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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (19 October) . . Page.. 3252 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

For a number of years the ACT has been distracted by debate on issues such as the heroin trial and injecting places. We have been distracted, perhaps unnecessarily at times, from some major issues. We have been distracted from the terrible problems that tobacco and alcohol and illicit drug use cause. But what the comments of Mr Hird, Mr Rugendyke and Mr Kaine indicate in relation to the debate about the injecting place is that, while we are engaged in considerable community debate on that issue, at this stage we do not know how much it is going to cost.

We have not had a debate about whether or not the cost to the community of an injecting place is the best use of very limited resources available to address issues of drug abuse. People say to me, in the context of the debate about the drug injection place, that they think a sobering-up shelter is a far more urgent need than a drug injecting place. That is the sort of comment that is probably made to each of us about a whole range of issues on which we are called upon to make decisions.

But these are legitimate issues and legitimate points put by the community. In developing a strategy in relation to anything, these are the hard issues, the hard questions. If you have got a million dollars are you better off putting it into a drug injecting place or are you better off putting it into a sobering-up shelter or indeed into something else? Those issues have been raised. That also discounts the fact that so many people within the community have such serious reservations about whether or not a drug injecting place is an appropriate initiative.

The Labor Party believes it is worth trialling as an initiative. We believe there are a whole range of reasons why we should trial a drug injecting place. We have been seeking to articulate those and will do so again when this place debates that particular initiative. There are a range of other points that have been made, but I think we really do need to sit back and ponder. Mr Rugendyke has actually raised those in relation to his concerns about the implementation of the on-the-spot cannabis legislation.

Mr Rugendyke does make some legitimate points in relation to the concerns that he believes exist in the way in which that legislation was implemented and the way in which it has been administered. I do not think the Labor Party would be supporting Mr Rugendyke's concerns. (Extension of time is granted) But I have great sympathy for some of the points Mr Rugendyke has made on that issue. I am not convinced about the community's expectations about how that change to the law would work, and whether it has been as rigorously administered as it should to achieve the outcomes claimed for it. I raise that now because I think there is a lesson for us in that particular issue for the drug injecting proposal.

We need to be transparent and very patent about what we are doing in relation to the possibility of trialling a drug injecting place in the ACT so that the community can have some faith in the adopted process and in our determination to trial this to see whether it does work; so that we can evaluate it; so that it can be audited; so that we can see at the end of the day whether or not it has made some real changes in a whole range of areas in relation to drug use and abuse. It is not just the health status of the individuals concerned, but also it relates to issues about the congregation of addicts in the streets and about crime rates and the extent to which we continue, as a community, to suffer burglaries and car thefts and other crime as a result of the activities of drug addicts.

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