Dr Michala Kowalski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at NDARC, UNSW Sydney, with a focus on alcohol policy, cannabis policy, evolving drug markets, and harm reduction. Here, she writes about a recently published research paper about alcohol retail lobbying in Australia.

Lobbying, or the attempt to ‘influence the decision-making of a government or opposition representative’ on behalf of members, organisations, or another third party, is part of the democratic process. Democratic governments, such as ours, regularly attempt to engage their constituents on policy proposals to hear how they might be affected by policy changes; this extends to business owners, clubs and entrepreneurs, as well as citizens and residents. While many lobbying activities may be unremarkable, they are often of interest to policy researchers, and in the case of alcohol policies, health researchers alike.  

My co-author Claire Wilkinson and I recently took a look at the lobbying activities of not-for-profit alcohol retailers in Australia. Claire has long been interested in not-for-profits in substance retail. My own interest in not-for-profits in substance related markets was sparked while attending the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs conference in Adelaide in 2023. Beau Kilmer gave a fantastic keynote presentation on possible models for a cannabis market, in which he presented research framing not-for-profits as actors who might be preferable to for-profit actors when it comes to selling possibly addictive substances. Claire and I got to talking about this after listening to the presentation and figured that we, as alcohol policy researchers in Australia, were well positioned to study this specific question: do not-for-profit retailers behave differently to for-profits retailers of addictive substances? Australia has a large not-for-profit alcohol retail sector structured around community clubs that exists alongside an even larger for-profit alcohol retail sector structured around hotels (more commonly known as pubs) and bars.

We collected all the publicly available submissions made to parliamentary inquiries by the clubs’ sector and hotels’ sector for inquiries that: 1) mentioned alcohol or liquor in their terms of reference, and 2) had received submissions from both clubs and hotels. Across a 13-year period from 2009 to 2021, there were 22 submissions from 11 inquiries that met these criteria, and we conducted two separate analyses – content and thematic – of the extracted data.

Overall, we found a very high degree of overlap in the policy positions of not-for-profit and for-profit alcohol retails sectors. The peak bodies representing both clubs and hotels came out against policies that would restrict alcohol advertising and reduce access to venues. At the same time, both sectors supported policies that would restrict other kinds of actors, like restaurants or retailers that don’t currently have an alcohol licence, from selling alcohol; as well as other measures that could reduce alcohol consumption such as promoting public education towards cultural changes around substance use and increased patron monitoring. It is worth noting that public education campaigns such as these have not been found to be particularly effective to-date; and that patron monitoring, while thought to be useful, is difficult to implement, rendering it less effective than other measures such as reducing advertising and access to alcohol.

The only meaningful difference we found in their behaviour was the difference in the kind of justifications they put forward for their policy positions. While hotels’ representatives based their arguments in ‘good business’ practices, clubs’ representatives emphasised the impact on the ‘community’ – in other words, restrictions on the club industry would eliminate a source of revenue for community.

We concluded that when it comes to lobbying through formal parliamentary processes, not-for-profit alcohol retailers weren’t inherently likely to behave any differently to for-profit alcohol retailers. We are interested in future research and other studies that would address other aspects of retail behaviour, such as sales practices, marketing practices, discounting practices, and engagement practices with clientele, that would similarly compare not-for-profit retailers to other kinds of retailers.