Salesa Jenny; Tisch LindsayJENNY SALESA (Labour—Manukau East): Thank you for this short call on the Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill. Labour supports this bill. The intent of this bill is very worthy. It is indeed well past time that we replace the outdated Alcoholism and Drug Addiction Act 1966—legislation that is at least 50 years old—with a piece of legislation that reflects modern approaches to the treatment of severe alcohol and drug addictions with current medical and health practices while protecting the rights of our patients. We welcome this initiative as part of a suite of tools to reduce the harm to individuals the harm to families and the harm to our communities.Compulsory treatment is a very serious issue and it raises concerns—especially the individual human rights concerns of folks who will undertake this compulsory treatment. This bill however gives us tools to assist in situations where an individual is considered to have a severe substance addiction but is not capable of giving genuine consent for treatment of their addiction. It enables patients to have their overall health stabilised their addiction treated their rights respected and their dignity restored such that they can make informed choices about ongoing treatment.Along with other members of the Labour Party however I have serious concerns about the implementation of this bill. We are concerned especially about the lack of resources which is already evident right throughout New Zealand's healthcare system. We are particularly concerned about the fact that our mental health services—and our addiction services in particular—are really overstretched. We know this because of the underfunding of the health sector that we have seen over the last 8 years—underfunding of at least $1.7 billion.Submissions to the Health Committee—that is a committee I do not attend as a committee member but in reading the summary of the submissions to the Health Committee we can see that they raised doubts over the capacity of our current health system to be able to deal with the extra services and the extra staffing that they would have to deal with just to implement this new legislation in addition to what they already have to deal with. Counties Manukau District Health Board is one of the largest district health boards in New Zealand and it covers the majority of the electorate of Manukau East which I represent. It made a submission to the Health Committee that stated that Specialist treatment interventions and programmes including those provided on a compulsory basis cannot improve the mental health of our population alone."We are mindful of the fact that implementation of this proposed bill may not—we hope—divert resources that should be deployed to the current mental health services and addictions sector away from that sector's focus on early interventions and more effective integration of the current primary health services as well as secondary care services.The Ministry of Health must ensure that there is adequate service infrastructure in place to implement this new legislation. We already hear and we know this from constituents coming through to our electorate offices of the fact that community mental health services—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair.Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 10 p.m."