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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 3062 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

dysfunction in a more comprehensive manner. It is sexier to look at the crisis end, but we should be careful not to duck any complex understanding of the factors at play that create what we like to characterise as drug problems. It might be life problems or it might be problems to do with education, violence, social exclusion, unemployment and poverty that give rise in some people to drug abuse.

"Let's not be soft on drugs," people say. "Look at Switzerland, let's look at Portugal, look at Sweden. The Swedes are tough on drugs and they have less addiction." Sweden is not so tough on drugs as might appear from the figures and statements the Internet offers. There is an incidence of drug abuse in Sweden, and it is through the health system in Sweden that harm minimisation is practised, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.

I would like to put to all those hard-line anti-drug moralists that there are a number of other factors that you ought to address in a debate on drug policy. They include employment, education, housing and health care. If you want to address the problems of drugs, you need to look at the treatment of people without work and living on pensions and benefits, sole parents, people living with illness, people who are damaged by other damaged members of their families and people who are damaged by a society that disowns them because of some perceived difference. It is not good enough to simply narrow your focus to the use and abuse of drugs.

In places like Sweden it is not their drugs policy that makes a difference to people's lives. It is how the Swedish people-and so the Swedish government-support those most in need in their community. Over 51 per cent of the Swedish GDP is returned to the Swedish people through taxation-in social security, universal health care, public housing and employment support. It is at the top of the OECD scale. Australia is near the bottom, with the United States, with less than a third of GDP returning through taxation. Yet the Liberal Party in this country peddles the fiction that we are all too highly taxed.

The Liberal Party has an appalling, ideologically driven, pitiless record of scapegoating the vulnerable-from the aged to the homeless, from the unemployed to the socially excluded. They are the same values that drive the ACT Liberals. it appears. In regard to substance abuse, however, the Independent anti-drugs campaigners in this Assembly and their Liberal Party cohorts ought to wise up to the fact that it is the wider set of values shaping our society that lead to the problems we face.

Mr Humphries referred to this as a moral issue. I was interested to hear what was said at the Conference of Swiss Bishops in 1997, when there was a proposal to have a referendum in Switzerland, which they opposed. I quote what the Swiss bishops said-men of faith, as we have in this place.

The Christian ethic defined by the example of Jesus places human dignity at the centre of discourse. It follows that Jesus' words are addressed equally to drug users who are so often marginalised: "each time you do this for one of the least of my brothers you do it for me."

A report on the conference reads:

Worried about the fate of addicts and their families, similarly uneasy about the serious consequences of alcoholism, the abuse of prescription drugs and tobacco, the bishops recalled that the Christian ethic urges and invites the social reintegration of

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