NSW'S ANTI-DRUGS BUDGET KEPT SECRET

NSW, the State with the nation's worst drug problem, has refused to divulge
how much it spends to combat it, throwing a national survey of government
performance in the field into disarray.

Each year the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia reports on State
and Territory governments' expenditure on drug and alcohol programs and
surveys 200 experts on their perception of government performance in
rehabilitation and treatment.

But NSW has refused to co-operate this year, effectively stymieing any
national analysis or comparison of drug and alcohol spending.

The report, Drugs, Money and Governments, will still be released later this
month but without any national spending averages or a per capita breakdown
of how much States allocate to drug and alcohol rehabilitation and education.

Ms Carol McNiven, the council's policy manager, said NSW ranked poorly in
last year's survey and received some negative publicity.

(The 1998 report found the NSW Government was cutting spending, did not know
the extent of the drug problem and had no clear strategy to fight it. It was
ranked last in prevention and treatment of drug and alcohol problems and was
named as one of only two governments to have cut per capita spending. It
ranked in the bottom three for spending through health department drugs
strategy programs.)

"We think there is a link between last year's outcomes and the fact they are
refusing to give us the facts this year," Ms McNiven said.

"We also understand NSW is undertaking its own consultancy to determine how
much is being spent ... but what this will do is inflate the figures because
expenditure such as provision of ambulance services, HIV AIDS programs, all
these additional areas that can have an impact on spending, will be factored
in ...

"We simply look at specific health department drug and alcohol expenditure
to make a comparison between States."

Early trends in this year's report show the Northern Territory consistently
outspends the States, allocating the biggest proportion of alcohol and
tobacco revenue into health programs.

The report shows that although State governments have slowly increased their
health department expenditure over the last five years, most are putting
back less than 10 per cent of what they raise in tobacco and other taxes.

The exception is the Northern Territory, which allocates 27 per cent of
revenue raised.

On average nationally, governments allocated about 2.5 per cent of all
revenue raised in the first two years of the survey. This fell to 2.2 per
cent in the most recent survey.

A spokesman for the Health Minister, Mr Knowles, said last night NSW had
raised concerns over the survey's methodology last year because it did not
take into account economies of scale.

"The best example is methadone. NSW has in excess of 50 per cent of all
methadone patients. The unit cost to dispense methadone to, say, 300 people
in NSW is much less than the unit cost to dispense to 50 people in a smaller
State," he said.

"They didn't take that into account in any revision of methodology." Another
reason why NSW would not co-operate was that the State was about to announce
a response to the Drug Summit and any figures it supplied would be
irrelevant by the time the report was published.