[First filed: Oct 11, 2010 @ 14:03]
As part of the Labor party’s efforts to get us all to drink at the Labor Club liquor law reforms everyone who ever serves alcohol under a liquor licence will be required, from 1 December 2010, to have a Responsible Service of Alcohol certificate.
Because I sometimes volunteer behind the bar at the Canberra Musician’s Club this meant I too needed to get certificated.
In fact hundreds of people across the ACT are going to have to get this grand looking piece of paper if they want to continue running small scale social events. (Or give up and just go to the Labor Club).
So here’s what’s involved.
In my case the CMC was organising and paying for my training. So an email arrived telling me to present at CIT’s Reid campus on a Tuesday evening with a driver’s licence and medicare card or birth certificate.
With some uncertainty we found the right room and started filling out paperwork and verifying our identity.
There then followed four hours of information tailored pretty much to working in the Labor Club based on slightly dodgy assumptions. It can be summarised thusly:
- — Don’t give people who are drunk more booze.
— Offer to call them a taxi
There was a bit of role playing, mostly about how to divert anger.
There was a suggestion that if a taxi won’t take the gibbering heaving drunk perhaps offer to call a friend or family member.
(Imagine for a moment the reaction of your friends or family on getting that phone call).
The instructor went sort of misty eyed at one point when talking about drugs with alcohol and seemed regretful that he’d never been invited to that sort of party.
At one point members of the class started asking pointy questions about the internal contradictions of the course material and an angry irishman shouted “Fer gawd’s sake just shut up so we can get out of this farce”.
After four hours with a break for dinner we had a test which mostly seemed to involve repeating the two above points in different combinations.
Having completed this in about 10 minutes I wondered if I’d grossly misunderstood the nature of the test but really didn’t want to be there any longer.
The above certificate demonstrates that I had in fact understood it.
I’m really not sure how this process is going to make us safer, anyone who’s been to a decent party will start the course ahead of the material.
It is going to make a lot of money for CIT though.
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