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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2405 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I sincerely regret that the supervised injecting room has been a casualty, because that was one part of the budget I definitely supported. My regret is made even stronger by the fact that the supervised injecting place is not even a new initiative of the government and therefore a core part of the budget. The government was merely providing a relatively small amount of funding to implement the supervised injecting place legislation that had already been passed by a majority of the Assembly.

In line with the Greens' constructive approach to dealing with bills before the Assembly, I did attempt to protect the funding of the supervised injecting place in line with the will of the majority of the Assembly in the earlier vote on the SIP legislation by voting for the health line of the Appropriation Bill. This approach also allowed the independents the opportunity to express their opposition to the funding of the supervised injecting place by voting against the health line. I thought this might be a solution to the impasse, and I regret that Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne chose to push the issue to the brink by not supporting the budget as a whole, even though they had not expressed general opposition to the budget before and, in fact, apparently still felt very comfortable supporting the government on every other issue.

I am also very disappointed at the speed with which the Chief Minister dumped the supervised injecting place in order to secure the agreement of the independents to pass the budget. Mrs Carnell knew that the Labor Party was considering supporting the budget in order to stop the Independents hijacking the funding from the supervised injecting place. She also made no attempt to talk to me, even though she would have been aware of my support for the supervised injecting place and my interest in finding ways to secure its funding, including having informal discussions with Mr Moore about the matter before she made her announcement of the deal. Mrs Carnell and her government are obviously more interested in keeping the coalition with Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne together than in getting the supervised injecting place up.

I am also disappointed by the actions of Mr Moore in supporting the Chief Minister's dumping of the supervised injecting place. I believe also that reform of drug laws was one of the issues on which Mr Moore reserved the right to maintain his independence when he became part of the Carnell government. I can accept that he may have tried and failed to influence the cabinet to negotiate with other MLAs to find a way to fund the supervised injecting place, but then to publicly blame all MLAs apart from his Liberal colleagues for the dumping of the supervised injecting place was quite bizarre.

It is regrettable that the debate over this budget has become so focused on the supervised injecting place when there are many other aspects of this budget that deserve condemnation. The government has criticised Labor and me for not supporting what they believe is such a financially responsible budget. Let me again inform the government that there is more to a budget than its financial bottom line. A growing movement of businesses seeking to be more sustainable are developing the concept of the triple bottom line.

It is not enough to be concerned about just the financial bottom line. There should be equal concern about the social and environmental bottom lines. Financially, the ACT may be in the black, but we still have social and environmental liabilities in the ACT that are significant and that I believe this government is not adequately addressing.

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