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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2392 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

For that reason, I find the rather simplistic and perhaps populist response to this issue from the Liberals and the two, sometimes three, Independents who support the Liberals quite worrying. It does not address the problem; it creates more problems for a society because more and more discretion is being given to police officers who really should not be given more and more discretion. I do not think anyone would suggest that that is a healthy thing to do. There are always indignant and upset cries of, "Are you suggesting, Ms Tucker, that we do not have a good police force?" I am suggesting that there is always the potential for abuse of power in any group of people. Police forces in Australia have been investigated by royal commissions over extreme abuses of their power and discretion. It is naive to suggest that that would not be the case. That is why you have to be very careful when you are increasing police powers.

The fact that so many of the people in our community who are committing crimes are addicted to substances requires that we look at that aspect of the problem. We have had debates in this place about establishing safe injecting places and, not so much recently, the prescription of substances to which people can become addicted. I think that that debate needs to be kept going. We are not going to get very far with this government and the federal government, given the current approach. Hopefully, in the next Assembly and federally we will have different governments and a different approach to this issue. I sincerely hope that we will have a change in government federally as well so that we will have a more compassionate approach to this social problem.

The prescription of substance to which people can become addicted is still at the crisis end of the problem. The Pathways to prevention document that the federal government put out about a year ago and some of the initiatives of this government which are an attempt at intervention and prevention, community building and so on are to be commended, but the approach to this problem is not coherent or integrated enough and is not properly resourced, despite the protestations of the members of the current government during this debate that they have done so much. Anybody who has anything to do with the community and works with the community sector knows that not enough is being done across the whole spectrum. That goes right back to fundamental notions about what we are as a society.

I will say one more time, because it is relevant to so many of these discussions, that the notion of equity should be at the centre of social policy and government should acknowledge that it has a responsibility to ensure as much as possible that social policy is implemented in a really committed way. If we do not take it right back to that point, we are going to continue to have debates about what we should do: whether we should build a prison, whether we should have more people in prison, what our sentencing will be like, whether we will give the police more powers, what we feel about the suicide rate in our community, and why we have so much violence against women. All those questions will arise more and more unless we get back to that fundamental question of how we see ourselves as a society and what we see as the role of government in trying to bring about common good and a collective understanding of the public interest and benefit, instead of its being a side issue that happens after the economy has been fixed up.

I am glad that Mr Stanhope raised the question of violence against women. We have had a recommendation from the Estimates Committee about sexual health. The committee asked that the notion of sexual health also include addressing issues of assault against

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