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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2399 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

people die. That is what we are doing. This government, because it wants to hang onto its job and because it wants to hang onto its power, is making sure that we sit here between now and 1 January 2002 and watch them die.

I quote Mr Smyth who said, "One death is one death too many." We have heard Mr Moore say that there could be as many as 20. We have heard the Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform say there are as many as 20. Well, so much for one being too many. When I spoke about my experience of this issue in the debate we had last December, the Chief Minister said, "Good speech." I believe she was sincere. I talked about the pain that people went through, and the pain that people who have drug overdoses go through, and she understood where I was coming from.

What we see, in fact, Mr Deputy Speaker, is a magnificent act of treachery. I will put this to you. If we cannot trust them to do this, what faith can we have that they are going to go full bore down the youth rehabilitation line? Part of the prerequisites that we applied before we would give our support to this trial was that there be a youth rehabilitation centre. We have got the premises of the former Watson Hostel allocated to it. We have got an agreement with the Ted Noffs Foundation. What else have we got? We have got this government's word that there is money available and we have got this government's explanation that the Commonwealth government is dragging its heels. Well, do we believe them, or do we now believe that perhaps their commitment to this thing is a little bit shy as well?

We are all agreed that we need to have a youth rehabilitation centre for drug people as an alternative to the courts. We all know that the best place to stop people going down this long road into substance dependency is to start with the kids. We all know that the most effective way of doing it is to say to the kids to tell their peers that it is not cool to take drugs. We all know that the government ought to put more money into that, but they have to determine their priority.

Likewise, this youth rehabilitation centre is an important part of the attack on drugs. If we can see the government do such an enormous backflip on this act and sit back and watch up to 20 people die in the process, what guarantee have we got that there will be one extra step in the opening of this centre? Quite frankly, I was thrilled to my back teeth when I heard that that was going to come up. I now wonder whether I will ever see a person go in there.

We also asked, as part of our list of items, for a properly constituted academic and clinical trial of the supervised injecting place. Let us set it up properly. What we got was a page of evaluation criteria which was about as good as Mr Humphries' cost-benefit analysis of the prison. I would not give it to Sorbent to do something rather remarkable with, Mr Deputy Speaker. Even Mr Moore was embarrassed by that particular piece of paper. So where has it been resubmitted and where can we see the criteria? There has been much work overseas, in Sweden, Germany and Switzerland. There is probably a hundredweight of paper which says it works over there and a hundredweight of paper that says it does not, but what is guaranteed is that they were clinically created and academically valid trials. So how come we have not seen that particular paper? I am beginning to think that we have not seen it because the commitment to this is more rhetoric than substance. I think the principle of hanging on to power, hanging on to your job and hanging on to a salary of $122,306 is more important than the lives of 20 people.

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