Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I thank the minister for the response and take some of the points that she has made on board. But I do want to offer just a quick couple of responses to the minister's response. Firstly, to be clear, we're not suggesting that the government is targeting people who personally use drugs. The assertion that I believe I made in my previous contribution was that the impact of these changes will fall more strongly on people at the bottom of an organisation than it will people at the top. I made the point that people at the bottom of an organisation often do have a drug addiction or are from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

Again, I'm not suggesting that you're targeting the personal use of drugs here. I do understand that the Commonwealth has responsibility, compared with states and territories. Nevertheless, the point remains that this is going to catch and disadvantage drug mules, drug runners, people at the bottom of the supply chains—people who are more likely to be carrying a low-purity product—and people who, let's face it, make up the majority of legal aid's Commonwealth drug clients. The burden will fall disproportionately less on the organisers and the profiteers at the top of those operations.

Also, to respond to the minister's point about the assertion that people are using cutting agents to get under a particular threshold, I'd ask why they don't just carry a quantity that's under the threshold. Why do they need to use a cutting agent to get it under the threshold? If you wanted to smuggle drugs and you wanted to have a quantity of drugs under a particular threshold, why would you cut it with a cutting agent and bulk it up and make it harder to conceal? I don't really understand the argument that's being put there. It's quite possible that, in attempting to cast my mind into the mind of someone who's smuggling drugs, I might have missed an obvious response to that! But that was my first response.

I also understand that people in compliance operations work hard, but I want to place on the record that we don't think that reducing someone's workload is a reasonable reason to propose changes such as this.

The last response I wanted to make was the obvious observation—which was stated, I might add, by the minister; I guess it's a concurrence—that pleas in mitigation are in relation to sentencing. They're not in relation to the way trials might be conducted, and the points I made were in relation to the defence of an honest and reasonable mistake of fact, and that's a matter that is at least considered in a trial. I think Senator Cash has—