Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement, I present the committee's report entitled: Inquiry into crystal methamphetamine (ice)—Report, September 2017.

In accordance with standing order 39(e) the report was made a Parliamentary Paper.

by leave—This inquiry started in the 44th Parliament and we have concluded it here in the 45th Parliament. We received a total of 119 submissions. We conducted hearings in Melbourne, in Mount Gambia, in Liverpool in south-west Sydney, in Caboolture, in Canberra and more recently in Perth. There's no doubt that the evidence we heard painted a disturbing picture of the growing prevalence of crystal methamphetamine and the havoc that it is wreaking in many of our communities and in many families across the nation.

Our report has been broken up into five separate chapters. The first is merely an introduction. The second chapter provides an overview of crystal methamphetamine and its use in Australia. It describes the substance and how it differs from other methamphetamines. Chapter 3 looks at Australia's drug strategies and work already done at a Commonwealth level and focuses on crystal methamphetamine. Chapter 4 provides an overview of the number of current Commonwealth law enforcement activities. In chapter 5, the examination of law enforcement strategies continues. This chapter also looks at strategies announced in the National Ice Action Strategy and considers how current and planned future strategies might be improved.

One of the most true comments in the report that I think all community members agreed with was that this is a problem that we cannot arrest ourselves out of. There seems to be almost an unending source of supply of this insidious drug. The drug cannot only be manufactured locally in Australia from precursor chemicals but it also seems to be imported from all around the world, most specifically from South-East Asia. So the difficulty we have is that because it is so small in volumetric terms, we cannot expect our Customs and Border Force officials, who are doing a tremendous job and who we congratulate on the many successful seizures that they have recently made, to solve this problem on their own. We have to work on strategies to reduce the demand for this drug in our society and reduce the damage that it does.

This report was the first report of the inquiry. The committee will also undertake a visit to Portugal, after which it will present a second report where we will consider evidence in further detail concerning treatment and rehabilitation services, harm reduction measures that can be undertaken and the allocation of the National Ice Strategy Taskforce funding. I commend the report to the House.

I would like to congratulate and thank the other members of the committee and compliment them on how we've been able to work in a bipartisan manner on this issue, because this is a most serious issue that is causing untold harm throughout our nation. We need to come up with new strategies and new ways of tackling this problem.