Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority Amendment Bill 2009 has been promoted, in particular, as a series of administrative changes. It has some quite serious implications and is worthy, I think, of some comment in that regard. These amendments—or series of administrative changes—were, quite properly, brought forward due to a considerable discourse within the management of ASADA that resulted in disputes about the privacy rights of athletes. There was a virtual zero tolerance process that some of the executive thought was appropriate but which was rejected by others. In the case of Thorpe, possibly that enthusiasm was acceded to. This bill is an attempt to bring forward a new regime that is expected, I think, to be more successful on both sides of the fence, and it warrants some discussion as to those matters.

I continue to have an involvement in the ownership and training of racehorses. I served for nine years on the committee of the Western Australian Turf Club and for two years as the chairman. Nowhere else, historically, has the issue of performance-enhancing drugs been more prominent than in the racing industry. Originally, it only applied to the animals. At the turf club, particularly under my chairmanship, we took a very strong position in regard to the taking of narcotic type drugs—so-called recreational drugs, a label that I do not agree with—by jockeys, track riders and other persons in the industry. An interesting aspect of the horseracing industry is that everybody is licensed, right down to the stablehand. As such, a simple punishment is to withdraw that licence. Of course, the consequence is that it takes away that person’s living. It is a very dramatic punishment. You can imagine a top jockey who, being delicensed for three or six months, might miss out on riding the Melbourne Cup winner, where five per cent of a couple of million dollars is a reasonable fee for the amount of time spent on the horse’s back.

When the first person so charged came forward—and it was for the use of marijuana—he was quite put out. He said, ‘I had my last puff on Wednesday. You tested me on Saturday, and I was clearly no danger on the back of the horse.’ Our response to that was to say, ‘You are an elite athlete. You are surrounded by young apprentices and others wishing to learn the trade of horse riding. It is a lousy example to set and you had better stop it.’ That process continued, and all of sudden our stewards started turning up at track work in the morning and asking certain licensed personnel to submit a sample. That really put the cat amongst the pigeons until the industry woke up to the fact that it was not smart to do it.

I make that point, because I have been enraged for a long time, considering the processes of the Australian Football League, the AFL: three strikes and you are out. Again, if one goes back to racing parlance, the odds of catching someone three times, considering it is a random testing process, are extremely wide, and, in my mind, it was an incentive to take a couple of risks in the hope that you did not get caught. That, of course, achieved high farce when I discovered that a 17-year-old draft pick could have a positive test to one of these drugs and such were the rules of the AFL that their parents could not be involved in the circumstances. You just cannot believe that, under the pressure of the players’ association, any organisation could accommodate those arrangements.

One of the situations that I want to bring to the attention of the House is that when one talks of performance-enhancing drugs there is a supposition that it will be some sort of steroid, blood-doping product et cetera. I suggest that, as one who back in 1976 had a very severe car accident that pulled one of his feet off, I do not run very well anymore. Maybe that is why I never run away! But the fact of life is that I have incessant pain in one of my ankles, and that stops me running. It is still accepted in human sport—not horse racing—that painkillers are an acceptable treatment. I well remember that on his retirement one of Australia’s better fast bowlers, Bruce Reid, commented that he had to give up the painkillers he was taking because they were sending him dizzy. One of the retired women’s champions who came back to the sport more recently gave as a reason for retirement at the time that the type of painkiller she was taking to address whatever physical injury she was suffering was affecting her health.

But you read in the paper that so-and-so is being given painkilling injections so he can run out on the football ground today. There is a tragedy behind that. Of course that has enhanced that player’s performance; but, more particularly, you are masking the pain signals that say, ‘Give your leg a rest,’ ‘Give your back a rest,’ or, ‘Give your arm a rest.’ That is what pain is all about. Imagine Bart Cummings stepping out one of his Melbourne Cup fancies on the day. Imagine if it were limping in the morning and he said to a journalist, ‘Don’t you worry; we’ll give it a painkilling injection before the race and it’ll go all right.’ There is the example of the death of Damien Oliver’s brother—yet to be resolved in the courts. It was killed and it killed the jockey in the process. In a trial the young horse he was riding showed positive; it was running with sore legs which had been masked by a fairly common treatment known as Butazolidin, and of course that young horse did not know to give its leg a rest and it broke. It rolled over and it killed the jockey, Damien Oliver’s brother.

Those sorts of matters are taken so seriously with animals but not so seriously with human beings. ASADA and the World Anti-Doping Code have no rules about performance-enhancing drugs. I note some tennis player picked up for taking the so-called recreational drug cocaine. I hear on the radio of research recently done in Holland by a woman who looked into the production of legal cocaine during the First World War. There was massive growth in production, which she suggested was because the troops were getting it. I quote that as published research—I do not want it to be attributed to me—but this raises the question of aggression: were the generals of that period, who I thought were murderers, feeding the troops this sort of treatment through a cup of rum or something like that if it gave them the courage and the stupidity to run out in front of machine guns and be mowed down? But, again, that then takes us to the step in the recreational area of the violence that is now so commonplace and that is frequently blamed on alcohol. I think there is a link between the two, and it is doubly worse. I am totally convinced.

