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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4181 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

is real strength in the position that my party has adopted at the grassroots level of calling for a referendum at least, something Mr Hird mentioned earlier, before we go down this path. I would be quite happy if 51 per cent of the Canberra population said, "Yes, give it a go. Let us trial it. Yes, have a go at a heroin trial as well". I would be quite happy with that. But this is such a serious issue that we do need some sort of endorsement because to act unilaterally as an Assembly would be to go against what I perceive to be a lot of public opposition on this issue.

There are some real problems, too, with being overly liberal with drugs. We have some great historical precedents in terms of what has happened in countries where drug use has been rampant. The British fought and won a war in China between 1839 and 1842 over the importation of opium, amongst other things. For over 100 years that country suffered greatly from millions of its population being affected by opium abuse. The Japanese who took over Manchuria between 1931 and 1945 had the philosophy of deliberately handing out opium freely, to the extent that 25 per cent of the population was so doped up that they became useless and docile and easy for the invaders to handle. I am not quite sure what the communists did when they took over, but they seemed to overcome the very serious problems China had with opium addiction. I do not think that we in this country want to go down that track. We have some real precedents there to look at.

Going down the path of having a heroin trial is the wrong end of the so-called harm-minimisation approach. Harm minimisation is fine in terms of ensuring that people who are affected by drugs are assisted. Initially, you minimise any harm drugs do to them and then you try to get them off drugs. Prevention is also absolutely essential. We owe it to our young especially to do all we can to stop them taking up the use of illicit and dangerous drugs of any kind. The most dangerous of all for our society is heroin and we need to do all we can there.

Mr Speaker, I come now to the survey of young people to which I referred earlier. It is a particularly interesting document. It has a few things, interestingly enough, on working for the dole, which most of them do not seem to mind. The survey was conducted this year by the Ministerial Youth Advisory Council of 161 people in the ACT aged between 11 and 25. They were asked why they thought some young people take up drugs, and the results are interesting. The largest age group surveyed was the 14- to 16-year-olds and the top two answers there were 27 for "peer pressure/to fit in" and 24 for "fun". The next ones were 15 each for "to be cool" and "to escape problems". For 17- to 19-year-olds the majority, 27, voted again for "peer pressure/to fit in" and 24 voted for "fun". Availability and social acceptability, which Angela Woods mentioned at the talk at Kaleen High School, came out very strongly there. Of the 20- to 25-year-olds, 22 voted for "peer pressure/to fit in" and 15 voted for "escape problems". The number of people in that category was smaller.

Another question was: "In what circumstances do you think you would take up drugs?". A lot of them said, "Under no circumstances", but "peer pressure" featured fairly significantly. They were also asked questions in relation to whether drug education at school was working. Some said that it was doing something, whereas others said that it was not. One of the interesting comments there for the 17- to 19-year age group was that

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