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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 4 Hansard (22 April) . . Page.. 1216 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

differences. I have agonised over these issues. I served for close enough to six years on Assembly committees looking at this issue and I went back to do university part time. It was not done lightly. I know that each member, even though we have differences of opinion, takes these things very seriously because we are aware of the anguish for families. We are aware of the people who are dying. We are aware of the spread of disease and the mortality issues that we have to deal with.

There is no simplistic approach in what we are doing here, Mr Osborne. We have a very complex approach in this strategy, and I think it would be fair to recognise it. You refer to the evaluation that the Federal Health Department did on itself. It did not. In fact, it brought in Professors Rohl and Single, one of them an Australian and the other a Canadian, to evaluate the Australian harm minimisation approach and to look at our national drug strategy. Those professors said, compared worldwide, we have a good strategy that we ought to follow.

Mr Osborne raised three other issues. The first one, he said, was mixed messages. Harm minimisation does not send mixed messages at all. The first thing we say is that the best thing you can do to reduce harm is not use drugs. I do this with my children as well. Mr Osborne, when your children are teenagers and you take them through these sorts of issues, you will worry. You will worry greatly, as we all do. Every person who has kids going through this age group worries greatly, particularly if your kids hear you talking about these things regularly. But they understand the difference between saying, "The first thing we want to do is to not have people use drugs, but if you are going to use drugs make sure you do it safely". If you tell young people no, particularly teenagers and adolescents, the chances are very high that they will see it as their responsibility - a healthy psychological responsibility - to test that.

Secondly, Mr Osborne indicated that harm minimisation was about increasing the health of the user but not the community. Wrong, Mr Osborne. Needle exchange was the example you used. Needle exchange, more than anything, was about stopping the spread of HIV, and that is what it did. It did it in Australia. It did it successfully. It has been evaluated. By world standards, we did a fantastic job.

While I am on needle exchange, Mr Smyth brought down some examples of what has happened with needle exchange. I can tell you that our campaigns are working. Things are improving. We will provide you with the information that we have here. Things are improving.

The notion that there are 150,000 needles lying around in this city is a silly notion. We know that is not true. Everybody knows that is not true. I remind you of the sharps hotline. In fact, there has been a 15 per cent decrease in the number that are left lying around the city, thanks to the campaigns. I occasionally use the sharps hotline that Mr Smyth's organisation runs. My relatives have used it recently. It works brilliantly. Those people are doing a fantastic job and respond very quickly.

Mr Osborne quoted Switzerland and said 74 per cent of people rejected legalisation. Good on them. I agree with them. We would all vote with them. We do not want legalisation. I remind Mr Osborne that they had another referendum, not on legalisation but on the Swiss heroin trial. People were asked, "Should it continue?". A similar number of people said, "Yes, it should continue". In other words, we should have

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