Williams PotoPOTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): I want to make a contribution. I want to touch on three main points in this particular piece of legislation. This bill sets out to support those people for whom substance and alcohol abuse is so problematic that it actually becomes life-threatening.This piece of legislation traverses a whole lot of significant issues and significant areas with regard to people's freedoms and rights. In that regard the select committee process was rather elongated because there were many issues that we had to traverse in order to ensure the proper safeguards were put in place. When you hold somebody against I guess their free will and require them to undertake treatment you must make sure you have got adequate safeguards in place.I want to start with the area of capacity and resources. It became very clear early on in the discussion and the debate around this piece of legislation that we had a concern in the health system about being able to fully engage in this service because we did not have enough fully qualified people to be able to provide the appropriate treatment from the first day that this bill is enacted. Some work will be required to bring people up to speed. The area of substance and alcohol addiction is so complex. It involves people with co-morbidities often mental health or other types of issues. The clinicians who are required to service this cohort of people—and we are not talking about a large group of people. It is somewhere in the region of maybe 200 or so a year. But the clinicians and the level of understanding required to treat that cohort of people is something that we are not fully able to facilitate currently in this country. So there will be some retraining required. On top of that the resource in terms of the facilities that we need to house and treat the people who will come under this legislation—we are not completely prepared for that to occur.What this has highlighted during the process of this bill is that not only are we not fully resourced in this significant area but all the way down the line where people could potentially receive treatment before they got to the level of being compulsorily required to undertake treatment a lot of the preventative work also is not in place. So there is a chain reaction of need all the way down the area of alcohol and substance abuse that we should be addressing in this country.The issue of taking somebody into care and then requiring them to undertake treatment was one that we spent quite some time dealing with. We decided to start as a base with the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act. The requirements under the provisions of that particular piece of legislation were our baseboard I guess. We looked at ensuring that when a person comes into the service they are able to be monitored by an independent group of people and we used the model of the district inspector which is currently used under the mental health legislation. But also provision was made to ensure that other independent monitoring was provided—that the patient the consumer of this service was also able to have some independent advice brought to the party and that their loved ones and their family members were also advised of the fact that the person was in treatment.Often when you are severely affected by substance abuse your relationships with your family members become quite disturbed and disrupted and you are not always in touch with your family. But having your family know that you are in this treatment also offers a safeguard to you. You know that there is an independent person who is monitoring your care from outside.So compulsion was an aspect that we looked at. Compulsion—to be required to undertake treatment means that your ability your capacity to make decisions about your own treatment is compromised. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the period of time that was required for somebody to be in compulsory treatment. I think the length of time that we settled on in the end was somewhere in the region of 56 days. We spent quite a bit of time talking about ensuring that the period was not too long because then it would become potentially a breach of someone's human rights and not too short so that the treatment could be effective and that at various points during that treatment period the patient has the ability to be tested to ascertain whether they are able to then provide consent for this treatment themselves.It is quite a comprehensive bill. The Health Committee was a very interesting select committee to sit on. There were some huge issues around freedoms which were discussed during the select committee process. We had several submitters who asked us to think very carefully about the area of compulsion the area of consent—being able to ensure that there was independent support and advice to this cohort of consumers. I think that we on the select committee did a reasonably thorough job of addressing those key issues. I do not want to hold up the passage of the bill. I commend it to the House.