Dubbo solicitor Bill Dickens calls out 'postcode justice', finds drugs court delay 'understandable'

Mr Dickens recalls when Magistrate Andrew Eckhold in 2011 expressed frustration at not being able send people to residential rehab programs by way of sentence or on bail, because none were available.

He called the problem 'postcode justice'.

"If you are before a criminal court on the eastern side of the sandstone curtain there are going to be a whole lot of options available to those courts in terms of drug court or sending you to rehab. But if your postcode is 2830 you don't have those options available to you," Mr Dickens said.

"It's really an issue of fairness and... [it] shouldn't be dependent upon the postcode where you live."

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His views were included in the 2018 Upper House inquiry into the provision of drug rehabilitation services in regional, rural and remote NSW. The report had acknowledged a grievous lack of facilities to address addiction related problems in those areas.

Mr Dickens called the delay in finding a location for Dubbo's alcohol and other drugs residential rehabilitation centre "very unfortunate".

"It's certainly taken a very long time to get to this position and I can only hope that there's announcements soon about a location and construction," he said.

While Mr Dickens acknowledged the delay in opening Dubbo's drug court from June 2020 to February 2023, he said it was "understandable". He believed it was important to get it right before it starts because "nobody wants it to fail".

"We have to get it right," Mr Dickens said. "We don't want to start a drug court that wasn't going to work properly and potentially set people up to fail if the necessary services weren't in place."

He said the drug court was a complex, intensive program and not a "soft option" for offenders.

"For many of our clients, this is seriously not a soft option... jail is nothing compared to an entrenched addiction," Mr Dickens said.

He felt the cost of failure was too high and wanted appropriate services, staff, facilities to be well-coordinated and fully functional before opening the drug court.

"It involves a a lot of coordination between different people, governments, departments and a whole lot of things like frequent drug testing... community corrections officers, [offenders'] whole behaviour in terms of properly addressing their addiction needs to be scrutinised so as to ensure their success," Mr Dickens said.

"If you don't have all of those things in place, there's a risk of failure."