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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1677 ..

MR BERRY (4.48): The people of the ACT get from this Government, and from Mr Moore, the wrong message about drugs. What people should be concentrating on in this place is - - -

Mr Moore: A drug-free society.

MR BERRY: We should be concentrating on how we educate the community about the hazards of drugs. Mr Moore interjects flippantly, "A drug-free society", as if that is what is being promoted by the Labor Party. Of course, it is not. What we propose is a sensible approach to drugs. We do not propose the open slather approach which Mr Moore has proposed in the past. I am sure that one has been put away in the cupboard for a while, after the flogging that Mr Moore got over this issue last time he tried it on. The fact of the matter is that most people out there in the community, the overwhelming majority of the community, do not want their relatives to be involved in unnecessary drug use. I think the Government and Mr Moore and others would be serving the community better if they were promoting caution at all times about the use of drugs. Mrs Carnell has been caught on this issue before. She got a nice little flogging about the issue because she, too, was involved in the ill-received obsession with the open slather on drugs which occurred in the last Assembly.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, we do not support that approach. We support a sensible approach. We support a sensible approach not only in relation to marijuana but also in relation to other drugs. That is our party policy on attempts to change the drug laws of Australia in respect of heroin. We have supported a national approach in respect of that. We do not support the Territory going it alone in relation to these matters, and we do not support the Territory being the trendsetter when it comes to drug law.

It may well be that marijuana has some therapeutic uses in relation to a range of illnesses. That is a matter for experts to decide. I do not think it is something that ought to be decided on the floor of this Assembly. I think we went through some time ago the debate about the issue of who should be deciding these things. Indeed, I think the National Health and Medical Research Council is a body which ought to be considering these issues if these drugs are to be put to therapeutic use. When it approves of these things for therapeutic use, that means that we have a national approach to changes in the way that we prescribe, administer and use drugs generally, and that is something that the Labor Party would support.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I go back to my original point: The matter of public importance that ought to be before this chamber is the message that is being sent to the ACT community. The message that is being sent to the ACT community, repeatedly, is that this Government and Mr Moore have a slack approach to drugs, and that is the wrong message to be sending to our young people. We know, for example, that in the last couple of weeks there has been consideration of heroin shooting galleries for the ACT, in an environment where the consumption of and trafficking in heroin are strongly opposed and are unlawful. Those are not the sorts of messages that we should be sending to the community. We should be sending a strong message that inappropriate drug use is hazardous. That is the message that the community should be receiving.

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