Page 4302 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 7 December 1993
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Mr Peter Beattie, the chair of the Parliamentary Justice Committee in the Queensland Parliament and State Secretary of the Queensland ALP; the Hon. Neal Blewett; Senator Christabel Chamarette; the Hon. Don Chipp; Mr Peter Cleeland, who was chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority which brought down a report on this issue in 1989; the Hon. Don Dunstan; the Right Hon. Sir John Gorton; Janine Haines; the Hon. Sir Rupert Hamer; the Hon. Alannah MacTiernan, a newly elected member of the Western Australian upper house.
I would like particularly to draw attention to the Hon. Kevin Rozzoli, the Liberal Speaker of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, who is publicly signing the original document today and who is currently chair of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre. Like many people who look into this issue, these people realise that it is time for a change in our approach. Other signatories include Jim Snow, the Labor member of the House of Representatives from an electorate next to us; the Hon. Ann Symonds from New South Wales, who was a founding convenor of the Australian Parliamentary Group for Drug Law Reform; and Helen Szuty, who is sitting next to me at the moment. The signatories are either members of parliament or ex-members of parliament.
The charter is endorsed by a wide-ranging group of people too. They include Mr Phillip Adams; Professor Duncan Chappell; the Hon. Russell Fox, a former Chief Justice of the ACT and a former Federal Court judge; the Most Reverend Ian George, former Assistant Bishop of Canberra and now Archbishop of Adelaide; Professor Peter Karmel; Anne Summers, currently editor of the Good Weekend, but probably more famous for her authorship of the book Damn Whores and God's Police; Freda Whitlam, former Moderator of the Uniting Church and member of the Kerr committee in 1985 in New South Wales, a ministerial committee that looked into drug use; and Dr Alex Wodak, the Director of Alcohol and Drug Services at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney.
Mr Deputy Speaker, before I speak to the charter I want to make this comment: The Australian Parliamentary Group for Drug Law Reform sees its role as ensuring that the social and political context for drug law reform is set so that people will feel comfortable with the notion of moving towards drug law reform. Almost any observer who has looked at the policies of prohibition, and looked at them carefully, realises that they are not working and that they are costing us a great deal of money. We set out in the preamble the disadvantages of those policies of prohibition and where they are leading us.
It is incumbent upon us then, as legislators, to take a different approach, to move down the path of trying something different. I am one of the first people to admit that we do not know what will work. That is the reason why, in the charter, in the penultimate point, we set out that the reform of drug laws should be in planned stages with detailed evaluation of such laws at all stages. The reason for that, Mr Deputy Speaker, is to ensure that, in taking a sensible and rational approach to drug law reform, we do not simply react to something that we know is not working and land in something else that either does not work also or makes the situation worse. I believe that that might well be the possibility if we were advocating complete legalisation, for example. In dealing with those issues of prohibition, Mr Deputy Speaker, as members would be aware, I would be only too delighted to provide for them examples, instances and literature to justify our inclusion of each of these problems with prohibition.
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