Bills

Controlled Substances (Youth Treatment Orders) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 3 November 2016.)

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (10:31): I am very pleased to speak on the Controlled Substances (Youth Treatment Orders) Amendment Bill. On a number of occasions, I have identified to this house my utter abhorrence at the scourge that drugs wreak on our young people. We have seen in recent months reams of evidence about the particular impact of ice in so many of our communities.

Crystal methamphetamine, base, speed, amphetamines—all these stimulants are taken by so many of our young people in recreational situations, thinking they will have no effect on their long-term wellbeing when the reality is it destroys lives. People get addicted to these drugs without even realising what is going on.

People under the age of 18 in particular are at a stage where their brains have not developed and so are at a point where, even without the introduction of amphetamines, their risk-taking behaviours are higher and their understanding of consequences is lower. Introducing drugs like ice into the situation puts them at enormous risk. It destroys long-term cognitive function. It enormously impacts on their lives and physiology in the long term and, in the immediate term, on their families.

Parents come to a situation where they do not even understand the child in front of them because they are so changed by the stimulants and drugs they are on. There is the impact of course on communities where people are so often led to engage in crimes or other risk-taking behaviours with disastrous impacts on those communities.

Undertaking every action we can to ensure that our young people are not under the sway of the drugs that are destroying their lives is an absolute priority for this parliament and a priority that this party, the Liberal Party, has identified for a great many years because ice is not that new a phenomenon. I remember working with the Australian National Council on Drugs when I was working with the federal government and going to meetings with the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy in 2006 and 2007, as we were identifying a national ice strategy.

This is something that the Howard government, in its Tough on Drugs campaign, took very seriously, occasionally possibly even with support from some wise attorneys-general around the country. However, that has not always been the case. I will be appalled if the Labor Party votes against this bill, which will go so far towards ensuring that young people are not left behind and left to the control of these drugs.

There has been some suggestion that youth treatment orders are inappropriate, but the fact is that we have research. The Australian National Council on Drugs published research in 2006, so there is long-established research that identifies that mandatory treatment orders can be as effective as voluntary treatment orders. It is a fallacy to suggest otherwise, particularly for a young person. We must take every opportunity to get them off drugs.

Some people have said this bill is harsh on young people. I say that sometimes you have to provide tough love and sometimes you have to do what is in the best interests of the child. If this measure is what it is going to take to get that young person off drugs, then that is absolutely to be commended. I commend the shadow attorney-general for introducing it to the parliament. I think the Liberal Party is on the right track as we seek to get our young people off drugs.

It is up to the Labor Party—the government—to show it is not a soft touch on drugs to ensure that our young people have the best opportunities in life and that our communities are safe from the harm that these drugs wreak.

Mr BELL (Mount Gambier) (10:36): I rise to support the bill. In my time as member for Mount Gambier, the second biggest issue I have faced is ice in regional communities. Ice in the South-East is a gateway between Victoria, Melbourne and Adelaide—a thoroughfare, for want of a better word. We have seen a rise in the use of the ice methamphetamine. What is deeply concerning to me is the prevalence of this hideous drug in our sporting community.

Most people who have grown up in the country realise that sporting clubs are the backbone of country communities. Ice has infiltrated many sporting clubs. The latest research reports also indicate the number of tradies who are using ice on a regular basis. From a country perspective, that is a potent combination because many of our sporting players are also tradespeople, and this drug is certainly having an effect there.

I would be absolutely dismayed if the government did not support this bill because, although this certainly is not the answer in its entirety, it is a small step towards doing everything we can as a parliament to put our partisan issues aside and focus on the people of South Australia. A mandatory detention order does have a place and can be used effectively as part of a suite of ways of tackling this issue. The Minister for Police and Correctional Services was in Mount Gambier just last week and held a round table. For some reason, the Minister for Health and Substance Abuse was not there, but I wish she had been because she would have heard stories of how this drug is affecting my community.

The forum was very well chaired and people were very respectful, and I think the minister did an outstanding job in drawing out the issues from the participants in that round table. It came out loud and clear that the issues faced by regional areas around addressing the ice epidemic are around lack of coordination. People do not know what services are actually available. Services between themselves do not know what other services are providing and are often competing for funding or allocation of funding from different buckets of money, so there is a lack of collaboration.

For parents coming in, they do not know who to go to, who to turn to or which services can help them, so it was loud and clear that we need a one-stop shop, an area where people can go to and either have those services in that physical building or certainly an early contact point. But what also came out was the need for rehabilitation services, both detox and rehabilitation. It is not just rehabilitation of the person who is using ice. This drug affects families, friends and work colleagues and the rehabilitation centre really needs to take into consideration those support networks that wrap around the person affected by ice intake.

If you watched ABC last night—it was a little bit late, probably about 11 o'clock at night—Ice Wars was on TV and it showed a young man who ran away from the police who were staking out a known drug dealer's place of residence. When they tracked that young person down, they had got out of prison only the day before, but the powerful part for me was talking to the mother. The mother said, 'I feel helpless.'

They showed photos of a young boy you would not recognise as the person using ice now. He was a young boy, who at the age of five would take $5 down to the police station if he found it because he did not want the person who had lost the money to be out of pocket, now turning into a person unrecognisable to his mother who had lost all hope in getting her son off this insidious drug.

It reminds me of Karen and Maurie Judd, who came into my office when I had only been a member for probably three or four months. They had lost their son, Jay, to drugs and one of the powerful statements that she said to me was that his spiral out of control was known for a long time and that the one thing she wished was that the authorities were tougher at the start. Had there been a mandatory treatment order in place, it may have—we obviously cannot know the outcome by going back in time—saved his life. They were very powerful words for somebody who has lived through the living hell of ice addiction through someone they love—their son.

One of the things that came out very clearly from their experiences was that they thought early intervention was the best idea going forward in terms of early treatment. I am hoping the government does support this youth treatment order because it needs to be one of the tools available to support our young people, and the word 'youth' being in there is paramount to this bill. It has to be one of the tools available to help people who are addicted to ice whose lives are spinning out of control and, without a mandatory detention order, possibly would not recognise that they even have an issue at an early stage.

Why do we let it go through to crimes being committed, normally escalating in scale, as they become more and more desperate for the drug before we take some intervention into the root cause, which is the drug ice? I commend the shadow attorney-general for bringing this bill to our party room. I cannot see how we need to be playing politics on this issue. This is about the youth of South Australia. This is one of the tools that our authorities need. I am hoping, with all sincerity, that people on the other side, who have not made up their minds, will support this bill.

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (10:45): I support and congratulate the shadow minister. In the absence of the shadow minister, I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

The house divided on the second reading:

Ayes 19

Noes 24

Majority 5

Second reading thus negatived.