Davis Kelvin: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 26 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:2021. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau): The Labour Party supports the Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill. It goes without saying that the use and the abuse of alcohol in our communities is fairly rampant and also the use and abuse of drugs such as cannabis are pretty rampant in many communities as is now sadly the use and abuse of harder drugs such as methamphetamine otherwise known as P. I have spoken in this House before of a family of students at the school where I used to be principal who had an intimate knowledge of the production and the consumption of P. That was because for their parents and their parents’ associates it was just a regular part of their week to imbibe that drug. Also I remember a youth aid officer telling me that in one house that he raided—and this was the house of a student who attended the school I was principal of—in 14 places around the lounge where you and I might have had chips or nuts on the arm of the chair or on the coffee table they had marijuana. It was just there accessible with kids all around. That is again unacceptable. Then there was the infamous league competition up north where the player of the day instead of receiving his $20 meat pack from the local butcher received in fact an ounce of marijuana.This just emphasises and highlights how normalised drugs and alcohol are in many communities and how normalised drugs and alcohol are in many families. Let us imagine then how difficult it is for an offender who is on a community-based sentence if the use of drugs and alcohol is normalised in his or her life to voluntarily abstain from partaking of drugs and alcohol. That is why we need a system that has to impose abstinence on these people. I remember a kaumātua up northsaying to me that sometimes the only way to get people to do the right thing or to change is to seriously inconvenience them. This bill will seriously inconvenience offenders in that if the conditions of their community-based sentence say that they must abstain from drugs and alcohol they will be made to undergo testing and they will be made to provide bodily samples to see whether there is alcohol or drugs in their systems. So it will be an inconvenience for them but sometimes that is the price that we do have to pay to make sure that we live in a safe society.There are safeguards within the bill that the Law and Order Committee will examine to make sure as the Minister of Corrections has said that people’s rights are not going to be overly imposed upon. We have got to make sure that this does in fact comply with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. The bill itself does give us the proper authority to undergo this testing regime. So what does the bill do? The Minister has spelt out what the bill does. It allows the police and the Department of Corrections to require community-based offenders to undergo a drug and alcohol testing regime to monitor them for drugs and alcohol in their systems. The offender must be advised by a judicial officer or the registrar up front that they will be made to undergo the monitoring by an authorised person and if they are advised then they must do so.There are a number of areas as I have said that the select committee needs to scrutinise and examine. Some of these things are the types of testing procedures that the offenders will have to undergo the regularity of the testing the consequences of prohibiting an authorised person from coming to conduct the tests and the types of drug and alcohol testing devices—and I think it is really important that we examine that. There is a range of drug and alcohol monitoring and testing devices. I believe other jurisdictions around the world have already implemented systems like this and it would be really good to hear at the select committee stage what those monitoring devices are how they actually work the technical functions around those devices how often and how long continuous testing may be carried out for and minimum levels of controlled drugs and alcohol in the system as well.There is no argument that drugs and alcohol are a major driver of crime in the country. In fact a District Court judge from up north said to me that if we could miraculously eliminate alcohol from up north 90 percent of his business would disappear overnight. That is quite a telling sort of comment from a District Court judge who every day has to deal with incidents where crimes have been committed because of drug and alcohol abuse. As the Minister has rightly pointed out 48 percent—almost half—of offenders report at the time that they are arrested that they have been using at least one drug. The Minister said two-thirds—60 percent—of offenders on home detention or supervision have a drug or alcohol addiction issue. So that just illustrates the seriousness and just how rampant drug and alcohol issues are and their contribution to crime. As the Minister said 5000 community-based—he said 4000; I have read 5000—community-based offenders and 15000 bailees have some abstinence conditions imposed upon them as part of their sentence. Drug and alcohol testing is used overseas and evidence shows that it is effective. So as I have said I would be interested to hear just what makes it so effective and what we can do to improve on that. What were some of the ups and downs that those overseas jurisdictions experienced as they were implementing similar systems?There are three principles that need to be applied consistently; again the Minister has gone over them. The first is that testing is no more intrusive than is reasonably necessary. The second is that testing takes place no more often than is necessary. And the third of course is that we make sure that testing and monitoring do maintain a person’s dignity and right to privacy. A positive test for drugs and alcohol can be used as evidence of non-compliance with the drug and alcohol conditions imposed on an offender or bailee and they—the offender or the bailee—need to understand that this can be used against them. There are offences for non-compliance such as refusing an authorised person access to the home to conduct the testing tampering with the devices or diluting or manipulating any samples.I just want to go back briefly to the technology around the testing—the testing devices and their accuracy which is something I would like to explore. Again when I was a schoolteacher we had a policeman come to the school to talk to kids about his police equipment. The kids got to sit in the car and turn on the sirens and the lights and everything. The policeman brought out a roadside breath-testing kit and he lined up half a dozen kids got them to speak their names into the device and they of course came up with negative results. Then he got them to gargle Listerine spit it out and then say their names and addresses and it came up with positive results because the device is able to pick up the alcohol in the Listerine. He also said that perfume and cologne if alcohol-based can also be picked up for their alcohol content. Therefore any device that is attached and picks up the alcohol content in sweat may actually also pick up the alcohol in cologne and perfume. Those are just some of the issues that we need to examine as a select committee. As I have said the Labour Party supports the bill.