Well every business wants to have return business, every business wants to have patrons who feel comfortable in the venue and can enjoy themselves in a safe environment. So to have people there that are intoxicated to the extent that it becomes a problem for other patrons in the venue or for staff and it becomes untenable, then that is certainly a detriment to my business, it’s not seen as a positive factor within the business. So to deal with patrons that are becoming intoxicated, the earlier the better, obviously, and it has certainly improved over the years that I’ve been in the industry, which is about 35 years now. I’ve certainly seen a great improvement in the type of patronage that we see in hotels now, women and families are more comfortable coming into the venues, and I think that all of that has been as a result of responsible service of alcohol being introduced into the industry.

It’s an important part of our business. A lot of the ways that you define your business is some of the things that materialise in policies and procedures such as RSA. We have a moral obligation as well as a corporate obligation to the way we dispense alcohol on our premises. Quite often people can misinterpret RSA for lack of or non-profitability, where in fact sometimes it can really help with the bottom line. People feel a lot safer in the environment, and in general you need to understand the trends. People are generally taking far more conscious approach to their wellbeing and their health so therefore they’re decreasing in the amounts of alcohol they’re consuming in general, and I think as a business we need to adjust to the trend, so if that is the trend we need to deal with that.

So what we are finding is that possibly people, while they are drinking less, they’re more particular about what they drink. So harm minimisation for us is more than just a set of rules and guidelines; it’s something that we truly believe in; it’s like our contribution to health and wellbeing, to the general community. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we want to discourage people drinking; in fact, we want to encourage more people to come and drink on our premises, but do so in moderation.

We’ve always been responsible—my background is that we’d regard ourselves as very responsible hoteliers, and what’s more we aim up the market; in other words, we’re a food-based business. Being food based, we’re looking to attract males and females, females are half the market, right throughout Australia; hotels that aim exclusively at the male market are denying themselves half the available market. Girls these days are happy to come to a hotel providing it’s well managed, it looks nice, it serves high quality drinks, high quality food, and the management of the hotel is such that they don’t feel in any way threatened. What’s more, we’d like to aim up the market because that’s a comfortable part of the market for us to operate in and it’s a large market, so that means that our emphasis on good behaviour has been there right from the start. I’ve been in the business about 30 years now and I’ve been able to observe over a long period the advantage of having that approach.

What this training does is fit very well with our long-established attitude on a good way to run the business to minimise harm, to attract great customers, and very often customers who do not want to behave well are not comfortable in our hotel.