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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
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Bills

Statutes Amendment (Drug Offenders) Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 15 November 2017.)

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (11:02): I rise to indicate that I will be the lead speaker, complemented by other of our members, on the Statutes Amendment (Drug Offenders) Bill 2017. This is a bill introduced by the Attorney-General on 15 November to amend the Controlled Substances Act 1984 and the Criminal Assets Confiscation Act 2005.

We are told by the government via the second reading and various press announcements that this bill seeks, firstly, to allow courts, when sentencing, to consider an offence to be aggravated if a child was present at any stage when an offence occurred. We fully support this; it is not before time. The government were clearly embarrassed subsequent to a raid of a property, which received significant publicity, where children were in the environment of a residence that was also a place where drugs were manufactured. It has been too long before this matter has been addressed.

Secondly, the bill allows funds to be paid to the authorities administering the seizure, storage, selling and disposal of assets under the criminal assets confiscation laws before the net funds are paid into the Victims of Crime Fund. It appears on briefings provided by SAPOL and members of the department, and also a representative from the DPP, that there is some concern about the definition of what has to be seized. As I understand it, this amendment is to remedy what is seen as an impossible task by those confiscating assets if in fact they are obliged to take everything.

Frankly, if they come across children's clothing in a premises, I do not think that would require them to have to take that because clearly it would not be used for the benefit of the adults being charged. What I do say is that if it causes some concern, particularly in the area of having to take assets which clearly are not going to provide any productive financial refund on their sale to the fund, then they should not need to take it, and we agree with that. It is also to provide the DPP with discretion under the regulations to decide if it is uneconomic or impractical to seize those assets. That really covers the last issue. Used wisely in the regulatory power, they will not have any problem from the opposition.

The other area really comes back to the Controlled Substances Act and this question of allowing the police to search a person or their vehicle if that person is seen entering or leaving premises which the police may, in respect of the premises, reasonably suspect are being used for the manufacture, distribution or storage of illicit substances or chemicals. That is where we say the government have gone too far.

Our position on this matter is one that is consistent in other recent bills presented to the parliament where we see the police having quite appropriate and adequate powers in other legislation, such as the Summary Offences Act, the Road Traffic Act and the like, where, largely, they have to have reasonable suspicion and they have to justify certain circumstances to obtain warrants. They do have some very, very broad powers, particularly in criminal conduct, and we think that they are adequate and set an appropriate balance.

The government's ask in this part of the bill is without precedent. There is nowhere else in Australia—nowhere—where the police have this power to search anybody or any vehicle going in and out of a suspected property. There is no justification, I suggest, for bringing it and, even on inquiry from some of the wise advisers to government on this, apparently it does not even have any precedents in England. The question is: why are we doing it here in South Australia? Other than SAPOL asking for it, and of course they have a long list (I am sure Mr Speaker would remember his dim, dark time a long time ago as the attorney), and there was always an extensive list.

That is fine; that is part of their advocacy role—to get the best they can for their members because they have an important job to do—but sometimes it is over the fence and a bit out there. Sometimes it is so novel that it is an excellent idea and it is worth pursuing. In this case, it has to have merit to justify it as necessary. I appreciate Mr Illingworth from the DPP coming along to the briefings to outline a number of cases, which he indicated, at first blush, had caused the failing of the successful admissibility of evidence because of police protocol ostensibly not reaching an adequate threshold, which this amendment is attempting to remedy.

One of those cases was actually during the briefing ultimately withdrawn from being relied upon because, clearly, it was not a judgement that had any relevance to what is being asked here. Be that as it may, it was put on the table, disposed of and we went back to some other core cases; in two of those, it would have been easier for the police just to be able to arrest people on the way in or out. We say that even those judgements do not require a threshold change and certainly not a carte blanche in respect of the search of persons or vehicles.

