Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): I am pleased to be able to speak to this bill the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill. It is one that I have not been actively engaged with particularly. It went of course to the Health Committee which was appropriate for a bill of this nature. But my interest in it has certainly been to the extent that I look at justice issues for the Greens. Obviously when we are talking about compulsory detention and treatment there are significant human rights issues involved and for that reason I have sort of tracked the progress of this bill with some interest. I have no doubt that our former colleague and friend Kevin Hague would have made a very useful and positive contribution as this bill proceeded through the Health Committee.The bill I thought had been around a long time but actually it has not been excessively slow. It was introduced in December 2015 and had its first reading in March last year. The select committee had a good go at it. It took about 6 months to come back from the select committee and that is not inappropriate for a bill of this significance I think.What is blindingly obvious of course is that the existing legislation that this bill replaces was seriously out of date—it was 1966 legislation. There was broad and deep agreement that that legislation is no longer fit for purpose. Among other things it enabled the committal—effectively the detention—of people for compulsory treatment on the say-so of two medical practitioners but neither of those two practitioners were obliged to have any sort of specialist knowledge or experience as drug practitioners and that was seen as an obvious flaw in this. It is a highly specialised area of treatment and medicine I guess and it is appropriate that the new bill does put that right. In future it will be required that at least one of the medical officers be a specialist practitioner in this area.The 1966 legislation allowed for a 2-year committal of a person which we know by modern standards is far in excess of what is reasonable. These are very acute conditions we are dealing with—people who are unable to make decisions on their own behalf and those sorts of conditions ought not to be prolonged. Certainly it would be unusual for somebody to be retained in that situation for a period of 2 years. The legislation I believe now talks of an initial period of some 8 weeks and that is a much more appropriate period of time.Again the 1966 legislation required a court process which was somewhat cumbersome slow and often quite daunting for people who were already in an unhappy situation of needing potentially to deprive somebody of their freedom—of their freedom of choice. It is unhelpful in these as I say very urgent and acute situations for there to be a slow or protracted court process and again this legislation does away with that.Overwhelmingly the feedback that came particularly from the submitters to the select committee was that there were insufficient and inadequate safeguards for the people who might be subject to this sort of legislation in terms of protecting their human rights and protecting their well-being. I guess it reflects sort of the cultural norms in 1966 but the world has moved on since then in all sorts of ways. Culturally and in other ways we are now perhaps a little more enlightened in our understanding that these people are actually in their own way victims—they have a health condition. They are not necessarily criminals although of course sadly drug addiction is often also a driver of criminal offending. But substantially we want to move away from the notion that we are dealing with criminals; we are dealing with people who have severe health problems and the new legislation does recognise that.I mentioned some of the submitters—Community Alcohol & Drug Services Auckland (CADS) made some very useful contributions in submitting on this bill from a very informed position. It is engaging with these people day to day and I have to say that I have the greatest respect and regard for people who work in the area of addiction because they are seeing people and dealing with people who are at their worst frankly—people and conditions that for a lot of us would be very easy to dismiss or write off frankly. Personally I think I would struggle to engage with some of these people—they are in a dreadful situation. I do really respect the work that is done by the people in these various agencies who see through that who just see a human being in need and seek to provide some service to them.The legislation as I said has had fairly rigorous attention from the Health Committee. It had a lot of submitters. As I have said CADS was in there as well as organisations like JustSpeak and the Wellington Community Justice Project. A lot of the district health boards submitted and various other entities and organisations large and small—the Privacy Commissioner. And it is appropriate that there should be broad and deep submissions on this legislation because on the face of it it is actually quite Draconian. It is the State saying to a person: You're not fit to make decisions on your own behalf and therefore we are going to detain you and subject you to compulsory treatment." That is fairly heavy-handed but it also sadly is necessary.What I particularly like about this legislation—it is Draconian; it is heavy-handed but it has a very clear statement of purpose. That is one of the primary defences I think of human rights in this bill. The purpose clause of the bill very clearly states that the primary purpose in this sense is to protect people from harm. That is a very significant sort of a stake in the ground to say that the key outcome we are looking for is to protect this person or these people from harm. The purpose clause goes on to say that it is to "facilitate a comprehensive assessment of their addiction;"—so to have a very very clear understanding of the nature of the addiction and what you are dealing with in terms of this person or of the health status of these people.The legislation—the process rather; the compulsory treatment—is intended to stabilise their health. Clearly the focus is very much on working out how we get these people back to a situation as swiftly as possible in as timely a way as possible so that they can then take responsibility for themselves and ideally then morph away from this compulsory status and into a voluntary programme. There is a phrase in the purpose clause: "protect and enhance their mana and dignity and restore their capacity to make informed decisions about further treatment and substance use;". One would hope that would be a discontinuation of substance use because that obviously is the end goal for most of these people—to get them away from these very destructive drugs that are doing such terrible things to their health and well-being.The other approach if you like that this bill takes which I particularly admire is that it outlines a set of principles. You are going to get a lot of different circumstances; a lot of different situations that people are going to be in. It is very hard to legislate for every particular circumstance or situation that might arise when you have got such a complex area as mental health well-being to the point that we are demanding compulsory treatment. So by establishing a set of principles I think it is a very powerful model to say: "OK these are the principles that will guide decision making by practitioners by decision makers." I think it is a very robust and appropriate form for determining exactly how people will be treated rather than trying to be too prescriptive about it because prescription typically will fail. With the best will in the world it is hard to imagine 20 to 30 years in advance and that may well be the life of this legislation what circumstances might occur.The principles are very clearly outlined. I think they are robust. For example clause 12(a) states that where compulsion is necessary the level of coercion used must always be the least restrictive possible. So we intrude or intervene in a person's life as little as we must do to achieve the ends—the outcomes—we are looking for. The views of the patient and the patient's principal caregiver should be ascertained and taken into account. It is a very thoughtful approach. It is one that recognises that although these people temporarily are not in a good situation not in a position to make decisions about their own treatment or well-being it gives the maximum scope to engage them and their caregivers in their treatment and in the compulsion.So I think this is a well-thought-through bill it is well framed and the Greens will be pleased to continue to support it."