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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4186 ..

MR CORNWELL (continuing):

unlamented yes campaign at the recent referendum, there are too many unanswered questions, such as whether we will be dealing - no pun intended - only with heroin or whether other illegal drugs will be permitted and thus, I believe unintentionally, encouraged in the shooting gallery. Another is the ambiguous role of the police. There is also the problem other members have referred to of whether we will be sending the wrong message about illegal drugs to the population.

There are other reasons for my objections and why I think we should be deeply concerned about this proposal. Prime among them is the obfuscation we have seen on this issue. There are the statistics, for example, which can be used to support either side's argument. Frankly, I would not bother talking about success or otherwise based on statistics. There has been the citing of successful European models, such as the Frankfurt one, when the European approach, by its very rigid nature, would never be accepted by the wussy, politically correct proponents of this trial in the ACT.

Mr Berry: All those pinkoes; that is the trouble.

MR CORNWELL: Perhaps so, Mr Berry. There is the small but vocal group of shooting gallery supporters who, through emotion or ambition, have captured the media high ground. There is the health bureaucracy which, despite repeated public and private challenges, has yet to produce figures on the local success rates for existing treatments. Heaven knows that they have been publicly challenged to produce these figures, but they have never produced these figures, never mind figures on initiatives such as a shooting gallery. There are the local courts which too often hand down lenient sentences for drug-induced crimes, ignoring the terror suffered by the victims and the loss of community confidence in the rule of law. There are some in the local media who perpetuate the idea that we should feel sorry for the law breakers and the drug thugs in our midst. I believe that all of those reasons raise valid concerns against having a shooting gallery. Yet we push ahead; we ignore the obvious.

The use of insidious calming phrases, such as "a supervised injecting room" or "harm minimisation", is, I suggest, directed to giving people a sense that there is control, that these drug matters are in hand and we are working our way through the problems - "Trust me, I am a politician", or a bureaucrat or an academic. Despite these calming phrases, people will still get mugged, they will still have their houses burgled, they will still be held up in shops by addicts with syringes. Despite the calming words and despite the existence of a shooting gallery, nothing the words or the facility itself represent will stop one person becoming another addict or prevent one drug thug committing another crime.

We push ahead in the face of the proven lies about needle exchanges, which we know are simply needle distribution systems, with 162,300 needles being handed out willy-nilly in 1998-99. Having done that, we seek to cover up this misguided approach with "sharps hotlines", another calming phrase for needle collecting, to protect the general public from the behaviour that our own policy has created among irresponsible and selfish addicts. Of course, all these needle problems could be avoided if we had a proper needle exchange program, that is, as the phrase suggests, the exchanging of one for one. That does not seem to be being proposed for the shooting gallery; so, presumably, the so-called exchange lie will continue to be bandied about. Whilst the

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