David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the Australian government response to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement report on public communications campaigns targeting drug and substance abuse.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

The government's response to the PJCLE report indicated support for the recommendations of the committee. I'm a member of that committee, but I'll be quite frank: I thought the recommendations when it came to public communications regarding drug and substance abuse were largely unhelpful and didn't address one of the most significant problems that we've seen, which is communications that have come out of the Australian Federal Police.

Recommendation 2 was that future Australian government communications campaigns include the following characteristics: targeted messages to key cohorts; messages that reflect the lived experience of illicit drug users and that use the experience of trusted people; providing information on addiction treatment off-ramps; and including a national schools element. I'm not suggesting that those aren't useful considerations. But one of the key things that were missing was a clear consideration of how the AFP's previous communications and often quite expensive public campaigns on drug use have been utterly without any kind of evidence base. In saying that, I do note that there was a reference to the need for some considered research and quantitative and qualitative measures for the efficacy of communications.

The reason I raise these concerns is that the Australian Federal Police spent millions of dollars of public money running a campaign called Faces of Meth, and the Faces of Meth campaign was a rebranding—a shameless rebranding—of a US education campaign that commenced in the state of Montana. It shows shocking images of corpselike faces of people that are asserted to be addicted to methamphetamines. The purpose of the Montana campaign, which was obviously dreamt up in some small office in Montana, in the United States, was to shock people into not using methamphetamines.

Now, let's be clear: methamphetamines are dangerously addictive drugs and can drastically negatively impact people's lives, including significant addiction and behavioural responses. No-one's minimising the impact of methamphetamine. But the Faces of Meth campaign, which commenced in the Montana Meth Project and then ran in a series of states in the United States, was the subject of significant academic and research review in the United States. That research was publicly available at the time that the Australian Federal Police spent millions of dollars of public money on running the exact same campaign in Australia. Indeed, the exact same faces that were used in the US campaign were just replicated in the scare campaign being run by the Australian Federal Police. Millions of dollars of public money was spent on it—money that, therefore, couldn't be used for actually effective addiction programs, for treatment programs or for things we know work.

Worse than that: the research on the Faces of Meth project shows that it's not only not effective but also directly countereffective, particularly with young people or cohorts of people who are potentially considering taking methamphetamines. When they see the Faces of Meth advertising—the scare and fear campaign—it does two things. It increases interest in the drug and it decreases, particularly for young people, belief in the validity or credibility of public advertising on drugs. I know this because one of the key professors from the National Drug Research Institute at Curtin University told our committee this in evidence. Professor Lee said:

There are some studies in the US that relate to Faces of Meth, which the police have copied here. I think the Montana Meth Project is what it is referred to as, and there has been some outcome research. Young people in particular actually showed an increased interest in drugs. It actually advertises the drug. The tendency is to sensationalise and go to the very extreme of what drug use might look like, and young people are like, 'Well that's never going to happen to me,' so they don't connect with that message. But now they know that meth is a thing—that you can take it, that you can get it—and they start to get interested in it. So there is actually research from that Faces of Meth activity that shows that not only does it not reduce harms for users; it increases interest among young people. I think that is a huge problem.

All of this research was available to the Australian Federal Police before they rolled out the Faces of Meth campaign in Australia—all of the research that says it's not only not effective at reducing drug use but actually communicates to young people the availability of the market and that the government's not to be trusted in this space. The extreme images being shown by the AFP do not resonate with the experience of the majority of young people with drug-taking. Therefore, those extreme messages simply lead young people not to trust any of what might otherwise be credible information coming in public information campaigns.

I asked Professor Lee:

Do you think, at a minimum, there should be a requirement for law enforcement agencies, before they spend significant amounts of public money on communications about drugs, to actually have an evidence base for their communication strategy?

Professor Lee said:

Absolutely. Everybody should be using evidence based approaches. In particular, something so dramatic and expensive that it not only doesn't help but actually does harm is a waste of public money, at the very best.

I utterly endorse Professor Lee's comments.

I find it astounding, though, that nobody in government has sought to get any accountability from the AFP on this. It appears that the AFP just had access to a couple of million dollars of public money without ever having to go through any credible process to justify the expenditure. Even when it was identified as being actively negative and harmful advertising, nobody in government asked for an explanation from the AFP. The Attorney-General hasn't. The secretary of the department hasn't. Nobody has asked for an accounting from the AFP about not only their squandering of public money but the active harm that they caused in their Faces of Meth campaign. I think it goes to show the lack of intellectual engagement with these issues in the government and the lack of accountability for the AFP in their day-to-day projects and their use of public money.

Australia knows from history that fear campaigns don't work. We know from our own history that fear campaigns don't work. We know that from the campaign in relation to HIV. The studies have shown that the communications that worked and continue to work for HIV are not the Grim Reaper scare campaigns. In fact, they disengaged people. They didn't work for HIV. What worked was providing credible information from trusted sources that people could engage with and trust. How is it that the Australian Federal Police have not learnt this lesson? I don't know. How is it that the government doesn't seem to care about the waste of money and the dangerous and harmful use of public money by the AFP? I can't explain that either, but I can say this: unless the government and the AFP come to grips with these actual issues, not only will the AFP be ineffectual in this space but it will continue to cause harm. I would have thought that all of us could agree that that's a poor outcome.

Question agreed to.