Page 3492 - Week 10 - Thursday, 20 October 2022
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We do not support this legislation, for the reasons we have articulated. We will be going to the next election saying, “We will not be supporting the decriminalisation of drugs like heroin and meth”. Let me be very clear—
Mr Pettersson: You will repeal it?
MR HANSON: Yes. Absolutely, we will repeal. If you think we are going to have the decriminalisation of heroin and meth on our agenda, it is not going to happen. Is there some ambiguity there? I know that is what you want to do. We will be honest with the electorate, unlike you mob, who went to the election not saying that you would do this. We will give the people of Canberra the opportunity to assess our policies, rather than sneaking it through just weeks after they have gone to the polls. So we will be voting no to this flawed legislation. We are on the side of our police, and we are on the side of our communities, which do not want to see the scourge of heroin and meth increased in their communities.
MR DAVIS (Brindabella) (5.51): Madam Speaker, you have known me for many years. You would know that I am a pretty opinionated bloke. I tend to show up and participate in every fight I am invited to. That has not changed since what some would argue was my almost accidental election to this place.
I am happy to have those arguments, be it on education, health policy, potholes, roads maintenance, or how we are dealing with waste. There is a great irony, of course, in my own personal story in this policy area, because I refuse to believe that every member of ACT Labor and every member of the Canberra Liberals subscribes to every single word and phrase of their policy platform. It is impossible. We are all individuals.
Ms Lawder: A bit like the Greens.
MR DAVIS: Ms Lawder, if you could, please resist the urge. This was an area of policy on which, I accept, the Greens have long campaigned and been active. I accept that many people vote for the Greens because they want a progressive and evidence-based drug policy. But it is safe to say that, upon my election, I did not share the policy of my political party.
Madam Speaker, imagine the irony, weeks after my election, of being asked by my party room colleagues to serve on the select committee inquiring into Mr Pettersson’s bill and being forced, as this place is inclined to do, to be presented with the evidence. You have to participate. You have to do your job on behalf of the people that you represent—Greens voters, and those who did not vote for the Greens, in Tuggeranong.
I did the work. I listened to academics. I listened to clinicians. I listened to police. I listened to lawyers and those in the criminal justice system. I listened to corrections officers. I listened to parents who have lost their children to drug addiction. I listened to children who have lost their parents to drug addiction. I listened to young people,
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