In response to anyone, including the government because it is their usual wont, who wants to say, 'If you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't be worried about us stopping you anywhere, anytime, and searching you, asking questions and requiring you to cooperate with the police,' all that sounds great on FIVEaa, but let's understand here, in this place, about making laws that are important for the protection of people to go along in their ordinary course of their daily work. These are good, decent citizens, including the poor old bloke who might enter a property, unbeknownst to the fact that there is a methamphetamine lab at the back of the house, and goes in to read the water meter.

In our view, it is just not acceptable that it should be a case of, 'Capture everybody. Let's leave it to the discretion of those who are in this space.' I say in this instance that whilst we thank the police of the work they do, and they do a great job in both the investigation and prosecution of cases where people are involved in the storage, distribution, selling or manufacturing of these despicable drugs, please do not ask us to do something that potentially, in the hands of a minority, might be abused—that is, to make laws in those circumstances—because we are not prepared to do it.

Can I also say that this initiative, by legislation, comes to us as part of a suite of recommendations from a ministerial methamphetamine task force summary report, 'Stop the Hurt'. The document is around four pages of text, another four pages of pictures of people's fingernails, and some blank pages. It covers four different areas in which the government proposed to act to assist in dealing with this curse: reducing supply, increasing treatment, increased family support, and community education and capacity building.

First of all, when we asked for the report earlier this year, all we received was this summary—this little picture book of a few pages—as to what was being done. I am appalled at that because apparently ministers Malinauskas and Vlahos went around the state, consulting the world to try to identify how they could best deal with this problem, and this is what they have come up with. We are not allowed to know what anyone else has presented or what the findings were; we just received information on what will happen next from the government in cryptic language. Let me give you an example.

They say: 'Becoming a national leader in regulating the chemicals used to manufacture methamphetamine.' Any South Australian reading that will think, 'Good on the government for doing that. Isn't that a good thing for them to do?' On inquiry, we find that is a complete myth. They are not actually 'becoming a national leader in regulating the chemicals'. They are going along to a national meeting run by a national body that is dealing with that issue. South Australia, along with the states and territories, is attending the meeting, which is being driven by national bodies and national administration.

It is important that we are part of those discussions, particularly where there needs to be some harmonisation of what goes on the list and those sorts of things, so that we can deal with that type of issue, including the storage and distribution of chemicals to build this stuff. That is part of the deal, but do not try to pretend, in this flimsy document, that you are doing something that you are not. That is not acceptable.

The second thing I will say is this: if Mr Malinauskas and Ms Vlahos had one nit of capacity in this area, they would have gone back to the November 2002 report prepared and provided to premier Rann after a comprehensive drug strategy summit. This was one of the first, and I think most commendable, things done by the prior Labor government when it took office in 2002. All the players were there by invitation. I was asked by the then premier to attend and represent the opposition. I had shadow education responsibilities at that stage.

Clearly, whatever we were going to action in relation to dealing with illicit drugs included police, education services and a multitude of other areas, including the then minister Weatherill's responsibility in relation to welfare. There is a surprising similarity between that much thicker report, including its recommendations and outcomes it ultimately presented, and the government's response to the drugs framework tabled on 11 November 2002.

Members should read it. It is a bit of deja vu. You would think that you had woken up tomorrow. Probably the only thing in here that is different is the government's initiative to establish the appointment of Monsignor Cappo's social inclusion unit, which has since bitten the dust. It cost $1 million a year. We received some quite good reports on mental health and other things out of it, but that has been and gone.

The same information is there. The same problem is there. The tragedy is that 15 years later we now have an abbreviated version, which I call an insult, presented to us as what needs to be done. Now the government are starting to get organised. I say 'starting', as it is a glacial pace. They say that they will increase the number of drug dogs and their handlers. I think that the next two we are to get have not been born yet, but, if they have, they have not yet even been trained. Goodness knows when we are going to get them. I saw a very interesting story on television the other night about the retirement of one of the SAPOL dogs who had apparently given many years of service. It was a wonderful story.

You have to wonder. They publish all these wonderful words about what they are going to do, and then you examine it against what is delivered and, sadly, it is incredibly disappointing. That is our position. Aspects of this bill are meritorious and we will support them. Extra search powers are novel, but they will not have our support.

