The government's half a billion dollar strategy to combat ice use and related harms has no way of assessing how successful it has been, a new report from the auditor general has found.
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Announced in December 2015, the National Ice Action Strategy included 30 different actions aimed at early intervention, supporting local communities and treatment services, as well as funding for law enforcement and better research.
After initial funding of $313 million over four years, the government announced another $153 million in the 2019-20 budget, bringing the total to $451 million over six years.
While the actions and measures announced as part of the strategy had been implemented, Auditor-General Grant Hehir found the government had no processes in place to actually measure how successful the strategy was.
"While Australian government funding to the alcohol and other drug sector has been increased and actions have been progressed, there is no monitoring to assess whether progress is being made towards the strategy's goal of reducing the prevalence of ice use and resulting harms across the Australian community," the report said.
The Health Department agreed with the auditor's five recommendations, but said in its response there was evidence use of the drug ice, or methamphetamine, was declining, even if it couldn't directly be attributed to the action strategy.
"The department is encouraged by recent data showing a decrease in the national rates of use of reported consumption of methamphetamines (from 2.1 per cent to 1.4 per cent between 2013 and 2016), including ice (1.0 per cent to 0.8 per cent over the same period)," the response to the report said.
Of the 19 actions the federal government has responsibility for 19 of the 30 actions under the ice action strategy, with three of those to be administered through the primary health networks across the country. According to the report, of the $155 million in funding delivered by the networks, just $5.7 million went to residential rehabilitation facilities, while $4.1 million went to day stay rehabilitation.
The bulk of the funding, $60 million went to counselling while $27.6 million went to early intervention programs.
Just two of the 19 actions have evaluation frameworks in place, with two more evaluated and one to be evaluated from July this year.
The Ministerial Drug and Alcohol Forum, a meeting of responsible state and federal ministers, hasn't convened since June 2018, and its annual report for 2018 hasn't been provided to COAG, the auditor-general said. The forum is scheduled to provide a "robust evluation" of the ice action strategy to COAG by June 2020, but no action has been taken to prepare for that, the auditor-general said.