O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I am very pleased to take a call on this Substance Addiction (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Bill. Can I begin by thanking everyone who actually came to our Health Committee to speak. We have just heard in the contribution from the member who has just sat down Poto Williams just a small hint of some of the feedback that we got which I think we found incredibly constructive in two ways. First and foremost to help us with the bill itself but also just to I suppose tease out some of the wider issues in the whole substance abuse space. My thanks go out to all of those officials who have helped us to get through and of course to the Associate Minister of Health himself for actually introducing the bill into the House. It has been noted in the Associate Minister's speech that this is an update from a bill in 1966 so it is a timely review. I want to acknowledge too the work of the committee members who have suggested that in 3 years' time we review what we are doing here. I thank the Associate Minister as well for his support of that. I think that it will make a difference to allow this to evolve. I think this is a difficult space for obvious reasons but the Associate Minister as well in the area of evidence around the efficacy of compulsory treatment highlighted that there is still a lot of debate and so I think that it is important that we evolve with that. I will add my voice to those of a lot of the submitters and it is somewhat articulated in the select committee report around that question of ensuring that the resourcing is aligned. I know by the work that the Associate Minister and others are doing that they can see the importance of that. Look first and foremost I think it is really important to stress as I did in the first reading that this is not a bill targeting those people with effectively a low level of what most people would anecdotally think of as substance addiction. This is for people who are at the absolute top end of addictive behaviour where their behaviours are such that they are causing injury to themselves—and potentially to others but fundamentally to themselves—and where they have no conceptual ability to actually engage with treatment. For those who have expressed some concern that this is the heavy arm of the State" I would certainly encourage them to get into the early pages of the bill where we did not actually make any changes because I think that the criteria laid down about who this applies to is actually really really clear. Clause 7 at the moment talks about the criteria for compulsory treatment. As you might expect the person has to have a severe substance addiction. Really important are subclauses (c) and (d) and I think it is fundamental actually to a rather compassionate approach of the Associate Minister and the Government that the compulsory treatment is deemed necessary but fundamentally that appropriate treatment is actually available. There is no point in compulsorily pulling someone into treatment that does not exist. That is a challenge for all of us in this House—for the Government and certainly in the health sector—to make sure that those services are available. The other important element too—and this comes up in clause 8 again unchanged—is I really want to stress to people that this is not about low-level substance addiction. We are talking here about people who are featuring at least two of the following: one is what they call neuro-adaptation. The long and the short of it is that a person's use of drugs is such that their bodies become totally dependent on it and are able to function at times what appears quite normally. Secondly they have to have a craving for the substance and efforts in the past to control have been unsuccessful and as I noted a bit earlier they are causing harm to themselves. It was even mentioned in an earlier speech that you may end up with someone who is actually in their palliative space and now you are talking about something absolutely serious. That said like any select committee process we have teased things out of it. We wanted to be really clear around a couple of things. The first was what an approved provider is. We thought it was best to align that with existing Acts; we did not feel that we had to double things up. We have removed references to age. The initial draft of the bill that came through had a lot of mentions of 17-year-olds. Again we thought let us just line that up with existing legislation. A previous speaker mentioned the use of facilities. We wanted to be very clear about where it was appropriate for these people to be held and treated. We did not want any ambiguity particularly if those people for example are being pulled into police cells and stuff because they have done some harm to themselves. We wanted to be clear that these are not appropriate facilities. There are a whole lot of other suggestions and changes too around the oversight of the Ministry of Health and so on. But I am going to leave it there. I know other members of the committee on all sides of the House will elaborate further. This is a very good bill and I recommend it to the House in its second reading."