Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

And obviously you are not going to have too many patrons coming in asking for drugs to be tested if they are destroyed in the testing process.

The second question is, what exactly happens when these drugs are tested and found to be contaminated? There are only two possibilities: contaminated or clean. Self-evidently, if someone knows a tablet is clean and they have already got some on board, there's a high likelihood they're more likely—they have an increased propensity—to take an additional one, thinking it's clean.

There is a greater concern about simple dose-related issues; MDMA is a toxic agent. People die of 100 per cent pure MDMA every year in most developing economies. What is the point of telling someone under the age of 20, with a still-developing frontal lobe, that the drug is safe and clean? What do you expect that person will do, apart from sharing it or taking more of it?

Now let's tip to whether it's actually contaminated. The drug is actually returned to the festival attendee to take back with them out into the festival. What would a young person do with a drug that has been tested as 'contaminated'? First of all, they have dropped a couple of hundred bucks on the pill, so they might want to get that money back from the person that gave them the pill in the first place. So next thing we have people roving around music festivals trying to identify the dealer or the supplier, to beat them up. Is that the conduct we want at a music festival? What about someone who slyly pops it back into the ziplock bag and onsells it, saying, 'I just got it tested over here and it's okay'—onsell it to try and reduce your losses?

None of these things were thought through appropriately by the Australian Labor Party. They just could not wait to egg on the chemist and the biochemist to get down to a music festival, pop up a shiny tent and start doing testing of illicit drugs. There's been no thought about these outcomes. I strongly support the Commonwealth for being very judicious about providing any support on Commonwealth land for these kinds of policy solo flights in illicit drugs.

I don't need to say it; the public knows that the coalition is deadly serious—through both supply and demand—about wiping out illicit drugs. Sure, we may never win that fight, but the Labor Party's white-flag approach to pill testing in music festivals is a fabulous manifestation of what is wrong with the progressive approach.

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