Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before the member for Forde leaves the House I draw to his attention a few facts. The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at the University of New South Wales has found that between 200,000 and 500,000 Australians a year cannot access addiction services, because they are underfunded and unavailable. I'd like the member for Forde to think carefully what this testing could actually mean in his community. This testing could mean that somebody on Newstart who has had two positive drug tests is referred to a counselling service when they don't want to be referred to a counselling service and they take the place of someone who is ready and willing to engage in that counselling. We absolutely know that places in those counselling services are not available in the numbers that we need them to be available to treat this as a health issue.

That's only a small part of why I don't support the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Drug Testing Trial) Bill 2019. I don't support this bill on that first premise. Anyone who has ever dealt with counselling services of any kind should understand that psychologists are not a magic pill taken to cure all ills, that it requires the person to seek support and that a prerequisite for any improvement to occur is willingness on the part of the person who needs the support. So setting up a system where we're going to mandate those referrals is destined, for many, to absolutely fail. Worse than that, they'll have taken the place of someone who was ready and willing and for whom that support might have ended in successful outcomes. So that's my first premise.

My second premise as to why I don't support this bill is that this bill has been brought into this House absolutely evidence-free. The member for Forde suggested that the member for Barton—possibly because she's female—was just being emotional in her objections to this bill. Well, perhaps he needed to read the dissenting report by Labor senators, because, if he had, he would know that the experts asked for this bill not to be supported. They do not want to see this trial occur.

The list of those experts starts with the Network of Alcohol and other Drugs Agencies. They believe that the bill is not supported by current evidence. They say:

… the New Zealand government's drug testing trial among welfare recipients as a pre-employment condition returned a detection rate in that population much lower than the proportion of the population estimated to be using illicit drugs in New Zealand as a whole.

That begs the question: why would you therefore target this group in the community for mandatory drug testing? It's built on a non-evidence-based notion that people on Newstart are more likely to be using drugs. The member for Forde also repeatedly referenced drugs and alcohol. There is nothing in this bill that suggests testing for alcohol. So the notion that it's about drugs and alcohol is a furphy—an absolute furphy.

Dr Kate Seear, Professor Suzanne Fraser, Professor David Moore and Associate Professor kylie valentine said:

As senior researchers with longstanding expertise in social policy issues relating to alcohol and other drug use, our assessment is that the bill is poorly conceived and counterproductive …

Another expert body, the Western Australian Network of Alcohol and other Drug Agencies, said:

Expert consensus, as demonstrated through a multitude of submissions to the previous two inquiries on the topic, indicate significant concern that the trial will:

The list goes on and on.

This is not an evidence based decision. This is an ideological decision. It's an ideological piece of legislation. It is an ideological trial. It has not come from evidence that this trial will give us the outcomes that the member for Forde believes it will. It's that simple. The people of Logan are the ones who are going to be involved in a process that has no evidence base—in fact, if there is evidence, it says that this shouldn't happen. So it's counter to evidence and absolutely counterintuitive.

I do want to go to the crux of the matter for me, and that is: there's the evidence; there are the experts; you've heard and will hear speakers recount those experts' opinions in this debate. But I cannot get past the fact that this is the third time that it has been to this House. Twice it's been rejected, because experts have told us that it's not a good idea, and yet here it is again. It's from the same government who, in their 2014 budget, thought that a six-month waiting period for all new claimants under the age of 30 for Newstart or youth allowance was appropriate. It's the same government who thought that poor people could wait six months before they accessed support. It is the same government that can't put together a crisis in homelessness and a problem in the space around Newstart and youth allowance. They can't figure that out. This six-month wait included a requirement to demonstrate appropriate job search and participation in employment services for up to six months. So they were going to have a mutual obligation for six months as a prerequisite to accessing support.

Debate interrupted.

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