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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4201 ..
MR SMYTH (continuing):
listen. What we offer here today through this legislation is actually an ear. It is a helping hand, but it is an ear. It is somebody who will listen. Certainly, they will be medically-trained staff in case of physical complications from the overdose or whatever it is, but there will be more than that. It will be a path back and it will be entirely consistent with the direction of the Vatican, for instance, in their "Charter for health care workers". I thank the friend who gave me this document. It goes on to say:
In the rehabilitation of persons addicted to drugs it is important "that there be an attempt to get to know individuals and to understand their inner world; to bring them to the discovery or rediscovery of their dignity as persons, to help them to reawaken and develop, as active subjects, those personal resources, which the use of drugs has suppressed, through a confident reactivation of the mechanisms of the will, directed to secure and noble ideas."
I think that that is pretty much what a medically-supervised injecting place will do in the ACT. It is an important document and I am pleased that the church has put it out.
Mr Kaine finds fault with what we do here today because there is no detail. That is curious as Mr Kaine knows as well as any of us, because he is a good legislator, that the detail is never contained in the legislation. An example is the legislation we passed on Tuesday that will allow the national road rules to be available in the ACT. But we did not pass the national road rules. They are contained in the regulations under the legislation.
Mr Kaine said that there is not enough detail in the Bill that demands that people have rehabilitation and asked how it will work. On Tuesday, yet again, when we were discussing the reform of the motor transport Acts we talked about penalties for those who drive under the influence and about driving under the influence not being acceptable; but there is no reference in there, and I noticed that Mr Kaine did not move for such a reference, to people caught driving under the influence being referred to AA or for detoxification. Why? It is because we never put that sort of detail into legislation. It is curious that the reason anyone would seek to stand in the way of this reform is that there is not enough detail in the legislation as clause 10 of the Bill allows the Minister to make regulations and set up the guidelines that are important. I look forward to Mr Kaine bringing forward amendments in the future to every piece of legislation that the ACT Government has in place requiring us to give the details on how all those things will be carried out.
Mr Kaine, I believe, said that an all-up strategy is needed. Ms Tucker made mention of a strategy. The strategy is there. In fact, the ACT Government is probably the only government in Australia, certainly one of the few governments in the world, that has a cross-portfolio, coordinated approach to drugs and their use and abuse. It talks about creating the right kind of environment to reduce the use. It talks about supply reduction, it talks about demand reduction, it talks about harm reduction and so on. It brings together an enormous number of strategies, again not contained in any legislation. It is important that it be on the record that the following documents are listed as being complementary to the implementation of the ACT drug strategy for 1999:
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