WA Premier Mark McGowan wants to keep border controls beyond pandemic

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“The measures we put in place both at Kununurra and at Eucla have had a dramatic effect. If staff are there checking for bananas, tomatoes, and avocados, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have other staff there checking and stopping meth, heroin, and cocaine.

“I would have thought the biggest threat to WA is not tomatoes, it’s meth and heroin.”

Currently people planning to travel to Western Australia, including returning residents, have to register for a G2G Pass and present a unique pass code upon entry to the state.

To apply for approval to travel people must complete an online application through the G2G Pass website and are required to complete a declaration about their particular circumstances. Approval can take up to 72 hours.

University of Sydney professor of constitutional law Anne Twomey said it would be extremely difficult to establish new legislation that permitted restrictions on border access on an ongoing basis.

“He’d [Mr McGowan] have to create new legislation to do it, the existing legislative basis [the state of emergency laws] wouldn’t allow ongoing restrictions to deal with drug trafficking, he’d have to have new legislation that would do it,” she said.

“The big contrast is the COVID-19 restrictions are really tightly confined to particular periods of time and require constant monitoring and reassessment every 14 days by a minister.

“I’m not saying it’s necessarily impossible, there might be a possibility that the High Court would say that protecting the state from drugs is a legitimate reason, but you’re going to have to meet up the requirements of justification and reasonable necessity.”

Professor Twomey said states can already ban illegal drugs from coming in and have border checks but restricting people entering WA to reduce the likelihood of illicit substances being brought in was another matter.

“If it was just monitoring who’s coming in, would that be a restriction on movement? I don’t know,” she said.

“Some people would argue it’s a slight restriction on freedom of movement and therefore it’s not such a problem and if it’s done for a legitimate purpose and it’s reasonable proportionate, well, maybe.”

Liberal Democrat MLC Aaron Stonehouse, whose party promotes civil libertarianism, said the premier was hinting at taking more control and power with a policy that had nothing to do with COVID-19.

“We’re basically under a state of emergency where the government has almost unlimited power, you’ve got a state opposition that is basically about to be obliterated in the upcoming election and the premier is using this as an opportunity to grab more power and impose border lockdowns that seemingly never end,” he said.

“Giving police a blank cheque to surveil and control our movement, that is a serious risk to our civil liberties and our freedoms.”

Labor promises to expand meth plan

On Sunday Mr McGowan unveiled a $79 million expansion to the $244 million meth action plan introduced by his government after Labor won the 2017 election.

The premier said a range of measures put in place since 2017 had been effective in combating meth.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s latest National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program report shows meth usage in WA decreased by 23 per cent in the past year but had been increasing in the two years prior.

Cocaine, heroine, and MDMA has all increased more than 170 per cent in the past year in WA.

Mr McGowan said there were no easy solutions to dealing with the scourge of drugs.

“This is a war that’s difficult to win but it’s something you keep fighting,” he said.

“We’ll never give up on trying to help families and people who are addicted to get off it.

“Clearly the G2G pass system, the controlled border has worked, and it does actually help us prevent the flow of drugs. This [the controlled border] is obviously something that will be in place for at least the next year I would expect.

“If we need to extend it beyond that, that’s something I’m certainly willing to talk to the commissioner about because it does help us with dealing with the flow of drugs into the state.”

Labor also promised in October to spend $314 million on recruiting 800 extra police officers.

WA Greens leader and alcohol and other drugs spokeswoman Alison Xamon said the premier needed to be transparent about what exactly he was proposing but also noted the federal and state governments had been failing to find measures, outside of the hard interstate border, to reduce supply into WA.

Ms Xamon chaired a parliamentary inquiry into alternate approaches to reducing illicit drug use in 2019 and said more needed to be done to reduce demand in the state.

“My committee had a whole range of recommendations about how you go about reducing demand and this government has effectively ignored those recommendations,” she said.

“If people aren’t going to take the drugs in the first place there’s no market for them. I wish the government would follow the public health advice in how best to tackle illicit drugs.”

The Liberal Party has committed to introducing mandatory sentencing for meth dealers with jail terms of at least one year for people caught with 10 grams and as high as 15 years for people with more than 200 grams.

The WA opposition also wants to match Labor’s 800 more police commitment and recruit an extra 200.