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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1638 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

services? Will the courts? Will community and business organisations concerned about the impact of drug use and dealing on their businesses and amenity? How is this to be done to ensure usefulness and consistency in the data to be used in this evaluation?

These questions bear heavily upon the larger question of what process is to be set in place for the purpose of evaluating outcomes. They are not merely rhetorical questions, yet the minister's statements in this place so far have failed to refer to them in the detail which, in my view, is absolutely essential before the trial begins.

On that point, I have to say that I do not accept the restricted criteria which the minister has indicated that he has already accepted and which he outlined in a letter of 9 May, and I assume everybody else in this place got the letter as well. The criteria that he has accepted without any debate anywhere are too broad and are too ill defined, and I do not believe that they provide any basis for evaluation of this trial.

For example, how do you evaluate public amenity? What on earth is the basis for such an evaluation? Until the minister tells me what data he is going to collect, what his baseline data will be and how he is going to do the evaluation at the end of the day, I do not believe that public amenity as an evaluation criterion is capable of objective analysis and interpretation. I do not say that you should not include client satisfaction , but how are you going to judge that? Is any client at this place going to walk out the door without a smile on his face? I ask the question: is the criterion going to be that they all leave happy?

The minister says that, in terms of public health impact, drug overdoses and other adverse events will be considered. What adverse events? What on earth are the selection criteria that the minister has already agreed to about? They are so broadly defined and, in my view, so incapable of objective analysis that, unless they are changed, we still will not know at the end of the trial whether it was a "success" or a "failure", except in the minds of the proponents for whom some sort of soft evaluation that is warm and fuzzy is all they require. They do not want to do an objective assessment.

Mr Speaker, that is not good enough. We need to know the basis of this evaluation in detail before it begins and we need to know the process. In terms of the process, the minister made the following statement in the house recently:

after the international survey project at the ANU has conducted some pre-trial evaluation measures-

Presumably, they have considered them thoroughly because they have made recommendations to the minister and he has accepted them, and yet what are the details of the tender? What are we going to ask people to tender for? I have seen nothing on that

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