Goff Phil: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: Drug and Alcohol Testing of Community-based Offenders and Bailees Legislation Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 20 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7417. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): The Labour Party supports this bill. As is quite common at the Law and Order Committee when we have legislation that is evidence-driven and designed to increase the security of the community all sides of the House can work together on that legislation both to support it and to improve it as the Minister has acknowledged in his speech. I think that we have improved this legislation.Is the legislation necessary? Yes. I think it is common sense that if the Department of Corrections and the police can require offenders and those on bail to abstain from the use of alcohol or drugs then you have to have a law that can ensure compliance with the conditions that might be imposed by the court or might be imposed by the Parole Board. It is a nonsense to actually have the directive “You must abstain from alcohol and drugs.” and then not have a mechanism to ensure that the person those orders are placed upon is actually complying with it. So it was a matter of common sense that we should support this.I think it is well-known to the public and certainly to members of the House that alcohol and drugs are a major factor a major driver in criminal offending. I think that at the point of arrest nearly half—48 percent—of those arrested are affected at that time by drugs and alcohol. When you look at the people who are on home detention and community supervision that proportion of a half of those at the time of arrest becomes two-thirds of those given those sentences who are affected by drug or alcohol abuse or addiction. So drugs and alcohol are important drivers and if we want to stop recidivism and stop people offending while they are on bail or on community sentences then enforcing this provision is absolutely necessary.I think that the corrections system has an absolute responsibility to minimise the risk to the community. When you look at the number of people whom conditions are imposed on there is an awful lot of them. Some 5000 people on community sentences have conditions not to use alcohol or drugs and 15000 people on bail each year have that same condition. If we were going to apply testing to all of those people we would be talking about tens of millions of dollars and that is not going to be very practicable so what this bill does—sensibly I think—is target those who are most at risk. The whole Australian experience in this area is that when you target those most at risk you have the greatest impact. The American experience is that where a person is on a sentence and they think there is a high chance of being detected if they breach compliance with those conditions then the rate of reoffending goes down quite significantly and we all hope that that will happen with this bill.Most of the submissions on this bill were from organisations that were not opposed to having compliance—it is hard to be opposed to requiring compliance—they just wanted to make sure that the testing was reasonable and did not constitute harassment. I think that we have this well covered.We did not pick up many of the specific recommendations of the submitters but we very strongly supported the principles that are set out for the Chief Executive of the Department of Corrections and the Commissioner of Police when they make the rules on testing methods and procedures. Those principles are firstly that the testing should not be more than reasonably necessary; secondly that those tested should be afforded reasonable privacy and dignity; and thirdly that testing should be no more intrusive than necessary. If those principles are followed then I think the way in which this compliance is enforced will make sense and will be widely supported.Debate interrupted.