Minister under pressure to reveal drug test costs

Social Services Minister under pressure to reveal costs of government’s proposed drug tests on welfare recipients.

Social Services Minister Anne Ruston. Picture: AAP

About 10 per cent of the 5000 welfare recipients trialled under the government’s random drug tests could fail a test, said Social Services Minister Anne Ruston, as she comes under pressure to reveal how much the tests will cost and who will oversee them.

Ahead of the bill’s introduction into the House of Representatives on Wednesday, Senator Ruston declared not one person who tested positive to drugs on Youth Allowance and Newstart would lose a cent of their benefits.

Of the 500 people the government expects could fail one test, only 150 are expected to test positive to drugs a second time within 25 days. Those 150 recipients could be eligible for up to $65,000 worth of support under the trials via a $10 million “treatment fund”.

“There is no set amount of funding per person — no target — because each individual will require a different level of support from a few counselling sessions, the cost of which may be just a couple thousand, through to more expensive residential rehabilitation services,” Senator Ruston said.

“We hope there will be no need to spend the full treatment fund but given these are trials we wanted to make sure there was ample funding set aside so treatment can be provided as needed.”

Government sources said they could not outline how much the urine, saliva and hair tests would cost as the trials, if passed by parliament, would go out to tender and then be subjected to commercial-in-confidence agreements.

Opposition social services spokeswoman Linda Burney demanded answers on the tests’ cost.

“The Prime Minister needs to come clean on how much each test will cost, how it will be administered, who will watch people urinate and will they be accredited, who will pluck people’s hair, who will swab people’s saliva, and other operational questions,” she said.

“What I do know is that when New Zealand attempted this only 0.27 per cent of participants were found to have tested positive.”

The Australian Council of Social Service estimated that administering the drug tests would cost $500 to $900 per test. Government sources said that was “considerably more” than anticipated.

Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie, whose party holds two crucial Senate crossbench votes, warned the lack of detail was making it hard to finalise a position.

“Our position was we did not support it last time (when the Turnbull government tried to introduce the tests). We’re yet to see anything from the government to move us from that position,” Ms Sharkie said.

Without the support of Labor or the Greens, the government needs to win over four of six Senate crossbenchers to legislate reforms. So far it has the backing of the two One Nation senators and independent Cory Bernardi.

Health Minister Greg Hunt said the government wanted to help welfare recipients break their addictions. “We do that because it's the right thing and we do that because ultimately this is the pathway to stability, to certainty and the dignity of work,” he said.

The government has based its estimates for the two-year trials on the National Drug Strategy Household Survey and its own data of welfare recipients who self-identified as using drugs.

Nearly 6000 jobseekers were on a drug treatment plan in 2018-19.