Two Islamic political parties, the United Development Party and the Prosperous Justice Party are looking at introducing a bill in Indonesia to ban drinks containing more than 1% of alcohol.
The bill is currently being deliberated by Indonesia’s House of Representatives with some officials believing that the ban, which is up for a vote in the coming weeks, could do massive damage to the local tourism industry.
Indonesia’s tourism and hospitality sectors have seen uproar from the introduction of the bill as those involved believe this could tear down the tourism trade, which relies heavily on visitors from other countries as their main source of income.
Indonesia Institute president Ross Taylor said:“There’s a lot of people in Indonesia right now taking the view – and they might not be wrong – that if you look at the Western world, and what alcohol is doing to young people, we don’t want that in Indonesia and we want to ban alcohol.
“There’s a lot of discussion in Indonesian society about the damage alcohol does to the wider community. The problem, of course, is if you ban it, you then create this enormous black market and it causes a whole lot of other problems.
“But in Bali, especially, there’s a very strong feeling that it’s the last thing you’d want to do, because if tourists can’t have a beer or wine on the beach, the potential consequences for tourism are going to be very severe indeed.”
Indonesia already has two areas that have complete alcohol bans – the province of Papua and more the port city of Surabaya in Java, where an alcohol ban was introduced in May.
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