Anne Aly (Cowan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—First of all I want to very briefly commend the committee, the chair and the committee secretariat for the report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement's inquiry into crystal methamphetamine. As a Western Australian I feel that it would be remiss of me if I didn't bring the House's attention to the parts of this report and the findings of some of the hearings here about the inequitable distribution of funding for services, particularly for Western Australia. Of the Primary Health Network funding allocations per state and territory, Western Australia gets a total of $20 million—that represents 3.4 per cent for the northern suburbs, 3.4 per cent for the southern suburbs and 4.1 per cent for country Western Australia.

The committee came to Western Australia and heard there concerns that the National Ice Action Strategy funding had failed to meet target areas with the most severe illicit drug problems. The Palmerston Association said Western Australia is:

… not receiving a fair share of the national funds. We work on the basis of about 11 per cent of the share, given our population. We believe—and I am sure that the Department of Health could confirm this, because I may be wrong—that we are getting about nine per cent. That two per cent difference is a significant amount of money.

Indeed, it is a significant amount of money if you only consider per capita funding. But what this inquiry revealed was that Western Australia has a severe problem with crystal methamphetamine use, much higher than the national average. Usage figures in WA are actually double the national average and they are particularly high in regional areas of Western Australia.

The report notes that National Ice Action Strategy funding for Western Australia for the four years totals around $27 million compared to around $74 million for New South Wales and around $57 million for Queensland. The report draws very significant attention to this. This leads to one of the recommendations of the report, recommendation 11, where the committee recommends the Department of Health consider using 2016 census and the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program data to determine the allocation of National Ice Action Strategy funding for 2019-20 because that data very starkly shows the extent of the situation in Western Australia comparable to other states in Australia and comparable to the Australian national average.

I commend this report to the House and, once again, thank the chair for his hard work on this report as well as the deputy chair. Indeed, I reiterate the words of the chair in his presentation of this report and in the tabling of this report that it was done in a very bipartisan manner and I commend also the committee secretariat.

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