Genter Julie AnneJULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I rise to speak on the second reading of the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill. I did not follow this bill through the select committee process. It was my former colleague Kevin Hague who was on the committee to hear the submissions. I do know that Mr Hague did think this was a very good piece of legislation and having looked at it myself the Green Party will be continuing to support the bill. My understanding is that they did have a very constructive process during the submissions process. As my former colleague said in his first reading speech it has been for at least the last 30 years that the alcohol and other drug treatment sectors have been calling for an update to the Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act which was of course enacted in 1966 which is 50 years ago. So this change is well overdue. Of course I would very much like to tautoko what the Associate Minister was saying in terms of taking a more wraparound approach to treating the problems of addiction. I think that fundamentally this bill takes at its heart a framework that represents a paradigm shift in how we deal with addiction. The previous Act which is being superseded by this bill—or will be hopefully—very much treated it almost in a punitive way. I think that throughout New Zealand in the 20th century—and not just in New Zealand but in other countries—we did have a tendency to treat drug issues with a criminal approach as a criminal problem rather than treating them as a health problem. What this bill recognises and what I think we would all do well to recognise is that addiction is a health issue and we must treat it as such if we want to get better outcomes.This bill not only updates the guidelines on compulsory drug and addiction treatment but also provides for reducing the time of detention. It has specific provisions around young people acknowledging the role that family and support people play. It provides for long-term community care for people who have a brain injury from addiction. I think that all of that is just as important. It is not just about the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and what we do when people are in the very worst state and might actually be at risk of dying from their addiction—in which case this bill sets up the guidelines by which they might be compulsorily put in care to help deal with that addiction. It also recognises that it is not just a personal individual problem that addiction takes place in a social environment and that if we do not address some of the surrounding factors around addiction then we will not be able to treat it. This reflects a wider paradigm shift about addiction which is quite interesting: that it is very much a social and environmental problem as much as something that individuals are susceptible to from particular substances. There are a whole lot of very interesting studies coming out that suggest that people in poor conditions—if they do not have good living conditions if they are under severe stress financially if they do not have solid social relationships—are far more susceptible to becoming addicted to a substance that may not actually result in addiction if people are living in a good context and have the basics. We see this in dealing with homelessness. It used to be the case that people would not provide homeless people with homes. They would say you had to deal with all of their addictions and problems first if the homeless people were indeed suffering from drug and alcohol addiction. But in fact the housing-first approach has demonstrated that we cannot even begin to deal with some of the other health problems that people are facing like addiction unless they have a warm dry secure place to call home. When we understand that addiction is something that happens in a social context it happens that we come up with far more effective ways of dealing with it. The Green Party is very supportive of and has long been an advocate for treating drug issues as a health issue in order to get far more effective results rather than treating it as a criminal issue. So we are pleased with this bill and the provisions that it has made particularly the reference to the support of family and community. There is a very tiny number of people who will qualify for compulsory committal. There is an incredibly high threshold and this bill actually introduces greater safeguards than what was in the previous Act. The Green Party can support the bill at the second reading. Thank you.