Mr KNOLL (Schubert) (11:16): I rise to support the words of the member for Bragg in relation to the Statutes Amendment (Drug Offenders) Bill 2017. I note that this is one in a series where the government is seeking to undermine the test of reasonable suspicion when it comes to where people should be searched. It is a debate that we have been having in this chamber and in the public over quite a length of time. This is just one in a series of opportunities that the government is seeking to take to try to undermine that principle.

The bill seeks to do the following things. It seeks to allow the court, when sentencing, to consider an aggravated offence to be aggravated if a child was present at any stage when the offence occurred. It seeks to allow police to search a vehicle or a person if the person is seen entering or leaving a premises reasonably suspected of being used for the manufacture, distribution or storage of illicit substances or chemicals. This is the part we have a problem with. I will go into more detail later. It allows funds to be paid to the authorities administering the seizure, storage, selling and disposal of assets under the criminal assets confiscation laws before the net funds are paid to the Victims of Crime Fund. It provides the DPP discretion under regulations to decide if it is uneconomical or impractical to seize certain assets from prescribed drug offenders.

I have provided quite a bit of commentary in recent debates on the scourge of drugs in our society. If I look at the rate of crime in South Australia, thankfully in a lot of cases the rate of crime is coming down. Whether it be offences against a person or offences against property, we have seen broad reductions. Obviously, there are always some outliers to that, but we have seen broad reductions in crime over a long period of time. However, the Report on Government Services that came out earlier this year showed that we have seen a massive increase in the rate of illicit drug offences in South Australia, that we have the highest rate of illicit drug offending in the country and that we sit at around 1,100 offences per 100,000 people or thereabouts.

More than that, what we have seen is a steady and consistent increase in the rate of those offences. It is an area we need to tackle. We have seen the work the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has done in relation to seizures, what types of drugs are more prevalent in which states and whether those drugs are more prevalent in metropolitan Adelaide or whether they have more of a regional focus. It very clearly states that in South Australia we have a problem with methamphetamine. All other states had a greater seizure rate for cannabis, but South Australia was the outlier in the fact that ice took precedence. That is really where our issue lies in the specific set of circumstances in South Australia.

I then look at the government's process in trying to deal with that and the member for Bragg talked quite appropriately about the 'Stop the Hurt' campaign and about their rushed process to put together something to make it look like they were doing something. It was something that minister Malinauskas announced with great fanfare, with the member for Taylor standing by his side. Interestingly, the member for Taylor had very little involvement in that process, beyond that initial press conference. I think she was too busy trying to save her own skin in relation to the awful issues that occurred at Oakden. Minister Malinauskas said, 'We are going to put together a task force. That task force has a very strict deadline of 60 days to come back and to respond and from there we will be putting our plan into action.'

The government was a little bit later than that in putting the plan out there. In about the middle of the year, June or so, they put their final plan out into the public. Lo and behold, when we tried to get information on this, understanding that it is in law enforcement, in crime prevention and in tackling issues within our society to keep people safe, what we got was a very skinny piece of paper that looked very much like something designed to look like the government was doing something, but without any real critical evidence based underneath it.

Some of the measures in there have been enacted and some of the measures in there we support, especially in relation to the increased use of sniffer dogs. We have announced a policy, potentially somewhat controversially, that we want to extend the use of sniffer dogs as well as increase resources to tackle prevention in a much more serious way. We believe that, if we are going to tackle this problem, it is one thing to try to deal with the problem as it currently exists and deal with the attitude and the behaviours of existing drug users, but we must not let the urgent crowd out the important, and that is to try to reduce the uptake of drugs and the use of drugs by young people.

We know from studies done by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare that many young people in their early to mid to late teenage years are having their first interaction with illicit drugs. That is the time we need to change the behaviour and that is the time we need to help educate and divert people from going on to more heavy and more risky illicit drug use that comes with all the associated issues that roll on from that, whether that be drug-related crime, drug-related theft in order to support a drug habit, deteriorating personal health and circumstance or family and relationship breakdown. All those things can be prevented if we can prevent the initial drug-taking behaviour. That is why we have put a lot of emphasis and focus on trying to tackle this at its heart.

