Webb DuncanDr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Madam Chair. Tim Macindoe the previous speaker talked long and hard about sending a message and it's right. This bill if passed would send a message. It would send a message that we've given up and we've stopped caring. We both agree—and Mr Brown and I were in the Justice Committee on this matter—that this is a very significant problem but the only message that this bill sends is to the fearsome community that they should be afraid. It doesn't send a message that there's something that we can actually do.We know for a fact—and the statistics are there to be seen—that increasing penalties does not have a deterrent effect for people who are in these communities. There's a fallacy that these offenders are smart-thinking people who make calculated choices. They're not. By and large they are themselves addicted to substances and often mentally ill so they are in the thrall of the very substances that we're trying to address.So what we need—and as my Supplementary Order Paper 170 sets out—is to in every decision we make ask: how can we address the root of the problem? Rather than incarcerating someone for long periods of time we should first ask the question: is that the right response? So the first question should be: Well is this wrong is this social harm and is this cancer that blights society best addressed by incarceration or by addressing the mental health needs of this person?"So my Supplementary Order Paper accepts Mr Brown's eight years but says this: when determining the length of a sentence the court shouldn't automatically go through their usual tariff process which is to start at the midway mark and look for aggravating and mitigating factors. No the first question should be: "Does the offender need the health and mental health services?" so that we can make sure that those person's needs—the very things that caused this social harm—are addressed so that we break the cycle and not compound the cycle and compounding the cycle is exactly what incarcerating people for longer periods of time does. It's exactly what we don't want to do in this area of the law. What we need to be addressing in respect of drug law is a situation where we don't punish people for their own essentially illnesses and frailties but we address those through the health system.The other thing that my Supplementary Order Paper would do—again accepting if Mr Brown manages to get this eight years through—is to look at the availability when making a sentencing decision of access to the required health and mental health services for the offender. So if we have a humane prison framework which can address those things then all well and good—that might be the right place—but we know that the prison system we've inherited is not one that has the resources needed to do exactly that. So the place for these people is in community facilities that can address their health and mental health issues.The signal we should be sending is not "Look out these people are dangerous. They are harmful. We need to lock them away. We need to fence off part of our society."—and we know for a fact that this afflicts our Māori communities particularly so there's an element in there that Kiritapu Allan's Supplementary Order Paper 162 looks at. We need to be able to say "No these people remain part of our community even if they are incarcerated." We recognise they're coming back into our community and we want them to be useful healthy members of our society. So when we make a sentencing decision in any drugs area but especially in the particularly pernicious psychoactive substances we need to look at the offender's needs for health and mental health we need to look at the availability of those services and we need to make sure we place that person in the area that's best for them best for the community and best for society. That is the signal we need to send."