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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 3013 ..

Mr Berry: Their speeches made sense.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Berry, if you keep that up, you will not be here to hear the rest of the comments.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, the fact is that there is an absence of leadership on the part of the Labor Party in this debate as well. When Mr Stanhope was speaking in April of this year about the impending election campaign, he gave a major speech. He talked about a variety of issues. Some of those issues were issues we have touched on in other debates since that time, and issues you might expect to be relevant in the course of a campaign like the one that we are getting under way at the moment.

Mr Stanhope was asked about a drug policy and what he thought about the position of drugs. To quote the Canberra Times, he said he was not particularly keen to campaign on drugs; that that was irrelevant to the party's position-whatever that means. That is not a surprising position to hear stated, because it echoes very closely what Mr Berry said as leader of the Labor Party at the 1998 election. He made a major statement early in the campaign saying that drugs were not an important issue for the Labor Party.

Mr Berry: No, that is not what I said at all.

MR HUMPHRIES: You can summarise how you put the words that you used, Mr Berry, but you said in the early stages of the campaign that drugs were not a key issue for the Labor Party in that campaign, and you pushed it to one side. You go back and check what you said about that. Mr Berry was doing it in 1998 and Mr Stanhope has done it in 2001, indicating very clearly that the Labor Party would rather not talk about this issue.

Indeed, the Labor Party was instrumental in killing off the supervised injecting facility in June of last year by voting against the provision of money for it in the ACT budget at that time.

Mr Berry: You wanted to get out of it.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, again I ask you-

MR SPEAKER: Mr Berry, you will have the opportunity to participate in this debate if you stop interjecting.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, this referendum is on supervised injecting rooms and a heroin trial, but more importantly it is about choice, participation, community involvement and listening. There are arguments about these particular issues, that is true, and I think we should return to those arguments at some point. But it is also important to talk about the basis on which we make decisions in this place, the basis on which we allow the community to be engaged with politicians in making those decisions.

We live in an age of representative democracy, when we assume that by voting for a party to govern in a territory, state or country we give them the authority to make decisions on our behalf for the duration of the life of that parliament-two, three, four or

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