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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2416 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

proposed, was very concerned about the will of the government and whether it was, again, just grabbing at headlines.

The history of the drug law debate in the ACT has been that the Chief Minister and Mr Moore, in particular, have been extending the envelope by pushing and pushing the issue, gathering an opportunistic headline each time, but not expanding the drug debate very far. I have never been that enthusiastic about their approach. I think that this issue is something on which we ought to avoid confrontation and polarisation, rather than promoting it. I think that Mr Moore and Mrs Carnell were more about promoting polarisation because it gave them a place in the sun in the debate. That was one of the reasons for our scepticism about the views that were being expressed.

Notwithstanding that, we were convinced following negotiations which occurred between Mr Stanhope and Mr Moore, and I suspect others, that there were sympathies for this issue and a bipartisan arrangement was reached. It strikes me as very interesting that the experts reporting on this issue are not prepared to mention the breaching of the bipartisan arrangement between Labor and the Liberals in relation to this matter. Neither are they prepared to mention that the bipartisan arrangement with the Labor Party on this important issue was ditched without debate at the earliest opportunity. Nobody seems to wish to comment on that.

I say, as Mr Stanhope said earlier, that this is probably the end of any bipartisan arrangement on drug law reform in the ACT for the foreseeable future. Putting this facility off until after the next election will mean that Mr Osborne, Mr Rugendyke and the Liberals can do their very best to polarise the community on this issue and it is unlikely that the mood in this place will be of a type to take these sorts of steps again. That will be all because the Liberals ratted on a bipartisan deal with the Labor Party. They have demonstrated to me and to my colleagues that they are not to be trusted on these issues.

Mr Speaker, this bipartisan arrangement led to an act being put in place by a majority of members of this Assembly which would have produced a facility for the use of drug-affected persons in our community. I have said enough in a previous speech about the reasons for having the drug injecting room, but I will repeat my view that it is not a panacea. I do not think I have ever believed that it would be. I am convinced that it will save some lives, though it will not save all of them. Experts disagree on the extent of the lives that would be saved and commentators disagree on the extent of the lives that would be saved, but I think almost everybody agrees that lives would be saved by having this facility.

There is disagreement as well about where the facility fits into the scheme of things for drug law reform in the ACT. Certainly, it was given our support on condition that the government agree to perform a whole range of activities. One of them was about establishing a youth rehabilitation centre. That is not up and running. I notice that there is no extra money for drug education in this year's education budget. That has not been delivered. All of these things have not been delivered. They are all good reasons for the Labor Party to be sceptical about the government's performance on this matter, but we had made a deal on it. We entered into an arrangement with the government in good faith and we came to this place and passed a piece of legislation.

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