In my previous life I was a hotel keeper for about 30 years, and as recreational drugs, as they are known, came to be part of people’s needs to have a good time—I never could work out why they needed it, but they did—I noticed an increase in violence. More particularly, as one who had to maintain order in his premises, I found that I was dealing with an entirely different type of person in a number of ways: there were people who could not be convinced to behave themselves and who were inclined to very violent acts. I was in the industry for 30 years and in 28 of those years I never saw anybody kick anyone lying on the ground, and yet that is a common factor and it is related to fatalities—but that is extending the debate somewhat.

This particular legislation gives me the opportunity to draw the attention of the House to a tennis player who has tested positive to cocaine and is doing time. He is banned from the sport for a given period notwithstanding that cocaine can be performance enhancing. All the original doping of racehorses was done with heroin and my old-time mentors reckoned the horses went pretty well on that. Elephant juice, which resulted in the tragedy of the horse that nearly died at the end of the Perth Cup, is only super-refined heroin and is so strong that if you want to give it to a horse you pull 10 millilitres into a syringe, squirt it all back and then pull in 10 millilitres of water, and the residual drug in the needle and around the edges of the syringe is sufficient to dope a horse and for it to run two miles when it is dead on its feet after a mile because it has no pain signals.

The point that I want to make is that while the tennis player got time for cocaine the AFL thinks it is okay unless you get caught three times. That is just outrageous and should never have been the case. To the credit of other sports like rugby, I do not think the ‘three strikes before you’re out’ rule applies, and nor should it. Human trainers, the football coaches and others, have become a little more responsible about resting players who have suffered injury. I can well remember reading years ago about a coach who said that when you go out on the football field you have to take a bit of pain. But, as I said, pain is a warning. Pain tells you to give yourself a rest. Pain is exhaustion and exhaustion is pain. Lactic acid suddenly discharging into the muscles of a horse or, I assume, a human being indicates that you had better give yourself a rest. Yet one of the most interesting doping techniques of recent times—particularly in the horse industry, and you wonder about others—involves bicarbonate of soda. We now have a testing regime for it, and it is very difficult because under a certain figure it occurs naturally in the animal. If you can get enough bicarb of soda into a horse within an hour of him racing, he will feel no pain because the bicarb of soda dilutes the lactic acid discharge. But the question is whether you should you do that to an animal and whether you should do that to a human.

All of these issues, if the ASADA people bother to read my speech, are issues to be addressed. It is wrong to give painkilling injections to an athlete and to be able to do so publicly. That was the case with Reid and with this tennis player. Reid said he was getting too dizzy and that he could not take any more of the stuff because his bowling arm had become so painful. That should not be, and I hope that at some stage ASADA and the World Anti-Doping Code recognise that painkillers of any format are as much a performance-enhancing drug as some steroids. In fact, if I were taking a practical view I would say that at some stage a person wishing to recover from an injury might think that they could enhance their repair with some steroid assistance that passed from their system, to their benefit, but that of course is a no-no. I wonder in practical terms whether a healing process is as unfair as a pain-masking process that can be applied on the day of the race—for humans but not for racehorses, dogs or other animals. In both cases I think it is really of grave concern and it is a huge gap in the entire process of assessing athletes so that they meet one another on the same level playing field. There just seems to be a thought that humans can run with pain masking of that nature. Most of these drugs are narcotic. Any of the usual injections you get to kill pain will have a narcotic base, and it is not good stuff.

The legislation is welcome. It creates a new administrative regime which will hopefully be proven, in time, as effective. But, if there is any weakening of the virtually zero tolerance system that should apply, it will not be successful. When someone is consuming drugs for whatever purpose I am not sure that they are entitled to privacy protection. It is said that ASADA wanted to look at Medicare records and find out what drugs people purchase, and that was considered a bridge too far. Getting further from the issue, a pharmacist well known to me and residing in my electorate said to me the other day that, when it comes to the recording of drug sales, if you need a particular antibiotic or other drug that is extremely expensive to Medicare the doctor has to ring up and get approval to prescribe it. But, if you are out prescription-shopping to get some of the somewhat lesser drugs that can be converted into quite serious recreational drugs, the doctors do not have to report that. This pharmacist thinks that is just dopey.

Outside of the ASADA issue, governments are worried about the cost of drugs and therefore make them reportable. But the kinds of drugs that people can go from doctor to doctor and get a prescription for are dangerous and can be turned into very dangerous products, yet there is no reporting process. A doctor has no responsibility to ring up as he issues a prescription, thereby creating a database that would say, ‘This person’s got five prescriptions today.’ The pharmacist gave me not only an example of that but an example of something that resulted in a fatality. So this is a chance to put that on the record. The advisers here might want to ring up and ask Medicare or the health commission why it is that doctors do not have to report those sorts of prescriptions, when as soon as the cost goes beyond a certain degree in terms of other medications they are obliged to do so.

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