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

I certainly felt we were pretty close to bipartisan agreement on the importance of combatting illicit drugs and respect for the work of the Australian Federal Police, but clearly that's not the case. I also find myself rereading the motion after the opposition speaker, the member for Hotham, has suggested it was about rehabilitation beds. That was not mentioned at all in the motion. Maybe she had a motion from last year and things got a little confused when her staff wrote the speech for her. In reality, we know that rehabilitation beds are a state government responsibility—of course, that was not apparent either on the speech horizon of the opposition speaker—and the Commonwealth government is fundamentally responsible for outpatient services. That $685 million is coming in very handy in the electorates of MPs on this side of the House, but I suggest that the previous speaker simply doesn't know what is going on in her electorate, as these contracts are let to large parts of Australia—urban, regional and remote—to ensure there are satisfactory amounts of counselling available for those who wish to break this habit.

I return to what we should all be agreeing on—we need to be employing a multi-targeted approach to beating illicit drugs. I want to make reference to two very important areas. The first one is drug testing in welfare, particularly with Newstart, and then I will touch on the area of pill testing at music festivals—another fascinating Labor Party solo flight here in the ACT, where they thought it would be appropriate to on the one hand ban illicit substances in a music festival but on the other hand set up a tent to test them inside. If that complete logical inconsistency isn't obvious to most people listening to the debate, we hear that they are promoting the use of an unreliable form of technology at those festivals. I understand how the Labor Party see this argument. Illicit drugs are everywhere, they are impossible to stop, and so let's just test every drug we can because the more safe ones that are out there the better things will be. When you talk to the experts, they tell you that just finding yourself a chemist and sending them to a music festival with a day pass and a fancy spectrometer and testing all the pills you can is not going to fix the problem. Things will go wrong, often and regularly.

The first reason is, whether you use colour imagery or IR spectrometry, these are not only unreliable tests, but they are subject to interference. When you take them out into the field—

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