You cannot talk about early intervention for teenagers without getting into schools. It is the place where they are very likely to be exposed to drugs for the first time, whether that be from classmates and peers who have started to use drugs and who may have availability of drugs that helps to give opportunity to that experimental behaviour, especially in high school years. It is why we have been unapologetic about seeking to go into schools to try to change that behaviour, whether that be through increased detection methods or increased enforcement around encouraging SAPOL to go into schools, so that they can help to find and identify problems.

It is not necessarily about trying to prosecute young people, but through the deterrence effect and an enforcement capability to make young people realise that police are on the case—that they are going to get involved, that they are watching—and, before the addictive effects of drugs can take hold, that this is not a path that they should take. Any effort to reduce drug use and increased levels through increased enforcement needs to have balanced with it increased access to education. Young people are not stupid. We need to educate them as to why this is risky and difficult behaviour, and that is why we have also announced policy to increase resources for schools to be able to educate young people as to the dangers of drug use.

We should, we can and we must also look at the drivers behind why young people take drugs. Certainly, we can deal with the experimental element. We can help to give young people the information they need to make better choices for themselves, but there would also be other underlying factors—difficulty with their living situation and difficulty with family situations—that may drive people to drug-taking behaviour and we also need to tackle those inherent causes as well.

That is a broader and much bigger problem, but one that we cannot shy away from. It potentially falls outside of the purview of my shadow portfolio areas. It goes into broader education and broader child protection measures where we need to essentially tackle the root causes of why young people choose to take drugs. It is why we have had an extensive focus on this, because we want to stop the next generation from undertaking this behaviour in the first place.

The government has come out with this very skinny document, and straightaway we say, 'Hang on, there has to be some research behind it. There have to be submissions behind this. There has to be some science behind this.' We put in a series of FOIs and questions, particularly in the other place, and the answer that came back to us was, 'Yes, sure, if there is more information out there, we will give it to you.' Lo and behold, a few weeks later, the very quiet and very sheepish answer came back, 'Well, no, this is actually all the information we have. This is the entire report.'

We have often said in this place that we need to undertake evidence-based policy and that we need to have a more systematic and scientific way that we go about making these decisions, but we have not seen that. Who was consulted during the 60-day process? Who put in submissions? What were those submissions? Did they line up with what the government in the end decided to do? If they did, great, but if they did not, why not? Instead of having a full, frank and open debate on this very difficult topic, what we get is a glossy brochure. This issue deserves more than that. This issue deserves us having a more full and frank debate.

I will now turn to the search powers. I know that we are not allowed to reflect on other votes of the house or other bills still before the house, but this is one in a series of measures where the government is seeking to erode the principle of reasonable suspicion when it comes to police being allowed to search someone and every time it gets dressed up as something quite innocent and something quite common sense. Why should police not be able to search drug users as they go to their drug dealer's house to buy drugs, which is essentially what we have been asked to suggest is this proposition before us?

People on the street would say, 'It is pretty reasonable for you to be able to pinch a drug user just after they have bought drugs from their drug dealer at their drug dealer's house,' but that is not the power that we are giving to police. What we are giving to them is the ability when we do not know that it is a drug dealer's house. We do not even have to know that they are a drug dealer or, indeed, that the people who are coming and going are drug users. It essentially gives them the carte blanche power to be able to search anybody in and around a house that they reasonably suspect may be being used for drugs. Always, in these cases, the purpose of the power that is being sought seems noble, but it is the unintended consequence that we need to focus on.

We need to bring some balance to where this extension of power lies. On one hand, we have the desire for the police to go about and very easily do their job, but on the other hand we also have the rights of private citizens to be able to go about their daily lives uninterrupted and free from interference by anybody, including law enforcement. There is a balance that needs to be found, and I think that in South Australia, and in jurisdictions all over the country and the world, we have tried to find that balance.

