Controlled Substances (Commercial Offences) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 2 July 2015.)

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (16:15): The Controlled Substances (Commercial Offences) Amendment Bill will in fact make it substantially easier, if my memory serves me correctly, for us to obtain convictions against some of our most serious drug dealers who, up until now, have been able to use technicalities. This bill would close those technicalities.

I think it was only a couple of hours ago that I was listening to the Leader of the Opposition talking about the dreadful scourge of what drugs are doing in our community, and I noticed the member for Wright talking about the valuable contributions that our new police commissioner Grant Stevens has made. Of course, one of the taskforces with which he has been most closely associated has been in terms of serious and organised crime and dealing with the drug situation.

The Controlled Substances (Commercial Offences) Amendment Bill was brought to the house by the member for Hartley with a view to making it more feasible to have some of those who perpetuate these crimes against our community, and against our young people in particular, locked up so that they can no longer do those crimes. As I recall, the nature of the offences, when there is a series of offences, can be put together, as it were, so that they can be considered in light of other offences that have been committed and more serious charges can therefore apply.

It is a historical fact that, for many years, South Australia was unfortunately seen as a light touch when it came to drugs. Many of the criminal operations that operate in this sphere took the opportunities provided by things such as the fact that you could grow 10 plants before you were having more than an expiable offence to ply their trade and to take advantage of the vulnerable people in our community who might want to sample their deadly wares.

I am sure the Minister for Transport would remember, because he and I are of an age, when we would have been starting to drive. If we were going to visit friends interstate, then we would certainly, with our South Australian number plates and potentially a P-plate above that, have been the target for any interstate law enforcement operations on the highways who would have seen us as a high prospect of potentially having something inappropriate in our cars.

I remember being stopped about three or four times in my teens. Fortunately, I had a clean bill of health, I am pleased to report to the house, because I was never a drug trafficker and I was never somebody who carried drugs in my car across state lines but, unfortunately, because of the nature of the laws that existed in South Australia for a long period of time, there was a significant number, in the view of interstate police officers, of P-plated cars from South Australia that were likely to be a reasonable prospect of picking up somebody carrying drugs.

I am pleased that more details of the bill are now available to my memory. Particularly, the Controlled Substances (Commercial Offences) Amendment Bill provides a maximum penalty of $500,000 or life in prison for the new offence, and that offence involves carrying on a business involving trafficking, manufacture, cultivation or sale of drugs. As I identified before, the offence available now must be considered as an individual, specific instance of offending, and the totality of the offender's offending cannot be taken into account. This bill will change that. The Supreme Court recommended that:

…the merits of adopting in South Australia a provisional act section 5 clause 1 of the Drugs Misuse Act 1987 (Qld) deserves the attention of the legislature.

That was R v Faehrmann, R v Moore, and R v Price-Austin 2014. I think that this will, in fact, create efficiencies within the justice system, as well as ensuring that the appropriate penalties are in place for those who, up until now, have been using the loopholes of having their crimes considered individually and specifically, rather than in totality. They have effectively been able to get away with what is little short of murder, because that is what their trade does: it kills people; it tears families apart. It is a scourge on our society that we need to do everything we can to stop.

Our police work very hard and they are doing a tremendous job. As the minister has identified on a number of occasions—and I thoroughly agree with him—we have the highest public confidence in a police force of any force in Australia. Given some of the things I have seen overseas, that would put us very high worldwide. But, the police can only do the jobs they can do with the laws that they have. There are some things in our laws which, for various reasons over the years, have been allowed to develop which create what might seem to be strange and different consequences for different types of activity.

We have drug laws, for example, that have not been changed in years, specifically in relation to the personal use and consumption of cannabis. Up to 100 grams of cannabis attracts a fine of $300, which is expiable. It is a hangover from the time of the 10 plants, and it is utterly—

Mr van Holst Pellekaan: You have 29 minutes to go.

