Little Andrew; Rurawhe AdrianThird ReadingHon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Health): Thank you Madam Speaker. I earlier presented to the House a legislative statement on the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill. I move That the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill be now read a third time. As the House has heard this bill amends the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 and the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013. It makes amendments to enable drug-checking services to operate and to operate without the threat of criminal liability for both those operating the drug-checking services and also for those who host events or organised events at which drug-checking services are available.The reason we're doing this and doing it under urgency is because it is December. The music festival season for the forthcoming summer is upon us. We know that there are festivals organised music events organised. We know that the cohort of people who go to those festivals tend to be younger people and many of them are at an age where they are experimenting with substances many of them illicit substances and some of them are substances the safety and security of which is not really known. So we accept the reality that this is going to happen. People are going to turn up to these events with illicit substances. We know that some of those substances are at risk of a lack of safety and causing harm to the potential user of them and we want to minimise that harm and we want to make the ingestion of those substances or the risk being taken with the ingestion of those substances as low as possible and therefore promoting greater public safety. That's the motivation for it. This is a time-limited bill so it will self-repeal within 12 months but my commitment to the House is that within that time we will bring back a piece of legislation that is a more thoroughgoing solution to that particular policy problem with a view to having that passed in time for this time next year and that will come under the full scrutiny of the House. Members opposite have raised legitimate questions about whether this is the appropriate way to go about this with this particular policy challenge and I get that and I do make the commitment that we will have a draft law that will come back to the House which they will be able to give full scrutiny to. But in the meantime we have to deal with the very real challenge that that festival season is upon us. We have outfits that have operated already in previous summer seasons as drug-checking services but they are facing a heightened risk or a growing risk of criminal prosecution—or at least the volunteers who operate the actual services—and we want to take that risk away from them. We also want to take the risk away from the event organisers because we think it is important that more event organisers particularly those who are attracting that young cohort—that young demographic—make these services available to provide greater safety for young people who are prone to wanting to experiment with and ingest these substances. Members opposite have raised a number of concerns some of which in my view are not relevant to what we are trying to achieve here. We can all cast moral judgment on those who would use illicit substances. We can all be horrified that some people might actually want to engage in activities that are on the edge of or outside the law but I think when it comes to the consumption of drugs and the health effects that go with that I would rather that we focus on taking a health approach not criminalising more and more people. We've done that for far too long and criminalised far too many people whose only crime really if you like is they've taken a risk a risk with their own health. For some of them they do fall into a bit of a hole of addiction and other kinds of reactions on their own part and actually what they don't need is a criminal prosecution; what they do need is some help and this is a further step in the direction when it comes to drugs in our community illicit substances mind-altering substances—to say actually offering help for health responses is way more effective and way more beneficial than simply another criminal prosecution another bed in another jail over another extended period of time. So that's why we have introduced this law and on that basis I commend it to the House.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to.