Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Oxley, Labor's spokesman for sports, has made clear to the House, we will be supporting this legislation. The bill effectively aligns Australia's anti-doping regime with that of the international scene. I will keep my remarks relatively brief and confine my comments to certain matters.

I come to this debate not only as someone who has been drug tested on several occasions in the course of my competition days but also as someone who has coached several of Australia's champion athletes along the way. It is an area that I think I have had some personal experience with and I can speak on with some authority.

Today, sport is a multibillion dollar industry. It generates huge amounts of money and, as we have seen, big business have gone into sport purely for the purpose of making money out of it. They make money out of it by ensuring that the sports people themselves are star performers. If you are not a star performer, you not only do not make the grade, do not get the billing and do not get the work; you also do not attract the audiences which in turn generates the money for those behind the organisation.

Given the amount of money involved in the sport and the amount of money that some of the top sports performers are earning today, it is not surprising that athletes will do whatever it takes to get to the top of their sporting code. The truth of the matter is that, unless you have exceptional skills, an exceptional ability or even an exceptional training regime and exceptional genetics, you cannot get to the top of your sporting profession today without the additional support that comes from sports enhancement drugs in many cases.

It is not surprising that this has become a major international issue. It was not until the 1980s that sports testing became common in sporting codes around the country and around the world. Prior to that there was little testing. Indeed, because there was little testing, there were athletes who on a regular basis were using drugs and performing with them in order to win championships or to be the best in their profession. When it became clear that athletes were winning or performing well because they were using sports performance-enhancing drugs, the testing regime came in, including here in Australia.

The problems, however, are twofold. It has always been the case, as the member for Herbert alluded to, that the pharmaceutical companies and the coaches are always one step ahead of the testing procedures and the testing processes that are implemented. When testing is carried out it is usually for specific drugs, therefore, the drugs that are not known and are not tested for are not found. There are also other ways, other chemicals and other drugs used to mask the drugs in the testing processes as well. Again, the chemical companies and pharmacists who are one step ahead of the game know what to use and how to use it in order to mask the drugs when athletes are tested. So the testing authorities are always one step behind the game. Indeed, it used to be said that the best athletes in the world are not those with the best training facilities and not those with the best coaches but those with the best pharmacists. That is the first problem.

The second problem concerns me more than any other. Many athletes do turn to taking drugs in order to get to the top of their sporting code or in order to be selected for a team or in the sports they do. I would be very surprised if any experienced coach, team mate, club official or club administrator were not aware of an athlete who is using sports performance-enhancing drugs. The problem that arises is that many of those athletes are sourcing those sports performance-enhancing drugs from unqualified people who know nothing about the chemical effects on the person's body. I have seen many athletes at the end of their career suffer very serious health consequences not as a result of using drugs but as a result of abusing drugs because they were not properly guided by the person who was selling the drugs to them. That is a real concern because for those athletes in many cases it has resulted in their death at an early age.

We seem to ignore that factor. In fact, I am not personally aware of any real studies that have been carried out on athletes subsequent to their performance days to see what their health is like afterwards. I have read many journals from America on this topic and I am yet to see a study carried out on athletes years after they have stopped performing. I can draw my own conclusions and I know many athletes personally, but I would love to see a study. As the member for Melbourne quite rightly said, we should be targeting the people pushing those sports performance-enhancing drugs onto the athletes without any scientific qualifications to do so because they are the ones putting the athletes at real risk.

The second matter that concerns me is that it seems that our authorities are not properly equipped or certainly not resourced enough to target the problem at its source—the suppliers of these products. In some cases products are sourced by people being able to get a false prescription or whatever the case is. In other cases I have no doubt the drugs come through the black market and other sources and it is purely a profit-making opportunity for the pusher, as it is when pushers push any other drugs. Again, our authorities do not appear to be well enough equipped to tackle the problem at its source. So my concern relates to the impact that sports performance-enhancing drugs have on the athletes more so than anything else. They are pushed to excel in their sports and in turn they may well succumb and take sports performance-enhancing drugs and in turn pay for it dearly later on in life. That is where I would like to see the effort and the focus put with respect to this matter.

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