



She said researchers didn't even have the most ''basic information'' about whether alcohol use in NSW was atypical, whether it was higher than expected or desired or different from one community to the next. ''It's quite a bizarre situation when you consider it's a regulated substance and nobody's actually watching how much of it is being sold,'' she said.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects national data using tax information but does not break it down by state and territory, let alone by suburb or local government area.

The states and territories routinely collected alcohol sales data until 1996 when the High Court ruled they could no longer levy taxes on alcohol.

Only Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory continued to collect the information, and have since signed up with the ACT to the federally funded National Alcohol Sales Data Project run by Professor Chikritzhs.

The Victorian Justice Department is considering whether to restart data collection, potentially leaving NSW - which is represented on the project advisory committee - South Australia and Tasmania as the recalcitrant states.

Ms Chikritzhs said the impediment was the reluctance of the liquor industry to participate.

''I think there's concern which is yet to be fully mitigated that it's an unfair imposition on the industry,'' she said. ''And I suspect there are quarters of the industry that resist quite strongly governments having more knowledge about what's happening with their industry.''

Meanwhile, public health expert Dr Alex Wodak said he would ''wager a huge amount of money that the word 'tough' would be used in the cabinet announcement 20 times and there would not be a single evidence-based recommendation''.

The NSW government held wide-reaching alcohol summits in 2003 and last year but almost no progress was made in the intervening years, an analysis by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE) found.

Just 19 of 107 preventive recommendations were adopted, mostly ''awareness-raising'' measures with little evidence of their effectiveness. The 2003 summit was instigated by then premier Bob Carr.

FARE policy director Caterina Giorgi said that knowledge about what could work in relation to alcohol abuse had grown in 10 years yet the challenge was making governments rely on evidence and break away from the hotels and alcohol lobby.

Dr Wodak said it was clear the government ''has outsourced alcohol policy to the liquor industry and that's really why we have the Thomas Kellys and Daniel Christies''.

Premier Barry O'Farrell and Hospitality Minister George Souris declined to comment.