Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak today on the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Psychoactive Substances and Other Measures) Bill 2014. The bill is an omnibus bill containing five schedules that address separate issues. Schedule 1 will create new offences for importing psychoactive substances, and those represented to be alternatives to illicit drugs. It will allow Australian Customs and Border Protection Service officers to exercise relevant powers, such as seizure, in relation to those substances.

Importantly, the new psychoactive substances are substances of abuse that are not captured by the major international drug treaties. Along with other Western nations, Australia has been struggling to keep up with the number of new psychoactive substances entering the market, and has found its current regulatory approach to be inadequate. The amendments in schedule 1 represent the Commonwealth's legislative components of a broader national response to new psychoactive substances that was developed by the Intergovernmental Committee on Drugs and endorsed by the Commonwealth and state and territory ministers, in July 2014. The offences themselves are broad, but they are subject to a range of broad exemptions, including for food, tobacco and therapeutic goods, for which a defendant will bear an evidential burden.

Schedule 2 will expand existing firearms trafficking offences to also apply to firearm parts, creating new offences for international firearms trafficking, introduce mandatory minimum penalties of five years imprisonment for firearms offences, and allow Customs officers to exercise the relevant powers in relation to the new offences. During the 2013 federal election campaign, the coalition committed to the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for Commonwealth firearms offences.

Schedule 3 will make a range of amendments to clarify the application of the International Transfer of Prisoners Scheme, or ITP scheme, and streamline the processing of applications for transfer. The main amendments will make it easier for prisoners serving suspended sentences to be transferred under the ITP scheme. It will introduce the concept of 'close family member', which will be relevant in demonstrating ties to a community and determining who may consent to a transfer on behalf of a prisoner who is not an adult or is otherwise unable to consent to his or her own transfer. It will allow the Attorney-General to close unviable applications and to exercise discretion in processing re-applications received within 12 months of a negative decision or the withdrawal of a previous application.

Schedule 4 will apply the broadest level of extended geographical jurisdictions to slavery offences so that they will apply whether or not the relevant conduct, or a result of the relevant conduct, occurs in Australia.

Schedule 5 will retrospectively validate the use of federal police powers in investigations of applied state offences at designated airports between March 2014 and May 2014, when the replacement regulations were made.

Schedule 6 will make several minor and technical amendments to the Criminal Code, the Customs Act, the Financial Transaction Reports Act and the Surveillance Devices Act.

There would not be a person in Australia who does not have some direct knowledge of the destruction that is caused throughout the community by the growth in the use of illicit substances. I am sure that at some stage of our lives, each of us has had either a friend or a family member, or someone we have worked with or been confronted with, or has otherwise known someone, who has fallen into the bleak world of illicit drug use. As a former criminal lawyer I can say that, inevitably, almost every terrible outcome was connected in some way to drug use; the lack of judgement it causes, or the criminal enterprises it funds. It is an issue which we must address on several levels. It is not only a law and order issue, it is a mental and physical health issue and it is a community services issue; it is a housing issue, a sporting issue, a regional development issue, and an employment issue; it is a national security issue and it is a budgetary issue. Regardless of this, sadly, no segment of our society is unsullied. From the wealthiest financial trader to the poorest person sleeping rough on the street, each is as susceptible as the other to falling for the wicked of illicit substances, and the consequences are equally devastating for both.

Not so long ago, drug use and the drug culture was widely perceived to be made up of so-called soft drugs like marijuana. While some of the claims made by various people at various times about the dangers of drugs have lacked finesse, and have perhaps been overstated in some specific instances, it is true to say that any substance which affects your judgement and perception can be dangerous to you and to others. During the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of what some people probably consider to be the harder drugs—such as cocaine and heroin—came to prominence, especially with the flood of product being made available to the West from developing countries who had discovered a vastly more profitable enterprise than traditional agricultural farming. The government's response to these issues was to toughen the law-enforcement response, and to slowly but surely dismantle these criminal enterprises through a series of related measures including policing and sentencing, disruption of supply, and health interventions to reduce demand; and to outlaw a number of substances that had been more freely available. Comparatively speaking, even though there were—and indeed there continue to be—significant challenges in dealing with these types of drugs, the number of new drug types over that period was fairly steady, and governments were able to make laws within a reasonable time to help address the emergence of new trends.

With the birth of the rave culture and designer drugs, we saw the production—and the capacity for someone with little more than high school or first year chemistry knowledge to produce—drugs with similar effects and toxicity but sufficiently different in chemical structure to avoid being captured by the legislation, and thus the drugs could occupy a legal grey area where they can be marketed to people as so-called 'legal highs'. But in practice, there is very little difference in the health risks, and very often there is an elevated risk; because of the interactions the new compounds have with different people, with prescription medications, and with health conditions; and simply because of the quality of the manufacturing process. They are often produced by the same syndicates and involve the same social risks and interactions as more long-standing and well-known illicit substances. Perversely, these new drugs do not have the benefit of having been around long enough for anyone to have any detailed knowledge or understanding of the risks of these new compounds. They are marketed in this fashion because the aim is to attract high-value market share—the types of people who can afford to go out on the town of a weekend, but who would otherwise be wary of interacting with criminal types who are dealing drugs. It is overall a much more comfortable and therefore enticing way to sell essentially the same substances, but it is deliberately designed to make the experience less dark, less scary and less off-putting. The ease with which these new substances can be produced is such that a new version could be available almost every weekend, if people were so inclined. It is obviously extremely challenging to a government's ability to keep pace with this, given how many different versions of a particular drug can be produced just in the time it will take for this bill to pass through this place.

As with all profitable and therefore valuable things, the trade in drugs needs to be protected—or at least so say the proponents; that is, protected from competitors, protected from government, protected from employees and protected from the unwilling. This is done with brutal, physical violence and intimidation. This need to ensure that they are able to protect their supply and their markets from a variety of threats, combined with what must be said to be a ruthless desire and a streamlined decision-making process, has meant that where gaps have emerged in the capabilities of criminal organisations, they have acted—often more effectively than law enforcement agencies and governments are able to—to add that capability, and with the most effective means available. That has meant the proliferation of increasingly powerful and lethal weapons, including military-style automatic weapons, in suburban streets.

Already the Abbott government is attacking this problem on a number of fronts; through increasing the powers of federal agencies to follow the money, to ensure that the ultimate perpetrators of these enterprises are not able to be rewarded while the low-level, street criminals are left to face the jail time. This legislation will attack other struts of these groups by making it harder for substances which mimic the effects of illicit substances to be imported into Australia without sanction. The bill also cracks down on the international illicit arms business that underpins the drug trade, and is the dark side of the drugs business, which too many in our community fail to realise is a direct and real threat to our community. That is why, in addition to creating a number of new offences for acts relating to the trade in firearms—including the sale of parts of weapons—and for acts of international trade in weapons, the Abbott government will give greater powers to Customs officers to police this trade, and will introduce mandatory minimum sentences for breaches of the act, something which I understand—to their eternal shame—the Labor Party is not supporting.

Whether it be the control of our borders, our national security and defence matters, policing, or the question of tougher sentences for dangerous criminals, Labor fails to meet community expectations. Only the Abbott coalition government will take the necessary action to punish those who deal in misery and vulnerability. Only the Abbott coalition government will provide the health and treatment resources for the victims of these criminal kingpins and for the predatory behaviours of these criminals, and the resources to make sure that the relevant agencies have the tools they need to do the job that is asked of them.

I commend the bill to the House.

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