Kay Elson (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very grateful to be given the opportunity to speak about The winnable war on drugs and the impact of illicit drug use on our families. Firstly, I would like to sincerely thank the Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, Bronwyn Bishop, for her valuable time and expertise in taking a down-to-earth and honest approach towards a genuine attempt at winning this growing and serious war, which involves our vulnerable Australian drug addicts. All members of the committee were committed right from the beginning to having a workable position and making recommendations that could make a real difference in winning this enormous battle. We are all very grateful to the hardworking, efficient secretariat, who were so dedicated to reaching such a positive outcome. A big thankyou to each and every one of you.

We received 188 submissions, and I personally want to thank all the people who made those submissions for their contribution to the positive outcomes of this report. It was a very humbling experience to listen to the witnesses who gave evidence at our hearings. I have great admiration for the many family members and reformed and current drug addicts who bared their grief and real-life experiences so we could see firsthand the enormous struggle they have each and every day. We owe it to them to ensure that this report makes a real difference in helping them to win this battle. I will do all I can to see the government of the day adopt all 31 recommendations.

In taking evidence, we found there was clearly an issue that has to be addressed very urgently, and that is the need to have a nationally based helpline so that family members, when they know they need help urgently, can ring a given number and be given a list of help groups within their own area. As it stands now, when you want to make that first phone call, there is not too much positive information about where you should go next and who can help you. Having a national helpline would help those families who need to access urgent support straightaway. People who want to get off drugs may only have a window of opportunity that lasts 24 hours. If they do not get help within the first 24 hours, they may go back to their drug taking because there was no-one there to give them instant help and say, ‘Go here and get this done straightaway,’ or, ‘Here are the numbers that you should access to get that important assistance immediately.’

An important recommendation of the report is the call for medical studies of babies of drug-using mothers. We have never had any extensive studies that show the ongoing health and mental effects of drug taking on our next generation—innocent young babies who are brought into this world by mums heavily on drugs. Another important recommendation is random breath testing to check for people driving under the influence of drugs. We have had an enormous increase in accidents on our roads, and evidence has proven that we need to take this issue of drug use and driving very seriously, so I highly commend that recommendation to the House.

An important aspect of this inquiry was that there were a lot of submissions and a lot of words spoken on harm prevention. I am 100 per cent certain that all across Australia we have to send a very clear message from our governments to our children about the importance of harm prevention. We do not want to send the mixed message of harm minimisation, because a lot of young kids think that means that you can take drugs on weekends but not through the week. They think that, if you try drugs, especially party drugs and recreational drugs—those awful terms we hear—you can actually leave them alone through the week. But we all know that that is the start of being a full-blown drug addict. So I highly recommend that we look at that.

Some rehabilitation centres have a policy that you cannot rehabilitate an addict and you cannot let one come into your facilities unless they want to be rehabilitated. Anyone who has had drug problems within their family knows—and we heard this evidence before our committee—that those poor addicts do not have a mind of their own. They are being controlled by a drug, so they do not really know whether they want to be rehabilitated or not. We should be giving them the opportunity of being drug free for a couple of weeks while they regain some of their thinking, not denying them access to drug rehabilitation centres. We owe it to our young Australians not to fund a drug industry which promotes harm minimisation. We should be sending a very clear message that harm prevention and treatment are the ultimate aim for making a person drug free.

The most potent messages from this report are the personal stories submitted to the inquiry, and they reflect the struggle, the hurt, the damage and the hope. Today I want to reflect on some of those personal messages because I think they tell the real story. It hits home that it is not politicians giving a message but people actually crying out for help. This one young drug addict mum, when talking about her six-year-old daughter, said:

She must have witnessed me using, she made gestures of putting a pen into her arm, like a syringe. She was found to have an old break in her right leg, broken elbow in three places, depressed skull fracture and a broken wrist before starting school.

There are the grandmothers who are left looking after their grandchildren at a time when they should be retiring and enjoying their life after raising a family. One grandmother said:

Imagine you are three years old.

You wake in the morning and your mother is in bed asleep. You cannot wake her. You are very hungry. There is no food in the cupboard or the fridge. Your brother and sister have gone to school. You eat dry dog food from the bowl on the floor. You get out all your toy cars. These are the only toys you have so you sit in your room for the next 4 - 5 hours playing obsessively with the cars.

… Your mother and her boyfriend are in the kitchen. You are not allowed in there. They are smoking dope. You do not like the smell. You play in your room with the cars. Your mother brings you some burnt food for dinner. It tastes awful but you are very hungry so you eat it. Later you will get some more dog food when your mother is asleep again. The dog food tastes good.

A teenager said:

Imagine ...

You have grown up and lived with violence since you were born. Your mother delivers drugs to people in the neighbourhood and to schools transporting them in your stroller … You watch your mother through three drug addict, abusive and violent partners. You see her bashed and abused time and again. You watch pornographic videos and see pictures of your mother and her partner naked on the walls of the house. You are forced to live in a caravan in the backyard with drug addict men, friends of your mother and her partner. They abuse you but you can’t tell anyone.

… By the time you are 18yrs you will have been expelled from three schools and have been in and out of a Juvenile Detention Centre several times. You will be addicted to drugs, petrol sniffing and alcohol. You will have a criminal record. At 18yrs old you will be treated in the Courts as an adult. No one has ever taught you how to be one.

This is from a drug addict—and this is a very clear message on harm minimisation—who said:

I survived harm minimisation, because it literally threatened to destroy my life and my family’s life through the messages that it can implant into that structure and the way it threatened to tear us apart, literally. It was almost like that was its objective; it did not want me to escape my addiction, it wanted me to stay stuck there.

I think the final quote hit home. This is from a parent—and a lot of parents go through this silently—who said:

Through conflict about the drugs and the subsequent lifestyle including some criminal activity my son chose to live away from the family home. At the time we were relieved and grateful for the peace until eventually he was brought home by friends who could see his downward spiral and knew he needed to be cared for. He weighed 45 kgs, by now the father of a one year old son who I was helping to raise. The heart break of watching his toddler son try to rouse his dad as he lay drug riddled on the couch was too much to bear. My son would slowly raise his arm and tousle his son’s hair, the deep love fighting against the grain of the addiction.

I learnt to live with my fear. I was fearful he would die; he would be bashed, hurt in an accident, attacked by other drug users, jailed, bashed by police or just disappear. My body jarred with the sound of a siren, a newsflash, a sudden thud ...

My grieving began. I grieved for his lost potential, his lost personality, his own peace, and my wants for him as a person. Constantly I have had to re-evaluate my own values, I have let go of my need to have a house with walls intact, furniture that matches, and my own career and I have peeled back the layers to value the person, to value keeping him alive at all costs.

I would like to close on that particular remark because this is what this report is all about: winning the war on drugs. I hope that all governments around Australia take the time to read this. It is a most positive report and one that could make a big difference to all families and drug addicts in Australia.

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