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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-25 Daily Xml
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DRINK SPIKING

The Hon. T.A. JENNINGS (15:03): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for the Status of Women a question about drink spiking.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.A. JENNINGS: I draw members' attention to an item in last week's Advertiser about a drink spiking incident that had taken place at an inner city pub. In that article, it was stated that the charge of drink spiking was not applied in that case, and this has raised some concerns. Members may be aware that this parliament approved some two years ago drink spiking laws under which food and drink spiking is seen as a crime in its own right. My questions are:

1. What has been done to enforce and police these laws?

2. What regulations have been used to back up the laws we passed? Has the minister considered, for example, employing CCTV in pubs and licensed clubs to monitor not only poker machines but also patrons?

3. Has the minister considered having memorandums of understanding between hospitals, doctors, rape crisis centres and other such places where drink spiking incidents may be better monitored?

4. Does the minister also share concerns that perhaps this law, which is a good law, is not being properly implemented?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for State/Local Government Relations, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Consumer Affairs, Minister for Government Enterprises, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (15:04): I thank the honourable member for her most important questions. Indeed, I think we are all aware of issues of concern around the practice of drink spiking. This issue has been a concern for some time, and legislative changes were made to ensure that this offence was captured.

In terms of drink spiking, the advice I have received is that the spiking that occurs most often is that involving alcohol—adding additional alcohol to a drink—rather than any other substances, but certainly there is evidence of other substances being introduced as well. From reports from accident and emergency centres, I know that there is, in some cases, some ambiguity around whether an offence has, in fact, occurred or whether a person has used that as a means to explain their overconsumption of alcohol. Nevertheless, even taking into consideration all those matters, we do know that drink spiking is an issue.

In relation to the sorts of activities that are in place around drink spiking, I know that there have been public awareness campaigns from time to time reminding young people of the importance of not leaving drinks unattended and of other such behaviour to reduce the risk of drink spiking. I know that those campaigns have been around from time to time. I know that more licensed venues are putting in place CCTV, particularly outside venues, as a means of crowd control, and my understanding is that, as a general form of security, more CCTV is being used inside.

It is interesting that, under the proposed liquor licensing review I spoke about earlier in question time, one of the things we are looking at is increasing the powers of the commissioner to put conditions in place more quickly on licence holders than is currently available. One of those conditions, for instance, could be introducing CCTV, and it could be a whole range of things, such as increasing the number of security guards. As I have said, there is a wide range of different strategies that can be implemented.

One of the really strong points about improving the commissioner's powers in this way is that it allows the commissioner to adopt a set of conditions on a particular premises or a group of premises that address any particular problem in behaviours or deficits that might be seen to be particularly prevalent on that premises. So, this will enable a greater flexibility, and it will enable us to come down much harder on those establishments that do not do the right thing, do not provide adequate supervision or allow misconduct to occur on their premises.

The honourable member obviously has some very well thought through ideas that I think are quite positive, and I would very much value those being fed in through our consultation process.

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