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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (19 October) . . Page.. 3237 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

I would like to know how that system is going to work. In a sense, picking up what Mr Kaine was saying, it is just a statement and it does not mean much. I would like to see what it does mean because I think it has some future.

Mr Speaker, we have talked about the proposed safe injecting place. Like Mr Hird, originally I was not very keen on it at all. I have come around to embracing the concept of a trial, provided that it is not the birth of a facility which will continue for ever and a day. If we tackle a trial seriously and there is proper academic evaluation, and if there is a sunset clause so that there is no guarantee of its continuation if it is not successful, I am very happy to support that. But I am very conscious, Mr Speaker, that sometimes some of the language used by the proponents of a safe injecting place is a little bit emotive. Those opposing such a place also suffer from the same disease of using emotion in their argument.

In a paragraph on page 14 referring to the proposed safe injecting place there is a sentence which mentions reducing the harms associated with drug use, such as overdose deaths. I would be very interested to know how many deaths there have been so far this calendar year in the ACT and how many deaths there were in the last year. I suspect that the numbers are not overly great. I agree with what Mr Moore has said before, and I have used this language myself - that just one death is too many. I have no difficulty about that. But, of course, when you are evaluating a trial, you have to work out whether or not the resources we are applying are going to the right spot or whether this is just a political grab for attention, and I would hope that that is not the case.

In relation to all of the deaths that have occurred due to overdoses, I would like to know whether there are figures about the number of times the ambulances and the police have been called out. I would like to know how many of them occurred in Civic, in the Belconnen Town Centre, in the Woden Town Centre, in the Tuggeranong Town Centre and in the Weston Creek Town Centre. I think that would give us some sort of an idea on where this is going to go next.

Ms Carnell: We do not call the police out to those places.

MR HARGREAVES: I do not propose to engage in argument, conversation or debate across the chamber with the Chief Minister at this stage of the game.

Ms Carnell: I was just helping you.

MR HARGREAVES: If she wants to know what I want to know and possibly help out instead of being obstructionist, she can read it in Hansard.

Ms Carnell: We do not call police out for overdoses. Nor should we.

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