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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 10 Hansard (24 November) . . Page.. 2817 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

I would have thought by now that it was well accepted that there should be means of collecting sharps, and not merely of collecting sharps but of exchanging them. I thought that debate was long over. The reason for the debate being over was the point made in Mr Moore's document, and I quote from page 5 where it is said that low infection rates were due to "needle and syringe exchange programs and related policies". The results of needle exchange are well established and well known, so it is difficult to understand the response to that Ansett proposal.

Mr Moore's document focuses on sexual help and blood-borne diseases, mainly HIV/AIDS and the hepatitis C virus. Mr Moore made a recent announcement about the hep C virus. The Minister used the opportunity in presenting his paper to promote the model of harm minimisation over that of proscriptive legislation. In general in this Assembly there appears to be support for the harm minimisation model; that is that we should take actions to reduce the harm to society and to the individual from the undesirable consequences of illicit drug use. This strategy well sets out the processes to expand that harm minimisation activity, and rightly so in view of the success I have indicated in containing the spread of HIV/AIDS. The paper is quite detailed and should build on that success.

Mr Moore argues that proscriptive law has failed. Well, it clearly has. Four hundred kilograms of heroin was captured on one of our beaches at about the same time as the strategy came down and illicit drug-related problems continue to grow. The capture of all that heroin appears not to have had much impact, if any, on the supply of heroin. I think it is fair to point out that, given the state of policing recently revealed in New South Wales, a strong prohibition campaign may not have been given a fair trial in New South Wales. That, of course, affects us.

I am not sure where Mr Moore wants to take us in the future. Do we have, on the one hand, just harm minimisation, and on the other proscriptive law? Do we have, in Mr Moore's mind, just one and not the other of those? It seems to me that law enforcement, enlightened law enforcement, remains a necessary factor in control of illicit drug use. If jurisdictions were to seek to move from the current system of prohibition of certain drugs, it surely could not be in any single-step legislative process. Present considerations require a law enforcement role.

In defining a whole-of-government approach Mr Moore refers to, among other factors, law reform efforts, but he does not refer to law enforcement. Perhaps that is the task of another document. In debating the undoubted merit of harm minimisation we need to discuss further the legalities of containing illicit drug use and of law enforcement. We do not have one or the other today. After the HIV/AIDS scare we adopted certain harm minimisation approaches, such as the needle exchange. So it is not to say that we have total proscriptive law at the moment. I repeat that, in the general debate that occurs, I am not sure of the future as Mr Moore may seek to move towards a stronger harm minimisation model and move away from proscriptive legislation. This is not the occasion for a debate on that matter but at some other stage we may need a longer debate on how we might move from one to the other and the relativity of one to the other.

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