Page 2289 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2022
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criminals—those that cause so much harm to our community and families, those people who deal in or traffic drugs in our community.
The government’s amendments change the nomenclature and introduce small quantity possession amounts for eight drugs in addition to the existing threshold for cannabis. The maximum sentence that will be able to be imposed by a court for possession at or below these small quantities would be one penalty unit. Currently, that amounts to a $160 fine. People apprehended by police with small quantity amounts will no longer be at risk of being imprisoned. They will also be eligible for diversion as an alternative to going to court, using a $100 simple drug offence notice or through diversion to assessment, drug education and treatment via the Illicit Drug Diversion Program.
Drug diversion is a more efficient use of public money than taking people to court to prosecute them for a minor drug offence. While it happens rarely, it does happen, for people with larger personal possession amounts. I hesitate to use that term because I want to be really clear—there is no such existing concept in law of personal possession amounts. The existing concept in law is of trafficable quantities. There is possession and there are trafficable quantities. It was Mr Pettersson’s bill that introduced that concept of personal possession limits.
The government’s amendments also reduce the maximum prison sentence for that amount between the small quantity and the trafficable amount from two years to six months. Two years is a disproportionate sentence by modern standards. Again, we know because we have asked people what they think.
As I said before, our central guiding principle is that drug use is fundamentally a health issue and that, in most instances, contact with the criminal justice system for drug possession can do more harm than good. This bill will mean fewer people will get a criminal record for a minor drug offence. It will limit the damage to the life prospects of Canberrans that can occur through criminal conviction for a minor drug offence. It is vital for equality before the law that the bill provides equivalent diversion options for drugs likely to be taken by people who experience disadvantage, such as methamphetamine and heroin, as well as drugs likely to be consumed by more advantaged users, such as ecstasy and cocaine. This bill increases the human rights of people who use drugs within the context of international law that make certain high-risk substances illegal.
The government are not being reckless with this bill. We have listened to opinions from all sides of the debate and considered all relevant factors. We have rightly taken our time on this, ensuring that we consider the best evidence available to us from international experience, listening to national interest groups and local on-the-ground experts, our dedicated frontline police, our specialist experts at Canberra Health Services, the ACT Government Analytical Laboratory, and the significant contributions made through the select committee inquiry.
What we are proposing is based on science, expert advice and painstaking, detailed work on how we best achieve the aims set out by Mr Pettersson in his private member’s bill. We have considered evidence of drug consumption patterns and have proposed changes to the bill to make the equivalent number of doses across different
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