Page 104 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 8 April 1992
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every area of Canberra. They are willing to undergo training, at no cost to the system. They are willing to be part of consultation. They are willing to be part of information drives to get people to understand the program better, at no cost to the system.
They, on the whole, may have somewhere between five and 10 clients each, at somewhere in the vicinity of $2 a dose. At $10 a day, or $20 a day, depending on the number of clients you have, knowing that that includes quite a lot of patient involvement with the people concerned, I promise you that no-one is getting rich, just as they are not getting rich by being involved in the syringe exchange system.
MR MOORE (12.14): I will speak to the amendment and, if other members are willing, close the debate. One of the more disturbing comments made by Mr Berry was that this is a rehabilitation program. The methadone program at the moment does fulfil that function, and that is the ideal situation. We heard Mr Humphries say that one of the things that he is concerned about is that perhaps we are having difficulty in getting enough people to be rehabilitated, to be able to come right off their drugs; and, of course, that is what we would all want. That is the ideal as far as we are concerned, and that is what we should be working towards.
At the same time, if that is our only goal, if that is the limit of what we are going to attempt to do, we are going to increase the problems associated with illegal drugs. That is why a harm reduction approach has to go broader than that. Of course that is part of a harm reduction approach, and that was the point that I was trying to emphasise in the initial instance.
I think that the churlish comments that Mr Berry directed towards the pharmacists were entirely uncalled for, when those people have volunteered to deal with - - -
Mr Berry: I did not direct any comments at them. I said that it is not going to be in the interests of pharmacists; it is going to be in the interests of the community.
MR MOORE: I hear Mr Berry now interject with a quite different story from the way I had interpreted it. Therefore, I am delighted to see that he does recognise that the pharmacists would be acting in the interests of the community, and quite rightly so.
Mr Berry: No, the Government will be.
MR MOORE: And the Government will be acting in the interests of the community too. That is fine. The purpose of this motion is to ensure that we do it.
The difficulty with the amendment that Mr Berry put up is that if we remove the word "potential" we limit the motion to the clients that are currently in the program - about 107, as I recall. I think that is the figure. There are 107 or 112. It is one of those two figures. They currently are in the program. There was no time limit on the motion. We have given Mr Berry some room to move because we realise that it does have ramifications from a budgetary point of view. The potential clients are the important ones. The whole point of the motion is to try to reach more people.
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