Policy context

Policy context in Australia

Responsibility for alcohol policy is shared across all levels of government. Government frameworks and strategies outline evidence-informed policies, programs and other interventions to reduce the risks of alcohol use.

The National Drug Strategy 2017-2026 describes a nationally agreed harm-minimisation approach to reducing the harm arising from alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use.²² The strategy describes priority actions for alcohol and focusses on effective demand reduction, supply reduction and harm reduction strategies.

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ Drug Strategy 2014-2019 was a sub-strategy of the National Drug Strategy (2010-2015). The overarching aim of the Strategy was to optimise the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by preventing and mitigating the harms associated with alcohol and other drug use on individuals, families and the broader community.²³ Currently, it is unclear whether efforts will be made to renew the Strategy.

The National Alcohol Strategy 2019-2028, a sub-strategy under the National Drug Strategy, builds on existing efforts and responses to prevent and minimise harms from alcohol including as a cause of cancer among individuals, families and communities.²⁴

Key priorities include:

The National Preventive Health Strategy 2021-2030 outlines the overarching, long-term approach to prevention in Australia.²⁵ The aims of the Strategy include all Australians having the best start in life, all Australians living in good health and wellbeing for as long as possible, health equity being achieved for priority populations, and increasing investment in prevention. The strategy considers action on the commercial determinants of health as being critical to establishing effective approaches to preventive health.

The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2021-2031 provides an overarching policy framework for Indigenous health and wellbeing. It is the first national health plan to address the priority reforms and health targets outlined in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. With a focus on prevention, one of the key priority areas of the Health Plan specifically addresses alcohol use and refers to delivering targeted, needs-based and community driven actions to prevent alcohol and other drug related harm.²⁶

National alcohol guidelines

The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has developed Australian guidelines to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol. These guidelines include recommendations on limits of alcohol for low risk of harm for different population groups. The guidelines state that

“to reduce the risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury, healthy men and women should drink no more than 10 standard drinks a week to cut the lifetime risk of harm from alcohol-related disease or injury and no more than 4 standard drinks on any one day to reduce the risk of alcohol-related injury”.²¹

Community support for action on alcohol

There is strong community support for government action on reducing harms from alcohol use. Seven in ten Australians agree that more needs to be done by governments to reduce the harms caused by alcohol; eight in ten Australians are concerned about the impact alcohol is having on individuals, families and communities; and two in three agree that Australia has a problem with alcohol.²⁷

Australians are strongly supportive of evidence-based policies to prevent harms from alcohol. For example, 77% of Australians support restricting alcohol advertising on television during times when children are likely to be watching, including during live sport broadcasts.²⁸ Over three in four (76%) agree that alcohol companies should not be allowed to collect their data online and use it to target them with alcohol marketing.²⁷ While 72% of Australians support the inclusion of health warning labels on all alcohol products that raise awareness of the harms caused by alcohol.²⁷

Evidence shows that policies with the potential to affect an individual’s own behaviours by targeting factors such as price and availability have received the least support when compared to policies which hold no direct impact on an individual’s alcohol use.²⁸ It was found that increasing alcohol taxation to fund health and treatment costs received greater support than simply increasing alcohol prices, which is consistent with other study findings demonstrating greater support for taxation when applied towards harm-reduction initiatives.^28,29

Alcohol policy impact on cancer mortality

Australian research provides some evidence that alcohol policy changes can have an impact on cancer mortality.³⁰ The liberalisation of liquor licences in the 1960s was subsequently associated with significant increases in mortality from head and neck, lung, colorectal and overall cancers in men, and head and neck and colorectal cancers in women.²⁹ The introduction of random breath testing had a protective impact on cancer mortality among men and women.²⁹ More broadly, there is clear evidence that reductions in per-capita alcohol consumption lead to reductions in cancer and policies that increase price or reduce availability tend to reduce per-capita consumption.^30,31,32

Alcohol industry influence on policy development

Those representing the interests of the alcohol industry have been known to use the same tactics as other harmful industries, such as the tobacco industry, by casting doubt on legitimate science, direct lobbying, political donations, reputation management, funding supportive research, creating front organisations to conduct research, attacking public health researchers, framing issues in ways that misrepresent the problem, and funding disinformation campaigns.³³ In 2022-23 alcohol companies and their lobby groups paid at least $1.3 million in political donations to the major Australian political parties,³⁴ and alcohol companies have been shown to have played a significant role in lobbying against evidence-based health measures such as pregnancy warning labels.^35,36

Australians are concerned about the alcohol industry’s activities and are supportive of measures to limit the policy influence of alcohol companies. For example, 65% of Australians are concerned about the influence the alcohol industry and its lobbyists have over governments, while 64% support excluding alcohol companies from being involved in development of public health policy in Australia.²⁷