In South Australia, it has come down to the principle of reasonable suspicion, this idea that police have to have some basis to expect that you are undertaking or committing an offence. In those circumstances, where there is reasonable suspicion that you are committing an offence, police can step in and they have the power to search you. It is something that has existed for a long period of time; it is something that has been tried and it has been tested. It has been the way that we in this parliament over long years have found that balance, but now the government is seeking to undermine that balance.

You would ask, in the circumstance where the government is asking for that increased power: where is the evidence that the current system is not working? That is what has not been forthcoming. It was not forthcoming in relation to drink and drug driving. I understand that the shadow attorney-general has asked for SAPOL and the DPP to provide data to support this assertion. Of all the information that is in front of me, that has not been provided. There has to be a reason that this law change is been sought by this parliament.

Without any evidence to show why or where there was a clear link between the inability to search somebody they did not reasonably suspect but they just wanted to search, and potentially had reason to, where is that deficiency? We need to get to the heart of that matter and understand very clearly that the absence of this power, which is currently being sought, is the remedy for the problem the government says exists. We need to think, though, about where this power may be used in unintended ways.

The member for Bragg gave the example of the bloke who has come to read the meter at the back of the house and whether or not he would then end up being searched. The poor guy is just trying to go about his job and gets caught up in this. Another example is children or young adults who live at home with their parents and those parents may be doing something that the kid may be unaware of or vice versa and whether or not in those circumstances people are going to get caught up in this. Does this give police the ability to stop Jehovah's Witnesses who come knocking on your door? 'Hang on, do we know that these people are legit? Well, let's stop and find out.'

We need to think about these unintended consequences because that is what is going to come back to this parliament. What will come back, for example, is a story in The Advertiser that says, 'Well, the police pulled me over with absolutely no provocation. They said just because I'd visited my mate, who I haven't seen for a while, they could pull me over and search my car.' As I understand it from this, when police have the ability to search a vehicle, they also have the ability to interfere with a vehicle for the purposes of the search, and that can include damage to the vehicle.

Again, where police have this very serious power, it needs to be used properly. I am not suggesting that there is widespread breach of the power as it currently stands or even that we have had evidence that there are breaches, but when police have immense power to inflict damage upon a vehicle in relation to a search we have to make sure that it is used only for its most proper purpose. Whether it be drink or drug driving or child exploitation in encrypted material, until we are presented with some evidence from the government about why and where we need it we will continue to say that the balance as it currently exists is correct.

This is especially important when we know that police have increasing ability to use technology to find, prosecute and create reasonable suspicion—for instance, being able to use evidence collected through mobile phones to prove that somebody is drug dealing and using increased surveillance technologies to be able to create reasonable suspicion. Why is it that this power is being sought? It is a question we have not had a decent answer to, and until we get that we will continue to uphold the existing principle.

Further to that, in relation to the other measures contained in this bill, we think they are straightforward and reasonable, and that is why we will be supporting them. We look forward to a decent outcome in the other place, notwithstanding the very limited amount of time we have left and the propensity of the other house to take their time with most things. We look forward to there being a good resolution on this bill and a number of others that are going through the house at this same time.

Mr BELL (Mount Gambier) (11:35): I rise to make a contribution on the Statutes Amendment (Drug Offenders) Bill. I indicate that I will be supporting the government's bill, in particular the notion that if children are present in facilities where drugs are being manufactured that it will be deemed an aggravated offence and taken into consideration when sentencing occurs. I also rise to indicate that I will be supporting the measure for police to search persons or vehicles for illicit substances if that person or persons is seen entering or leaving a premises reasonably suspected of being used for the manufacture, distribution or storage of illicit substances or chemicals used for the manufacture of illicit substances.

Methamphetamine, commonly called ice, is having a devastating effect on our state, in particular regional communities. You just need to sit down—and as a local member, I have on numerous occasions—to speak to police officers who share a degree of frustration or to parents of their son or daughter who is addicted to ice or nurses or loved ones. They will talk about their frustration at this insidious drug. In particular, of a number of police officers I have spoken to one sticks out in my mind. He was a 30 or 40-year veteran of the police force who talked to me about his experience throughout his career of seeing many evolutions of drug taking, whether it is heroin, marijuana or cocaine, He said that he has seen it all before.

