Page 2477 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 31 July 2019

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(3) notes that:

(a) some families in the ACT include young people with complex substance use disorders that are beyond the family’s capacity to deal with;

(b) families in the ACT cannot compel drug treatment for such young people nor can they seek for such treatment to be ordered; and

(c) this situation leaves some families feeling afraid and hopeless, in some cases requesting that their children be removed into out-of-home care;

(4) further notes that:

(a) Magistrate Jennifer Bowles of the Victorian Children’s Court has, based on extensive local and international research, developed a model that would allow for the compulsory therapeutic treatment of young people with complex substance use disorders when voluntary treatment fails, comprising:

(i) Youth Therapeutic Orders made by the Children’s Court;

(ii) secure therapeutic residential treatment facilities for young people; and

(iii) effective after-care and transition arrangements for these young people; and

(b) Magistrate Bowles’s recommendations are currently under consideration in Victoria; and

(5) calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) consult with experts about whether compulsory therapeutic drug treatment models for young people with complex substance use disorders, including the model based on Magistrate Bowles’s research and recommendations, should be implemented in the ACT;

(b) report back to the Assembly no later than the last sitting day of 2019; and

I am grateful for the opportunity to bring this very important motion before the Assembly today. In doing so, I am seeking to fulfil my role as an elected representative by bringing the voices of regular Canberrans into this chamber. This motion has its origins in conversations that I have had with a number of families who reside in this territory. These concerned mums and dads have told me very difficult stories of what happens in and to a family when a member of that family develops a complex substance use disorder.

I have heard distressing accounts of families who have spent years watching a child first play at the margins of and then be swept away by the whirlpool of serious addiction. The impacts of such a tragedy on a family can be devastating. I have had parents tell me that they have grown fearful of the violence and anger of their own offspring. In many cases they have come to fear for their own lives and/or for the wellbeing and safety of younger children in the home.

I have heard stories of extreme worry as mothers have gone days at a time, sometimes weeks, not knowing where their child is. Families have come home at the end of the work day to discover that their home has been broken into and their possessions have

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