Salesa Jenny: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSalesa Jenny: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 10 March 2015. Volume:703;Page:2048. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): It is with pleasure that I stand to take a short call on this bill the Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill. This is an important piece of legislation and one that Labour supports to its next stage. We know that the misuse of drugs and alcohol is a major driver of crime and criminal activity.I would like to share a story that is relevant to this bill and it highlights why it is important to have a bill like this. A lady who works in crime prevention was working with an offender who had a very long history of offending. His record indicated that most of his offending involved drugs or alcohol. He had already clocked up a very long history of criminal activity. This young man was on parole and one night he and two friends decided to go driving. He had never been tested for drugs or alcohol while he was on parole. In the course of this night as they were driving he unfortunately went across the middle line and went head on into another vehicle that was coming on the other side. The young man who was on parole was the driver and he was heavily under the influence of alcohol. This accident unfortunately resulted in his best friend who was a passenger passing away and his other friend who was also in the car is now confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.When the cost of incidents like this in human terms in misery in lives lost in health and disability support services and in dollars is considered the potential benefits of the preventive measures that a bill like this proposes seem to me to be well worth our serious consideration in this House.Research from the United States indicates that where high-risk drink-drivers are aware that the chances of their detection are very very high recidivism can be reduced by as much as 36 percent. The Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill will enable the Department of Corrections and the New Zealand Police to require community-based offenders and bailees—the individuals who are subject to the conditions prohibiting the use of drugs or alcohol—to undergo drug and alcohol testing in order to ensure that they are complying with the condition of abstinence in their sentencing.Each year around 5000 offenders are on community sentences and orders and approximately 15000 bailees have an abstinence condition imposed. However it is only in very very rare cases that abstinence conditions actually require testing. Testing for the presence of alcohol and other drugs to improve compliance with abstinence conditions is already widely used overseas in the United States and in the United Kingdom as well as in Australia. The evidence shows that it actually works. In Australia where they have been testing offenders for quite some time they have concluded that as a result of their experience targeted testing especially of those at the highest risk of reoffending is the most effective way of improving public safety around these offenders.Here in Aotearoa we have a group of offenders and bailees whose offending is at times directly related to their consumption of alcohol or taking drugs. The issue that this bill solves is that the current legislation does not provide clear authority that allows offenders or bailees to be tested in order to find out whether they are continuing to abstain from alcohol or drugs.Labour would like the committee to explore the threshold for reasonableness regarding the frequency of testing and in the context of the privacy and dignity afforded to those subjected to testing. We would also like to hear evidence about the use of alcohol monitoring technology and its effectiveness. We believe that the imposition and enforcement of a drug or alcohol condition play an important role in preventing reoffending and ensuring that our public are kept safe. We support this bill. Thank you.