He pointed out that alcohol is still one of the most destructive substances in the community but he also pointed out that he has never seen the impact that ice has on people and, in his words, it is an epidemic. The cost to the community and the state is far greater than is ever reported. That is backed up by nurses who will talk about people they know who come into the emergency department under psychosis. They are violent, aggressive and irrational, and there is no comprehension of where they are or who they are lashing out at.

It is with this in mind that I want to support any measure that puts greater pressure on those who are manufacturing or acquiring the chemicals to manufacture this insidious drug to be searched, or those entering or exiting a property to be searched. I invited minister Malinauskas to Mount Gambier when he launched the Ice Taskforce or 'Stop the Hurt'. He was gracious enough to conduct a round table with representatives from my community. Sitting around that table, there was clear frustration at a lack of resources and a lack of state government focus on tackling this problem. This is not an emerging problem: it is here and now.

I commend the state government for the six rehabilitation beds that have been allocated to Mount Gambier. I am sure we will find in a very short period of time that those beds are fully occupied and that we will need to work as a community on how we continually address this issue of ice in the South-East. I think $3.6 million to increase access to treatment could easily be $36 million because, unfortunately, we are seeing an epidemic that needs to be stopped earlier. It is only when people get to a psychosis stage that intervention seems to be forthcoming. By then, the amount of money, time and effort required is far greater than if we addressed the problem at an earlier stage.

It is fine to say that we are going to put more and more into schools but, as a previous teacher, what you start to realise is that everybody looks at schools as the answer to society's problems. No longer are teachers concentrating on English and arithmetic, but they seem to be doing a whole plethora of societal interventions in that period of time. Most of it is doable, but you cannot just keep loading it on to schools to sort out society's problems.

In terms of the impact of ice on regional communities, I know a number of people whom I would call functioning ice users, but it seems as a drug to eventually catch up with all of them. People are losing their jobs, their families and their livelihoods because of this drug. With those thoughts in mind, I will be supporting this bill. If there is one message I can give, it is about the money allocated. It is okay to allocate $20 million for a new road or $160 million for a new piece of infrastructure, but if we start getting serious about tackling this issue earlier then that is the type of money that this will need. This money needs to be spent wisely because at the moment there is nowhere near enough resources being put into this insidious drug.

There are not too many people I know who become regular users of this drug who are able to kick the habit. It is a dire warning and I am very confident that we have a ticking time bomb in this state and in this country, where regular ice users are addicted to this stuff and, while they think they might have it under control, their lives are slowly unravelling, and it gets to a point where they cannot stop taking it. Intervention is certainly needed.

I have had numerous parents of young people in my office. Unfortunately, in most cases their loved ones have died because of substance abuse, whether it culminates in suicide, a road crash or an overdose. Invariably, from the parents I have been speaking to, it has resulted in death. They always talk about the early stages when they still recognised their loved one, but they get to a stage where eventually they do not recognise them: they are stealing from them, they are turning into basically wild animals—those are the words they use; I do not necessarily use those words. Early intervention is the key. If this goes some way to deterring people from going to drug houses then I fully support this measure. With those comments, I will conclude.

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (11:44): I thank those members who have contributed. In particular, I thank the member for Mount Gambier, who has obviously thought about this issue quite a bit and has seen some of the misery that these substances have brought to families and to communities. I will be brief in relation to the objections that were raised, particularly about the powers to search and seize.

Put simply, if you read the provision we seek to include, which is in clause 5 of the bill, it requires that the police form a reasonable suspicion that the premises that is the subject of their investigations is, indeed, a drug house. They cannot park in front of any house in any street because they like the look of it and randomly stop people from going in and out of that house. They have to have a view that there is a drug house operating in a street or that it is a manufacturing place, or that there is somebody there who is dealing in drugs, or whatever. Of course, the reasonable suspicion that they have to form that view should be something that can be tested in the court.