Mr GARDNER: I think the member for Stuart is wrong; I think I have four minutes to go—it is utterly inappropriate, given that that is an amount of cannabis on which you could make over $1,000 if you were to sell it amongst your contacts. That leaves opportunities for a business model to be created where people, with fear of getting nothing more than an expiation notice for carrying a personal quantity of cannabis, are actually able to make thousands of dollars a week from selling drugs. That is just one example of the sorts of things we have.

If you are one day late in paying your car registration, you are liable for $1,000 and pursuit for significant liability. If you are carrying enough cannabis to sell for thousands of dollars, then you are up for a $300 fine. Those are the sorts of things that need to be addressed. Serious crime needs to be dealt with in a serious manner. The member for Hartley's bill will go a long way towards that. It is not a very complex bill—it is four pages long, I am pleased to inform the house—so I am sure that all members will have the opportunity to get their heads around it. It has been on the Notice Paper for a little while, so, with the assistance of the members speaking today and being provided with a bit more detail about the bill, all members should now have no excuse not to be fully informed about the merits of the bill and its consequences.

I know the member for Stuart is somebody who takes these issues very seriously. As the shadow minister, he did a lot of good work in this area and has put a number of things on the agenda that are worthy of further consideration, and we will talk a bit more about them later. Fundamentally, this is an issue that needs more attention than it gets from the government. This is the sort of level of crime that needs to be suitably addressed for the safety of the community, and in particular, for those young people who are currently often the targets of those seeking to pedal drugs in our community.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (16:23): It gives me great pleasure, on behalf of the people of Stuart, to rise to support the member for Hartley in this work. Just to pick up where the member for Morialta finished, this is really straightforward; this is really common sense—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just before you continue, member for Stuart, the table has informed me you have already spoken on this on 2 July, so I am sad to inform you that it is going to be the member for Morphett's turn. Has he spoken yet?

Dr McFETRIDGE: No, I have not. I checked with the table staff, and I definitely have not spoken on this particular one.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: We are going to let you go back to 10 minutes. We are going to reset the clock, so as not to deprive ourselves.

Dr McFETRIDGE (Morphett) (16:24): Only 10 minutes. Thank you, Deputy Speaker. The member for Hartley has put forward a number of pieces of legislation to this place and each one of them has been an impressive piece of common-sense legislation, yet we see, again and again, the government and the adversarial system at its worst.

They just deny, deflect and they will not cooperate in any way with sensible legislation that is suggested by anybody else but themselves. This is another piece of very sensible legislation. The Controlled Substances (Commercial Offences) Amendment Bill 2015, as the member for Morialta has said, and other members have said, is not a complex piece of legislation. It is fairly straightforward. It talks about the trafficking of drugs and it talks about the sale and manufacture of controlled drugs.

Can I tell you that, having been involved in the veterinary profession where we are dealing with S8 drugs and drugs of dependency, I had my practice broken into a number of times—the grilles ripped off the windows, holes smashed through brick and timber walls to get through to the safes and things. People are desperate to get out there and get drugs, and the extent to which businesses such as my veterinary practice have to secure these drugs emphasises to me that we need to have systems of not only protecting law-abiding citizens but also controlling the substances that are out there that these people are wanting to acquire.

Apart from the drugs that I used in my veterinary practice, there are many legitimate drugs that people want to use for illegitimate reasons. There are many other drugs which are completely illegitimate—illicit drugs—and this bill aims to bring into 2015 some very straightforward, common-sense measures that will help deter people who want to get involved in the drug scene.

Why anybody would want to get into the drug scene with the stories you hear on the radio and the vision you see on television. The number of documentaries I have watched and sat through; and the number of newspaper stories I have read, it is tragic and, can I say, it is even more tragic for the parents of young people who get involved in the drug scene and get hooked on drugs.

Obviously the common one at the moment is ice. I had a chap in my office just the other day who was at his wit's end. This young fellow—the son of this man who came to see me—is from a very well-educated family yet he is hooked on ice. The big problem for the parents was that this young person had nowhere to go. We have to have somewhere to go not only for the addicts who become addicted to these drugs, but let's try and stop the problem in the first place, let's try and control the problem. This is about dealing with controlled substances which are out of control. It is an oxymoron, isn't it—controlled substances—and we see their widespread use.

