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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3686 ..

MS DUNDAS (11.34): The ACT Democrats will not be supporting either of these bills. We will not be supporting the government’s proposed legislation because we believe it is heading in the wrong direction for drug law reform in the territory. While I think everyone generally agrees that there is a role for law enforcement and prosecution for the sale of illicit drugs, particularly at the very high end of the market, the government’s proposal achieves that aim by very questionable means. We already have legal penalties for the supply of drugs and the government has not put forward a case that the current regime is inadequate.

The Attorney-General has not brought forward this legislation with any investigation of its impact on drug users and has not tried to ensure that harm minimisation principles will not be compromised by the adoption of this legislation. I also believe there may be human rights implications that have not been adequately addressed by the government, not even in its response to the scrutiny report questions. However, I make it clear that that is not to say the Democrats oppose all the provisions of the bill. I particularly point out that the Democrats generally support the new offences aimed at reducing the role of children in distributing drugs. However, they have been placed in legislation that takes the wrong approach to the use of illicit drugs.

Currently the territory has one single piece of legislation, the Drugs of Dependence Act 1989, to deal with a whole range of drug issues in one place. Through this Act there is an attempt to try to deal with drug issues with a holistic approach; trying to combine enforcement with harm minimisation and keeping a health-based focus. I will not deny that there are problems with the Drugs of Dependence Act, but the proposal put forward today by the government of moving away from a holistic approach is not the answer. It is not helpful to try to split up drug laws into a whole host of different acts, ramp up the penalties without any consideration of how that will affect the use of drugs in the territory, and ignore the health of drug users.

The criminal code project has been a long time in development, but the territory should not be blindly implementing the code without considering the needs of the ACT community. When the Assembly first debated the criminal code, the Democrats argued that while there was merit in more closely aligning the criminal provisions between the states and territories, this should not be done at the cost of arbitrarily increasing penalty and reducing the rights of defendants. Sadly, that is what is occurring with these bills.

Once again, co-operation between states and territories on the criminal code seems to have hit a wall. While different jurisdictions have been incorporating parts of the code into their existing criminal laws, only the ACT and the Commonwealth are introducing a completely new code into legislation. This bill will not necessarily result in greater harmonisation of state laws, as this requires other states to follow the same path, and they have chosen different ways. This section of the code is particularly problematic as it has been substantially altered since the first round of recommendations.

My understanding is that the original proposals for drug law reform were rejected by some jurisdictions as they did not fit with those governments’ desired “tough on drugs” image. So the code was changed to ramp up the penalties and make defending against charges more difficult. I do not understand why the ACT needs to follow this path. The Democrats do not want the territory to go down the path of a “law and order” option, yet

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