Drug Summit Recommendations

Interviewer: You’re listening to ABC Illawarra, and if you were listening to the news just then, you would have heard that legal advocates, among others, are very disappointed with the state government’s response to the Drug Summit recommendations, including what you heard in the news there about the recommendation to scrap sniffer dogs and strip searches at music festivals. That’s been in the news a lot lately, hasn’t it? Well, the state government has said no to the recommendations to scrap sniffer dogs and strip searches. Among other things people are disappointed with in relation to the government’s response, one is a lack of a firm commitment to a Drug Court for Wollongong, something that it looked like the government was quite amenable to, in fact very supportive of. So the New South Wales government yesterday released its formal response to the report’s 56 recommendations given earlier this year. The government’s today announced it will support over 50 of them, but one of the glaring omissions from the government response was a firm commitment to a Wollongong Drug Court, which was all but promised to local lawyers who’ve been pushing for the court. You might recall we spoke to Matt Ward from Morrisons, he’s been lobbying hard to have a Drug Court in Wollongong, and Matt Ward joins us now. Matt, good morning.

Matt Ward: Good morning.

Interviewer: What do you make of what is in the government’s formal response to the recommendations, which were pretty clear about Wollongong being a suitable place for a Drug Court, more than suitable, that it was something that should happen, and some commitments that we heard from local members here in Wollongong? What’s your response to how they have responded?

Matt Ward: It’s extremely disappointing, in short. They clearly have supported it in principle, which is consistent with what we’ve been told in the conversations that have been covered by you and other media outlets, but sadly we haven’t got the funding or the commitment that the people of the Wollongong and South Coast areas deserve for a Drug Court in this region.

Interviewer: Is it something you’d expected to come out of this?

Matt Ward: I was hopeful that there’d be at least some indication of more positive steps. Support in principle, I find, is a pretty cheap way of avoiding a commitment to something that is needed for the region, but what I am buoyed by is that the community and the legal fraternity here and across the South Coast, we won’t be stopped by this. We need to continue to provide the government with real stories, real examples of how this is affecting people that live in this area.

Interviewer: Why do you think the government’s balking and falling short of a firm commitment of money and timelines, and just saying it supports it in principle?

Matt Ward: I think, sadly, this is a budgetary consideration. There’s no doubt on anyone’s version, including their own response, where they recite the effectiveness of the Drug Court, that this works. There’s no doubt that they agree it needs to be expanded. The question really is where and when, and sadly that appears to come down to a monetary factor for the state government. But that means very little to the people that are trying to get help for their drug use, families and victims of these sorts of crimes. That, in my view, is a low blow to them.

Interviewer: I’m sure a lot of work’s been done on this, because Drug Courts have existed elsewhere for some time now, but some sort of cost-benefit analysis of how much it costs in the long term compared to potentially incarceration. Is there some sort of analysis out there about the actual cost over time of a Drug Court compared to no Drug Court?

Matt Ward: Certainly studies have been done to assess its financial effectiveness. Figures can vary about how much it costs to keep someone in custody for a year, but some low figures are around about $150,000 to $160,000 per inmate per year. If you reduce the risk of reoffending and reduce the rate of reoffending, and keep people out of custody, obviously that’s a huge saving to the taxpayers in this region, but across the country as well.

Interviewer: And if you look at what your colleagues are dealing with in other regional areas, the specific recommendation from the Drug Summit was to expand the Drug Court to regional areas, prioritising the far north coast, the central coast and Wollongong, ensuring accompanying service infrastructure. So we’re one of three. I don’t know if you know much about what your colleagues are contending with on the far north coast or the central coast. If it’s about priority, where do you think we sit?

Matt Ward: Well, I think we’re fairly high in priority. When you look at the geographical areas of where the court is now, you’ve got the north, you’ve got the CBD, and you’ve got the west. We are, in my view, the next logical location, and could allow access for this Illawarra area but also the South Coast, and expansion through there. So I think that we should be, both from a statistical point of view, a cost point of view and a geographical point of view, the next area. That’s not to minimise what is understandably happening in the far north coast and the central coast, but obviously I’m a little bit biased, as you can see, in relation to trying to get it for this area.

Interviewer: Just finally, where to from here, because I know the roundtable that you hosted back in April, we spoke to you after that and you were quite heartened by the response you got from political leaders at the local government and state government level. What do you do now, given that I feel like you felt like you had their full-blown support? What happens from here?

Matt Ward: We’ll keep lobbying. We’ll keep presenting them with the reasons why it should be paid for and funded, and why it should be in Wollongong and how it can be done. It’s also really important for community members to share their stories with people they know, with parliamentarians, with their local members, to write to their local members. This is not a topic that’s going to go away, and the more consistently that it’s in the front of parliamentarians’ minds, the more chance we have of getting this for this region and the South Coast.

Interviewer: Matt Ward, thanks so much for talking to us this morning.

Matt Ward: No problem, my pleasure.

Interviewer: That’s Matt Ward from Morrisons, he’s been lobbying hard to get a Drug Court established here in Wollongong, and probably felt pretty optimistic that there’d be a firm commitment on the table as a result of that recommendation from the Drug Summit, but as you heard, that hasn’t happened.

Transcript lightly edited for readability (false starts, crosstalk removed).