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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 12 Hansard (25 November) . . Page.. 3679 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

By reshaping the circumstances under which a person injects, a supervised injecting facility would not only assist in the distribution of clean, sterile injecting equipment for users but would also assist to reduce the incidence of inappropriately discarded injecting equipment. As such, a supervised injecting place facility has the potential not only to improve the health of its clients but also to reduce the criminal, health and public nuisance impact on the wider community.

The Government does not condone illicit drug use. And, indeed, I think that we all have a responsibility to assist people to become free of their addictions. I believe the best way we can do this is by keeping injecting drug users alive as long as possible and as healthy as possible to give them the best chance to stop. Despite all that I have said about supervised injecting places, they have yet to prove their effects in practice. As members well know, the debate on supervised injecting places in the ACT, in New South Wales and in Victoria extends only to the running of evaluated trials.

The facilities in each jurisdiction will be limited to 18 or 24 months of operation and will be the subject of extensive research. We need to determine what we do not yet know. Will a supervised injecting place slow the spread of disease? Will it save lives? Will it improve the health of the community? Will it form one small but integral part of a comprehensive drug strategy?

Mr Speaker, the key features of the Government's proposal are the establishment of a single facility in the Civic area; the closure of that facility after two years of operation; the staffing of that facility with qualified health professionals; the provision at that facility of diversionary services, counselling, information or other treatments, chaplaincy, if appropriate; the evaluation of effects of the project by independent scientific researchers; and the adoption of legislation by this Assembly to address the legal issues involved in running the facility.

More information on the operational matters are set out in the folders provided to members a few weeks ago. All members will be aware of the extent to which I have gone to provide information on the government proposal. This information has been provided to supporters and opponents alike.

I will now discuss in more detail the legislation to support the project. Firstly, a number of elements of the original Drugs of Dependence (Amendment) Bill (No. 2) 1998 have been included and revised in the Supervised Injecting Place Trial Bill 1999. These include provisions enabling the Minister to choose a place and an operator for the facility, in clause 5; provisions aimed at removing any doubt that operators and staff of the facility are acting lawfully, that is, clause 6; provisions aimed at preventing civil claims which injecting drug using clients may otherwise be able to make against the operators and staff for harm suffered as a result of their use of the facility, clause 7; and the two-year expiry period for the trial, clause 11. This period would commence from the declaration of the facility. This allows a flexible time period for the set-up arrangements to be concluded without reducing the 24 months set aside for the trial to run.

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