No-License movement, and admits

the prospects of the licensed trade being wiped out altogether at no very distant date. He claims, however, that the system is still on trial. Hitherto the experiment has been confined to comparatively small towns, and he considers that not until one of tha four complete metropolitan areas, with all its suburbs, comes under No-Licence can the experiment be regarded as having been thoroughly teste3. He admits that in NoLicense towns there is less open drunkenness, and that the removal of the open means of temptation tended to wean some men from the old habit. On the other side, the evidence, he says, is conclusive that the aggregate quantity of liquor consumed is practically unaffected, that much drinking still goes on in No-

License districts, that the closed bar has taken the place of the open bar; that there is more sacret drinking and more 'drinking in the houses of the people; that were a license district is contiguous to a No-License district, much drinking precipitates from the latter into the former; that the strength of the No-License vote is accounted for by the entnU3iasm and splendid organisation of the temperance parties, and the women's vote influenced by women's natural social reforms. It is pointed out that the concrete results of the New Zealand system does not compare favourably ■with the Victorian system. After a three year's strenuous No-License campaign about 150 houses will be closed throughout the Dominion, and not the worst houses at that. More has been done in Victoria in eighteen months, with this supreme advantage that the worst houses have been closed, while reduction has proceeded steadily by a judicial process.

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