Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this motion on this important issue of illicit drugs as well. We are really faced with two policy frontiers. The first is there has been a lot of discussion around random illicit drug testing of jobseekers. The second is the issue of caregivers. This is primarily the responsibility of the states and territories, but I want to put to this chamber the importance of testing caregivers, which the Queensland government performed earlier this year. What they found was that, of child notifications in Queensland, 60 per cent of caregivers were ice positive—not six or 16 per cent.

The drug ice or the simpler versions of amphetamine have come within five years from being an also-ran to now passing alcohol to be the No. 1 clear and present danger in raising children. In Queensland alone, with 9,000 children requiring protection and only about 3,000 of them finding foster care arrangements, we have to be genuinely concerned about the thousands of children in Queensland living with ice-addicted parents. Before we get too hostile about random drug testing and say that we are selecting or picking on a particular demographic, I would ask for the counterargument: how exactly do we break this nexus of ice addiction where children are involved, where children are in the house?

We have about 20 deaths in Queensland each year that are difficult to explain. Often ice is not mentioned as a precursor because it is deemed a mental health issue, so of course the general public does not know the extent of the challenge. But where children end up at the bottom of a pool because the parents are sleeping off ice upstairs, where children are locked in bathrooms in nappies that have not been changed because adults are walking in and out of the house trying to pay off drug debts, the state has to do something. Under current law, a housing agency can have a suspicion because of a complaint which is passed to police, who can do a welfare check but cannot enter the dwelling. It is preposterous that every second police officer cannot even do a drug test because they are not credentialled to. They are limited to—do not be so bemused—driving past the house and waiting until the occupants jump into a vehicle in order to be able to use current laws around operation of a vehicle. This is an incredibly serious challenge. Currently we are let down, even though the technology is there to test. We need to engage in this area or we will see more than 60 per cent of those at risk of ice addiction leaving children utterly exposed.

The other fad I want to talk about is pill testing, particularly at music festivals, where it is trendy for anyone slightly to the Left of the political spectrum to say what a fantastic idea it is to be able to pill-test. Pills do not belong at music festivals. Pills do not belong in your pockets at music festivals, and no-one should have to tolerate a person consuming illicit drugs sitting next to them at a music festival that is run by an entity responsible for the safety of attendees—basic common sense. But as a doctor I say to you: before you do colorimetry at a music festival and tell festivalgoers, 'Your E's are safe,' let us remember colorimetry has a 15 per cent false-positive rate. What does a musical festival goer do when you test one pill and tell them, 'Your bag of 20 is no good'? What does the person do? They return to the music festival and sell them because they are no good. No-one surrenders bad pills. How do you test a pill if its heterogeneous content is such that you test one side of a pill, or one pill in a batch, and it is completely different to the other? These are amateur-cooked tablets. You cannot just test one part of a tablet and say the whole batch is okay. What happens when someone says, 'That pill is okay,' so a young Australian takes five of them—because they are 'okay'? True testing of these drugs requires laboratory analysis, which, apart from being $300 a test, cannot be done in the time required at a music festival.

A focus on harm reduction is incredibly short sighted when, in fact, there is no harm reduction when you identify a pill as not safe and the owner simply goes and resells it to someone else because it is not. In these pills they substitute the ice derivative with other, more lethal elements in order to give the high but save their money, because it is cheaper and easier to manufacture. This is the challenge. What is in these tablets is not talcum powder; it is actually more dangerous, with a lower lethal dose, and it is utterly random. Colorimetry does not pick that up. Colorimetry just says there is a little bit of ice in that tablet, so it is okay. That is all colorimetry does on the spot. Pill testing at music festivals is a joke. We need a way to help families where there is ice addiction—and, first of all, remember the greatest challenge here in this ice addiction issue are children themselves.

Debate adjourned.

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