If it turns out that they do not have a reasonable suspicion for believing those premises are in fact premises where drug deals are occurring, or drug activity is occurring, then all the evidence that follows thereafter based on that reasonable suspicion is excluded. The notion that your home or my home could be picked at random and that people coming to our place for a barbecue could be stopped and have their cars searched is, quite frankly, ludicrous. The police have better things to do than to park outside people's houses for the sake of it when there is no good reason to be there.

Let us be clear on what we are talking about. The police do not have this power unless they have a reasonable suspicion that the premises they are in front of is a drug premises. That is point number one. Point No. 2 is that what the opposition is saying is that not only should they have a reasonable suspicion about the premises being drug premises but that everybody going to and from that place, they should independently and additionally form the view that those individuals are somehow involved in drug activity.

What I am going to say may shock some people, but I am reasonably confident that people who are involved in this illegal activity are not foolish enough to come into drug houses dressed up like Cheech and Chong. That is not what they do. In fact, if our proposal is not accepted I can tell you that the costumes presently used by UberEATS, Telstra and hard hats with hi-vis jackets are going to be a premium amongst drug dealers because they would just put one of these things on, or would dress up like Ronald McDonald or something, and head into the place.

When the police stop them, they would say, 'Hang on, what's so suspicious about Ronald McDonald? I'm just here because I'm a burger guy, notwithstanding the obvious question of why is Ronald McDonald going into a house full of methamphetamine? We cannot ask that question because Ronald himself does not look suspicious. He does not have a bong in one hand and a large beard. Let's be real about this.

To get to the point, the police will not randomly park outside people's houses and molest their visitors. If they do, and if they obtain stuff through the search, they still have to prove that they had a bone fide reason for being in front of those premises and had a suspicion in particular about those premises. The other thing is that the people we are talking about here who are applying this trade are not law-abiding citizens.

They are not people who want to play by the explicit and implicit rules of civil society like the rest of us. These are people who do not care less. What they are on about is making money and exploiting people, and they do not care what damage they do along the way. If the police have formed a bona fide view that a particular premises is a drug premises and there are people coming and going in and out of those premises, it is not unreasonable to assume that those people coming and going outside those premises may have something to do with what is going on in there.

To put the additional burden on them, that they have to appear to be some sort of druggie or that it has to appear that there is something inherently suspicious about them before they can even be intercepted and their car checked for drugs or something, with respect, I think is unfairly hamstringing the police and it is also very helpful from the point of view of the drug pushers. Another example is why would you not use kids to be the people who come and go from your house, or why would you not use senior citizens?

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Watch it!

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Madam Deputy Speaker, you are not, with due respect, a senior citizen.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am an elder.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: You are in your prime. Madam Deputy Speaker, you might be comforted by the notion that 40 is the new 20.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I said that once, famously, and was overruled.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: I will go back to the more mundane substance of this conversation. The point is that it might actually encourage them to pick senior citizens to come and visit these properties, and what is inherently suspicious about a senior citizen? These people are not nice people. They do not play by the rules. They are inherently tricky. They are not nice. They are not trying to do the right thing; they are trying to do the wrong thing. All we are trying to do here is to give the police an opportunity to be able to say, 'If that house is full of drugs and these characters are going in and out of the house, that should be a good enough reason for us to have a look at their cars and see whether they are involved in some illicit trade.'

We disagree with the opposition's position. We do agree with the member for Mount Gambier. Otherwise, I think we all generally accept the fact that this is a very insidious and dangerous trade that is going on in our society and anything we can do to do something about it will be for the common good.

Bill read a second time.

Committee Stage

In committee.

Clauses 1 to 4 passed.

Clause 5.

Ms CHAPMAN: Clause 5 is the offending aspect of this reform from our perspective, which we say simply goes too far. Notwithstanding the contribution by the Attorney immediately preceding the committee stage, the fact is that it is not necessary for any other police or law enforcement agency around the country to require to have these powers to search anybody who is going in and out of a premises that the police reasonably suspect is undertaking some manufacture, storage or dealing of drugs, and his further contribution does not, in any way, discharge the views held by the opposition in that regard. I do not think it is necessary for us to go through any other data.

