Clendon DavidDAVID CLENDON (Green): This is just a brief call to reiterate our support for this bill. The point has been made that currently we have 50-year-old legislation that is no longer fit for purpose and is enabling a probably excessive intervention to the term of a 2-year detention period that has too few safeguards to protect the well-being of the people whose rights to make decisions on their own behalf are being taken away from them. It seems that the focus of this new legislation is much more about how quickly we can return people to a condition where they can make their own decisions about their own treatment.The threshold within this bill for compulsory treatment is set very high and that is as it should be. Many of these people will be in a situation where in fact their lives are at stake directly as a result of ingesting substances or of the behaviours associated with that. So although the threshold is high we do think that this legislation strikes a much better balance between obliging people to undertake treatment that is necessary to their well-being and protecting their human rights and ensuring that there is not an overly draconian intervention if you like from the State.I thought one of the most useful submissions was from the Addiction Practitioners' Association Aotearoa New Zealand. It scoped out the breadth and the depth of the situation out there in terms of treating people with these very very severe addictions. It both highlighted the shortcomings in the existing legislation and also pointed out some of the key principles and what will emerge as practice under the new legislation. It also rang a few bells. One that the association particularly referenced—and it has come up before—is that we can have good legislation but it will only succeed if it is properly resourced. Currently we see 70 to 80 people a year being treated under the existing rules. We could expect that to increase to about 200 people a year. There needs to be an investment into ensuring that this much-improved legislative tool will get better outcomes and the only way to ensure that is to make sure that it is properly resourced. The association expressed some concern that it was not evident to it at least exactly where the funding would be channelled and I think that is a fair challenge. In the spirit of goodwill I do think that given that this bill seems to have Parliament-wide support there will be a serious and determined effort to make sure that the funding does get to the place where it can do the most good and where we can see much better outcomes than we have.I have a great admiration for people who work in the field of addiction. They are dealing with people who are at their very worst and those must be incredibly difficult people to deal with. Frankly I do not believe I would be someone who could work in that environment working with those people. Through the level of patience the level of compassion and the level of commitment to getting a much better outcome for those people they must be very special people working in this environment and I do hope we continue to resource them to enable them to get their work done and to get it done well.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.