Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill (No 2)

Members, we come now to our final debate. This is the debate on clauses 1 and 2, which are the title and commencement.

Yeah, I’ll just take a brief call in regards to this. I guess there was an aspect that the Health Committee did discuss and consider, and that was particularly around the funding element of this bill. As we know, subsequent to this, the Government have come out and said that they’re actually going to be funding this legislation. I think that that comes as quite a surprise in terms of where the conversation was at the select committee, in particular.

I guess, in regards to the title of the bill, I just wanted to sort of float with the Minister a bit of a concept around the introduction of the “Publicly Funded Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill (No 2)”, because I think it is pretty significant that, in effect, this is about taxpayers’ money—hard-earned taxpayers’ money out of the pockets of hard-working Kiwis, people that are under considerable stress and pressure and anxiety and all of that in this country at the moment. I think about my colleagues across the country, and particularly in Auckland, and that their taxpayer money is going to be going into, in effect, you know, what’s referred to as party pill testing. I mean, surely this Government has higher priorities in terms of the allocation of scarce public resources than that. I think in regards to the title of this bill, I think it would only be reasonable that it actually articulates what it actually is.

I take it from the member’s submission just now that he thinks that the title of the bill should be amended to refer to the public funding aspect of it. The Government has announced it will fund up to $800,000 to support service providers. I just make this point to the member because he comes out of the health sector himself—former chief financial officer for a DHB—and I don’t know whether he’s a former or current volunteer for St John Ambulance, but he will know that the consumption of drugs, as with the consumption of other recreational substances, causes harm. And most often, the cost of that harm is borne in our health service. So people consume substances because they don’t know what’s in it, or sometimes they consume substances and they know exactly what’s in it; they just have a lot of it, and they fall over and hit themselves and have to go to hospital. But otherwise, people consume substances, the reality of which they do not know, and then have a reaction that they hadn’t predicted and didn’t know, and it causes them harm. They wind up on the health system as well.

We know that the cost of the health system responding to various substances runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you add up the staff time, time taken for equipment to attend to them, the length of stay they might have in the hospital, the use of other countervailing drugs, you might say, and other substances that they have to take in order to clean their systems up and clean themselves out, there’s a cost to that. If we can do something that not only keeps people who consume these substances safe but prevents them from having to draw on the stretched resources of our public health system, then that is a good thing.

I say to the member, I’m prepared to wager that the economic benefit, the economic payback of this bill will be considerably greater than the $800,000 that it will cost to support drug-checking services to carry out these services. They will be dealing with literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people in the summer months and throughout the year. And if we, as a result of those drug-checking services, prevent any number of those people from having to draw upon the public health services, we will have saved money, or at least we will have meant that those resources are available for others who need them at a great time of need. In the middle of a pandemic, we need to know that as much of the health system as possible is available to help people who may be infected with the mighty coronavirus.

Madam Speaker, the committee has considered the Drug and Substance Checking Legislation Bill (No 2) and reports it without amendment. I move, That the report be adopted.

Motion agreed to.

Report adopted.