What we need to do with this piece of very sensible legislation is increase the penalties, and increase the ability of the police to go about and do what they want to do—what they are very good at—but they need the help of this legislature here. We have to make sure that people who are caught are then penalised, and there is also the deterrent of significant penalties. While we see new legislation or amendments brought into this place with penalties that are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and gaol terms of ten, 15 and 25 years, we very rarely see those maximum penalties applied. That does not mean to say that we should not be increasing the opportunity for our legal system and our judges to implement the maximum penalty and we consider that that maximum penalty should be increased.

In this case a person who carries on a business that involves trafficking in controlled drugs is guilty of an offence, a maximum penalty of $500,000, or imprisonment for life or both. The need to be able to look at what these people are doing with their illicit gains is something we are all trying to work on, and certainly the confiscation of criminals' assets is something that I personally support, but let's put the deterrents in place before we have to go and then retrospectively grab people's possessions.

I should put on the record that there are many cases where there is collateral damage. The children and the families of these idiots who get involved in the drug scene whose possessions we would like to grab become the collateral damage. I think if we can have some system in place so that we can be fair about directing our punitive approach, directing our preventative approach, directing our legislative approach at people who are wanting to become or are involved in this drug scene, then this sort of legislation should be part of that approach. The need to have members of parliament bring this legislation in is, to me, an indication of the fact that in the past our legislation has not been working, so we need to look at it, fine-tune it and amend it. This is a straightforward amendment.

I do not know how we can measure the cost to the public—not only the financial cost but the social cost of drugs—because it is just so wide. The number of people, whether they are businesspeople, like I said, being broken into and robbed, whether it is people who are being attacked by ice addicts, or whether it is our doctors and nurses in our EDs being attacked by people on drugs—there are social ramifications. Then, for every ED admission for someone who is on drugs, it is about $1,700 I understand to process them, so that is the financial cost.

Even the most hardened economic rationalist cannot argue with the fact of getting in and making sure that we are putting deterrents in place and reducing the problem through the deterrence and detection of perpetrators, and then also having systems in place for rehabilitation so that the people who are unfortunately involved in the drug world are not kept on this downward spiral of drug dependency and the effects on their health.

In fact, as just a bit of an aside, a number of years ago I visited a drug injecting room in Amsterdam. The people working in that room said to me that this is not so much about getting people off their drugs and stopping them using drugs, it is about maintaining their health, because once they get on these drugs, their health goes down and down. They end up with all these other comorbidities and many of them die, unfortunately. The cost to the health system, to social services, to these individuals, their families and the community is just enormous. I keep emphasising that.

There is a need to emphasise that this legislation is sensible and straightforward. It was put up by the member for Hartley, a very good member of this place who will be a terrific addition for many years to come. This piece of legislation should be taken up by this government. We should add an extra deterrent and extra penalties so that, when people are caught, they are going to suffer the consequences. When do you stop being responsible for the consequences of your actions? That is what I am trying to say. You should not, unless unfortunately you are high on drugs, and even then, is it the drunk's defence or is it the drugged-out dopehead's defence? I do not know; I am not a lawyer, and by that I am boasting, not apologising.

I look at the legal system we have and I look for justice and fair outcomes for people. I tell you: if we need to improve, increase and expand the penalties that are put in place, giving our police and judiciary the opportunity to detect and deter these people who are dispensing, selling and making millions out of controlled substances, if we can do something about that, we should be doing it. We should not be arguing about it in this place; we should be taking the legislation on its merit and we should be making sure that people like the member for Hartley who put this sensible legislation up are able to achieve what they want to do and that is have good outcomes for their constituents.

The member for Hartley did not come into this place for any reason other than he wanted to make the constituents of Hartley feel that they are well represented in this place, better than ever before, in my opinion, other than Joe Scalzi, who we remember as the lion of Hartley. The constituents in Hartley, like my constituents in Morphett and everybody's constituents in this place, want to feel safe in their homes, safe in the streets and safe in their communities. How will we do that? By giving the police and the judiciary the tools they need for deterrence to be able to stop these people doing what they are doing and control substances.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Whetstone.