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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4168 ..

MR HIRD (continuing):

There is no hard evidence to suggest that the establishment of injecting rooms - or shooting galleries, as they have been more aptly referred to - will reduce drug-related deaths and trauma or crime associated with drugs within the Territory. But there is any amount of evidence that drug taking increases the crime rate. No amount of supervision in self-injecting places will change that, unfortunately. On the contrary, my belief is that what is proposed here will compromise police trying to perform their duties in the prevention of crime within our community. This Bill, if it is passed, will have the effect of tying the hands of the police behind their back. We will be telling them to turn a blind eye to one of the worst criminal scourges on our society, not only within the Territory but within Australia.

In so doing, we would be sending a totally wrong message to the people who are most vulnerable to, and influenced by, anti-social behaviour - our children. The message that they will get from the implementation of this Bill is that illegal drug use is acceptable in our community. We would be sanctioning an illegal operation. Consumption and sale of a prohibited substance are illegal. Up to 80 per cent of crime in Australia is drug related. This Bill will not reduce crime; it will provide the means by which the criminal element in Civic will be expanded. I submit, Mr Speaker, that we would be encouraging more crime by inviting people to come into our injecting rooms, safe or otherwise, to shoot up an illegal substance. We would be clearing the way for drug pushers to target the very area of this city that we are spending millions of dollars on to make it more attractive to genuine visitors and members of our own community.

Another concern I have about this Bill is that no substantive assessment has been made of the advisability or otherwise of setting up an injecting room in Canberra - in the city or wherever. But my research has unveiled that a joint select committee of the New South Wales parliament held an inquiry last year. The report brought down by that committee substantiates my misgivings on all the issues I have raised here this day.

The committee recommended that the establishment or trial of injection rooms not proceed. That recommendation was made on the very same grounds that I have spoken about this evening. The committee received 103 submissions and took formal evidence from 89 witnesses from various parts of Sydney and Newcastle and Wollongong, including parents whose sons and daughters had died because of drug abuse.

I will take a little of the parliament's time to refer to some of the expert opinions on which the New South Wales committee recommendation not to proceed was based. Injecting rooms can never be safe when users are injecting heroin, which is an illegal substance. Injecting rooms can lead to an increase in drug dealing in the nearby vicinity and confirm a local community as a drug ghetto. These places will become a mecca for dealers and pushers. They will not only be supplying the existing demand, they will be stimulating and expanding their markets. Injecting drug users travelling to an injecting room are likely to perpetuate property crime in that community. The establishment or trial of injecting rooms could be interpreted as condoning illicit drug use. The provision of formal support for illegal activities and hard drug addiction sends the message to our youth that hard drugs are condoned by community leaders, as we are in this place. It is very obvious from that report compiled by the upper house and lower house in the parliament of New South Wales last year that the type of activity being proposed by this parliament should not be supported.

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