Clendon David: Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 15 March 2016. Volume:712;Page:9714. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): On behalf of the Greens I am pleased to reiterate our support for the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill to go to select committee for a good investigation there which I am sure it will receive. The point has been made and I will not labour it that the legislation this will replace does date to 1966 and that since that time our understanding of addiction is very different. There are many more substances it would seem to which one can become addicted. Our understanding of what constitutes appropriate treatment has changed.As my colleague Kevin Hague mentioned a shift away from a punitive regime to one genuinely focused on treatment is entirely appropriate. I think those are all things that this bill seeks to achieve. Sadly what has not changed of course is that it would seem that there is still a need to have a legislative power to compel people to take treatment if they are in such a state of mind that they are unable to make those decisions on their own behalf as an option of last resort for people who either lack family or community support or indeed have rejected that in the depths of that addiction.I should just say in passing that I have the greatest admiration for people at the sharp end of this sort of work who work with severely addicted people. I think you would have to have a more than usual quality of compassion because people in that very degraded state would not be the most attractive people to get up close and personal with I believe. It is a credit to those folk who do this work day in and day out that they manage to pick people up out of that pit and help them on to a better path.The Law Commission in 2010 issued a report on which this bill is based and established a number of key principles which we hope to see and indeed there is evidence of them being embedded in the text of the bill. For example there is a very high threshold for compulsion and that is as it should be. It is an extraordinary intervention in a person’s life and it is against their rights in a sense to compel them to take treatment and so the threshold needs to be high and I think this bill does do that. The notion of limited duration—8 weeks—seems to make a great deal more sense than 2 years which does seem excessive. One would hope that after 2 years a person may be in much better shape to make their own decisions. Also there is the notion of protecting human rights of course and the idea that the compulsory treatment should lead directly on to a pathway—that people are not simply brought out of crisis and then abandoned but that there will be an ongoing pathway for them to pursue a voluntary course of treatment for as long as that takes.In terms of protection of rights it would seem the bill does make some efforts to address that. I like the fact that there is a clear definition of exactly what constitutes severe addiction so that those people doing that assessment can make as sound a judgment as can be made. The bill defines clearly what treatment is and excludes certain things that on a bad day may be deemed treatment but in fact would look more like punishment. There are criteria around which the compulsion may be determined to be the appropriate way to go: proof of severe addiction severely impaired judgment and that appropriate treatment is available because of course it makes no sense to compel someone to a course of treatment if in fact there is nothing available to them. One would hope there always would be. So there are these fairly high bars set and a degree of principle underpinning that.We understand that of course the legislation does allow for some use of force if people are unwilling to be taken to a place of assessment or a place of treatment and there are some safeguards around that. I am particularly pleased to see that the treatment centres will be listed in the Crimes of Torture Act as places of detention and therefore subject to the “OPCAP” the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and so the national preventative mechanisms—the Human Rights Commission the Ombudsman and so on—will have oversight of these treatment centres and I think that is an appropriate thing. As I say these will be some of the most vulnerable people in our community when they are in this condition and of course it is appropriate that we have the highest order of monitoring of those sites where they will be treated.So I will simply finally say that if we seriously wish to reduce the number of people who will fall into this category of severely addicted we need to look very hard at the current resourcing of community-based drug and alcohol treatment. I suspect that there is scarcely a provider in the country that has no waiting list and is properly resourced. I would encourage all of us to take that issue very seriously. Thank you.