I will say that in respect of reasonable suspicion with regard to the premises, members should be reminded that police officers have the capacity to act in those circumstances and to deal with those who are either at the premises or are ultimately traced back to some responsibility for the manufacture or distribution of its product. They ought to be doing that. In the course of these briefings, we are provided with various information which, for obvious reasons, we will not repeat in the parliament. That is all part of the material accumulated by units to deal with detection and prosecution in these cases, so we will not do that.

I mentioned in a preceding debate the 2002 strategy outcomes from a drug summit held in South Australia. It would behove the Attorney to refresh his memory, if he ever read it—he was a humble backbencher at the time of that exercise and when the summit was held. All relevant stakeholders and agencies were represented and hundreds of people attended that summit. There were some good outcomes, including law enforcement, including dealing with insidious manufacture, and including the rising incidence of methamphetamines, etc., which were utilised. One of the outcomes—which is why I said in the preceding debate was a bit of deja vu—was the reinforcement of reducing the supply and availability of illicit drugs. Just to quote one sentence of the report:

Seizures of amphetamine-type drugs and clandestine laboratories in South Australia, over the past three years, indicate that there is significant growth in the number of these laboratories and that the manufacturers have little or no pharmaceutical experience, leading to contaminated products entering the market place.

That is one sentence of a very lengthy report in respect of the initiatives to be taken by the government of the day. I think they failed comprehensively. They knew what the problem was then, in a very real way. They had commitments to extra data collection. I would say we have moved into an area of significant extra data that is out of date. I think we have utterly failed to have contemporaneous data on this matter. Nevertheless, there has been some effort made there, but there has otherwise been a comprehensive failure to do all the things that are aspirational in the current drug strategy from the most recent task force, which was all there in black and white.

For the government to have initially failed and then, when they come back to us, try to add in and pad out a list of categories of implementation of strategies to deal with a problem which they have known about for decades I think that is insincere. As such, the opposition will be opposing clause 5. The police will be left well armed with their current regime, like every other police officer in the country, to undertake this rather arduous task. They do not need these amendments to do it.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: I listened very carefully, and it is difficult to discern exactly what that question was. I am reading it as a speech, and I am not sure that is strictly orderly—

The CHAIR: Maybe just sit down then and we will see if we can move on.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Is it the cartoon strip Peanuts where—

The CHAIR: No, let's just try to move on, shall we.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: —people had their sticking plaster?

The CHAIR: Shall we try to move on? Any further questions on clause 5? No. In that case, I am putting clause 5 as printed.

The committee divided on the clause:

Ayes 23

Noes 15

Majority 8

AYES
Atkinson, M.J. Bell, T.S. Bettison, Z.L.
Bignell, L.W.K. Caica, P. Cook, N.F.
Digance, A.F.C. Gee, J.P. Hamilton-Smith, M.L.J.
Hildyard, K.A. Kenyon, T.R. (teller) Key, S.W.
Koutsantonis, A. McFetridge, D. Mullighan, S.C.
Odenwalder, L.K. Piccolo, A. Picton, C.J.
Rankine, J.M. Rau, J.R. Snelling, J.J.
Weatherill, J.W. Wortley, D.
NOES
Chapman, V.A. (teller) Duluk, S. Gardner, J.A.W.
Goldsworthy, R.M. Griffiths, S.P. Knoll, S.K.
Pederick, A.S. Pengilly, M.R. Pisoni, D.G.
Sanderson, R. Treloar, P.A. van Holst Pellekaan, D.C.
Whetstone, T.J. Williams, M.R. Wingard, C.
PAIRS
Brock, G.G. Marshall, S.S. Hughes, E.J.
Tarzia, V.A. Vlahos, L.A. Speirs, D.

Clause thus passed.

Remaining clauses (6 to 8) and title passed.

Bill reported without amendment.

Third Reading

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (12:04): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.

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