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Questions Without Notice Questions without notice are asked of Ministers and answered during Question Time.
Mr LAWLOR: My question is to the Minister for Police and Corrective Services. Random drug and alcohol testing of police has been in place since the beginning of the year. Can the minister outline to the House what the results are to date?
Ms SPENCE: I thank the member for Southport for this important question. I am pleased to inform the House that alcohol testing began on 4 January. It began initially in the Brisbane area, but will be rolled out statewide next month. The figures as of 14 February are that 214 officers from 26 work units were randomly tested, including 160 males and 54 females. No-one has tested positive to alcohol or drugs.
I note that yesterday in the Courier-Mail in a perspectives column piece Mr William De Maria was talking about this particular subject. Mr De Maria pretends to be a citizen and says-
Mr Beattie, how many police officers were randomly tested for alcohol and drugs last year?
Mr De Maria pretends to be Mr Beattie and says-
None of your business.
Mr De Maria says-
This is not fiction-the information requested in these vignettes is real and will never be released to the people of Queensland. Such release is either specifically statute-barred or the Government will withhold the information for political purposes.
Who is Mr De Maria? He is a lecturer at the University of Queensland's business school and an FOI specialist. Mr De Maria obviously is not a specialist in checking out his facts or even trying to reveal the truth. The truth is that there was no alcohol testing last year. It began on 4 January this year. The truth is that neither the government nor the Police Service are attempting to coverup these figures. The Queensland Police Bulletin-the official publication of the Queensland Police Service-of March this year at page four talks about the preliminary figures for alcohol testing.
So it is widely available. It is a free publication. All members receive it in their electorate offices. We are all well versed in how this is proceeding.
We will certainly put Mr De Maria on our mailing list so he can check his facts in future. This is serious business. I am pleased to report that the roll-out is proceeding well. We have a steering committee implementing the process made up of the deputy commissioner, Mr Dick Conder, and representatives from the Queensland Police Union, the Commissioned Officers Union and the Public Sector Union. I thank all of them for their involvement, especially the Police Union because we all know that it initially had some reservations about this. But it has been involved in the day-to-day decision making of this roll-out. I thank them for their participation.
Alcohol and drug testing is about making sure the public has confidence in the integrity of the Police Service. It is not about catching out police officers. I am very pleased that we have had no-one test positive thus far. Last changed: [PUBLISHED_DATE] at 11:00 PM
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