Harm minimisation is a set of policies and strategies that Australian governments have used since the 1980s to reduce the harm that people suffer when they use alcohol but also other drugs. The philosophy looks at drug use on a bit of a continuum whereby one end is they would see harmful drug use and at the other end of the continuum they would see not using at all, and the policies and the strategies that are developed are basically trying to move people along that continuum from using harmfully more towards using safely, and it also accepts that for some people abstinence might be attainable, that people might be able to not drink or not use drugs but for a lot of people, and the Australian society, that they will continue to use at some stage, so it accepts that a big majority of the population will use alcohol or other drugs at some stage in their lives, and they want to stop people from developing health and other related harms from that use.

And so in the context of serving alcohol, there’s three main strategies:

• there’s reducing supply, which is about controlling the amount of alcohol that is available

• reducing demand, and that’s encouraging people not to consume or to consume less or to delay consuming

• and another one is reducing harm, and that’s by helping people who do consume to consume in less harmful ways. An example of that is by only selling low alcohol beers at sporting events, providing water at licensed venues, drink-driving laws, which state that people, once they’re above a certain level, then they’ll get ‘you shouldn’t be on the road, you shouldn’t be driving’.