Doocey MattMATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): Thank you very much Mr Chair. I'll just pick up where that last speaker Liz Craig left around the investment of $1.9 billion into mental health. I notice the health Minister's in the House today. So I'm looking forward—I don't think he's spoken on this bill yet so hopefully he might take the last call and confirm for the House today that every person who's referred to a drug treatment service at the discretion of the police will be seen in a timely fashion. It is interesting: they throw around the figure of $1.9 billion but when you break that down in fact there's only $44 million extra that went into drug and alcohol services in the last Budget. Ross Bell from the New Zealand Drug Foundation said drug services needed $150 million investment. That was before this bill.So it would be interesting for the Minister to take a call and maybe tell us a bit about the modelling of how much increased demand for drug treatment services this bill will stimulate where are those services and if Ross Bell from the New Zealand Drug Foundation is saying drug services need an extra $150 million before this bill went into law and they only got $44 million is he going to commit to that extra funding? While he's on his feet in the next call he might be able to answer a question of how much increased access to mental health and addiction services that new investment will be providing. I'm very much looking forward to that contribution this afternoon.I think for this bill for me it swings the pendulum too far. I think there's a real problem here that if you start to disentangle penalties or a punitive or a punishment from therapy you start to think that they're two separate things. In fact they're complementary. I'd like to give an example about that today. So when I did my clinical training I did a placement out in Lower Hutt—it was an organisation called WellTrust. Many people might know the name Pauline Gardiner who was a former member of Parliament in this Parliament. Her name is associated with the success of WellTrust.Now we were taking young schoolkids who had been caught smoking cannabis who normally would have been kicked out of school basically and part of the programme was that if they wanted to stay in school they had to go through a cannabis programme with us. Through drug testing they had to show a declining level of cannabinoids. What that programme showed me—because I was a trainee—was that in fact for some people the penalties are what drives them for their therapeutic outcome. These kids wanted to stay in school. In fact what was actually quite surprising to me and actually a lesson I took through my mental health career was in fact sometimes penalties give some people an excuse not to use drugs. These kids would constantly report back that they felt it gave them an ability amongst their peers to actually say Hey I can't use cannabis because I'm getting drug tested." and they didn't lose any face over it. In fact it was quite cool.I think it's very clear that for some groups of people if you take those penalties away there is not going to be a driver for them. What was quite alarming during the submission process of the select committee is that there doesn't seem to be much thinking at the back end of this law because how many times is a person going to go through this referral approach and maybe not turn up to a drug treatment clinic or actually not engage in it and not achieve the outcomes? Then they come cycling back around. As my colleague the Hon Paula Bennett alluded to is this going to just result in people laughing at the police when they pull them up around personal use of drug? You can actually pass a law but you know it's a bit bigger than some academic equation.What's going to happen out there is—drug users aren't stupid and this bill is actually quite alarming for parents of teenagers out there because as we know the teenage years are ones of pushing boundaries and they experiment and many young people in New Zealand will try drugs like cannabis—probably most—but actually most stop that and just carry on with their normal life. But what these drug users do very subtly is—the drug dealers are a similar age and they hang out in peripheral groups to where many New Zealand kids are going to be hanging out on a Friday and Saturday night. When they get pulled up by the police they'll only have a small amount on them because they're just introducing the drug to the young person and under this law they won't get prosecuted. They'll just get sent to a therapeutic approach. They'll have no interest in engaging in it they won't get anything out of it and they'll cycle back round. In fact we weren't even sure through the submission process whether there was going to be any joined-up data-sharing between the drug and alcohol services and the police.So what we've just got to be very clear on out there is what signals we are sending out into the community. There'll be plenty of parents who will be watching this tonight very concerned that in fact if their child starts hanging out with a group of people that are starting to use drugs and there's one person pushing it through that group the police are not going to have any way to stop that. That is concerning because in reality that's what's going to happen and those people are going to know that. They're going to play to the referee and they're going to play to the rules and I think that is concerning for many parents out there who are generally worried about their teenagers as they go through that very difficult time of growing into a young adult.When you look at the model the Prochaska and DiClemente clearly states that when someone wants to change their behaviour they move from a pre-contemplative stage where they say "Actually I'm not accepting the difficulties these drugs are causing in my life." then they might move to a contemplative stage where they start thinking "Actually this is going to affect me." It's not till they move to an action stage where they start thinking "Actually what differences do I need to make in my life?" Everyone in this House would've met people who said "In fact it wasn't till the threat of a criminal conviction it wasn't till my engagement in the criminal justice system it wasn't till my engagement with police that I actually realised I had to make a change or something was going to happen that wasn't good."That's actually what we're taking away here. It is complementary. A criminal justice approach and a therapeutic approach should be going hand in hand and I believe with this bill it is swinging too far the pendulum is. I agree with the direction but I don't think that back end of this policy is there yet. It's not joined up and the people who want to milk the system will. How hard is it going to be for our community police officers out on their beat—small-town provincial New Zealand—to hold these troublemakers to account?With the small time left I just want to acknowledge my colleague Simeon Brown for all the work he's done on synthetic cannabis. I mean I think he led the way. I was disappointed that the support for his bill got pulled by some of the Government parties. I think he is someone who really came to this House with a conviction and was able to get it almost there and in fact—Brett Hudson: Did he? How did he get in if he had a conviction?MATT DOOCEY: No no he didn't have his own conviction; it was conviction of his ideas. I just want to clear that up. Ha ha! But he was scuttled out of politics and I think that's disappointing. Thank you Mr Speaker."