Dubbo mayor says drug trade responsible for Covid spread

Tailor-made QR code check-in systems for drug dealers - especially in regional NSW - should be considered to reduce the spread of Covid or other viruses, a mayor has told a Senate inquiry.

The “out-of-control” drug trade was the driving force behind the Covid outbreak in western NSW and governments should consider the potential roll out of a QR code style check-in system for dealers and addicts, Dubbo Mayor Stephen Lawrence has told an inquiry.

Since the Delta outbreak began on August 10, more than 1800 people in the Western and Far West NSW local health districts have caught Covid and 14 deaths have been reported.

Dubbo Mayor Stephen Lawrence has spoken out about the government’s Covid response. Picture: Toby Zerna

Cr Lawrence made his comments on Wednesday when he fronted a Senate committee inquiring into the national response to the pandemic.

“Our outbreak was initially sparked by a person who returned to Dubbo, having been released from the correctional centre in Bathurst,” Cr Lawrence told the inquiry.

“The virus then jumped very quickly into the community in West Dubbo and spread from there out to Wilcannia, Broken Hill and so forth. There can be no criticism of his release, but it would be interesting to know what steps were taken to speed up the test result and perhaps to accommodate him in Bathurst rather than have him being immediately moved back to Dubbo.”

Cr Lawrence said community transmission of Covid occurred in large part because of “the out-of-control drug trade and the difficulties in relation to compliance and so forth”.

“This is largely linked to intergenerational cycles of dysfunction and disadvantage that drive high crime rates and the over representation of Aboriginal people in jails across NSW,” he said.

“There hasn’t been an adequate policy response to these issues … I think a lot more could have been done in recognising the actual drivers of transmission … I don’t know if anyone has talked about QR codes for drug dealers yet, but there really should be.”

Police talk to a man in Dubbo’s main street on September 1. Picture: NCA Newswire / Dean Marzolla

On Friday Cr Lawrence told The Dubbo News he made the comments because he thought the link between the drug trade and spread of Covid had been ignored.

“I made quite a deliberate decision to provoke a community discussion around illicit drugs and the pandemic,” he said.

“It was the drug trade that brought the virus to the Dubbo region and it spread from there. It’s been a very significant driver of community transmission during our outbreak and by that I mean drug dealers and drug users moving throughout the community constantly, often at night, moving from household to household in a totally unregulated way.

“I’m not suggesting QR codes should be implemented tomorrow, what I’m saying is it has to be at least talked about so that we can have policy that deals with the societal reality of community transmission in regional NSW ... we need to talk about how we apply, to unregulated industries, the modes of regulation and containment that we apply to everyone else.”

A block of public housing units on Church Street where police charged numerous residents for drug possession and breaching Covid health orders during the outbreak. Picture: Ryan Young

When asked what evidence he had to back up his claims about the drug trade and Covid cases, Cr Lawrence said “it’s not a state secret”.

“It’s been something that has been put on the public record a number of times and it’s something I’ve learned as a consequence of being closely involved in the Covid response in western NSW as mayor of the Dubbo region,” he said.

“We need to deal with the reality that the next pandemic could be more deadly and more infectious. Is anyone seriously suggesting we would completely ignore the role of the illicit drug trade in spreading a virus?”

According to Cr Lawrence, the failure to address the drug trade’s role in the spread of Covid was “yet another instance of stigmatisation and criminalisation leading to a failure to apply harm minimisation principles”.