Fiona Scott (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In my adjournment debate on 17 March this year, I addressed parliament about the scourge of ice right across our communities and what it is doing to devastate families all across Australia. Sadly, as I highlighted in that speech, the uptake of ice in Western Sydney is outstripping uptake in other areas of the country. Increases in ice related crimes in St Marys LAC alone are seeing an arrest every week and the increase of crime in the Penrith local government area is up eight percentage points on the New South Wales state average. As I said in that speech, we cannot stand idly by and watch our community drift into an ice haze.

I stand here today representing a community that I am incredibly proud of. After that speech, I had over 100 service providers representing 30 organisations attend a community forum at Werrington, where we went through an extensive phase of focus groups to identify the problem for our community and how we could work together to solve this issue. The community came up with a report which we called the Ice Meltdown. In the Ice Meltdown report, we looked at six key areas. These were the awareness and understanding of the issue of ice; how we can prevent people from using ice; treatment and what is needed; post rehabilitation services so people do not go back to using ice; policing and justice; and then, of course, the integration of services where, in many ways, siloing between state and federal jurisdictions, philanthropic causes and local government has meant that service providers are not necessarily working together as well as they could.

On 29 May, we presented this report to the National Ice Taskforce and to the Prime Minister. I would like to thank Detective Superintendent Tony Cooke, commander of the New South Wales Police Drug Squad, for attending our forum to then re-present this report back to the community. This report is the work of the people of Western Sydney and the people of Lindsay, whom I represent.

I would like to thank people like Maria Murray from Sarina Russo Job Access, who agreed, saying that the solution is a collaboration between all community stakeholders. Merinda Voight from Barnardos simply said 'thank you'. The point is that the solution was partly reached because everybody was working together. Further, the success of the report is fully owed to Laura Barr from Break Thru Family Mental Health Support Services, June from Southern Aftercare, Glenn Hughes from the Western Sydney Local Health District, Joanna Dennis from the Nepean Blue Mountains Primary Health District, Liz Ray from the Nepean Blue Mountains Primary Health District, John Magee from the New South Wales Police Force and Joy, Impiombato from the Nepean Community Neighbourhood Centre. (Time expired)

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