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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3696 ..

their homes and then pools those plants. It is, in effect, a decentralised plantation. Drastic changes to the SCON system are unnecessary to deal with this problem.

Under the law as it stands, police already have the discretion to use the criminal process when they suspect that plants are being grown for profit. The police will still need to gather the evidence of the threads of the major operation if the intent is really to go after the Mr Bigs. The change to the SCON system will only allow easier prosecution of the little people in the scheme, likely to be users themselves. This additional criminalisation comes without any apparent advantage, since it is discretionary.

The Greens do not support this bill; neither should a government committed to harm minimisation. Also, I will not be supporting Mr Stefaniak’s Drugs of Dependence Amendment Bill, which would further meddle with the SCON, increase penalties and reduce the amount of time available for a person issued with a simple cannabis offence notice to pay the fine for that before more criminal system action is taken against them.

The Greens do not support that bill. It is basically another law and order response from Mr Stefaniak. Both bills are meddling with a system which has been effective in keeping users out of the criminal system, which would only lead to increased criminal activity and greater human and community cost. It is being done for very poorly argued reasons.

MR PRATT (12.11): Mr Speaker, this bill goes a long way towards developing a deterrent. There is a great need to help those who are drug dependent. This bill is part of a mosaic of strategies that will do that. The bill goes in that direction. Therefore, I must disagree wholeheartedly with the approach that the Democrats and the Greens have taken in this debate.

It is very important to lay down clear law that reminds people firmly of their responsibilities. You cannot rest all of your strategies simply on harm minimisation, which is what the Democrats and the Greens seem to want to do. Yes, harm minimisation is an important component of the broader strategies for dealing with drugs and intervening on behalf of our youth who are going down the wrong pathway, but you cannot succeed always simply by appealing to the better nature of people when those people are not interested in pursing their responsibilities. I think that the Democrats in particular are insulting the community with some of the points that they have put forward this morning. I think their call, and that of the Greens, for the scrapping of this bill is purely irresponsible.

We must help people get off drugs, not sustain their drug habit. The Greens were saying here this morning that this bill will catch some of our young people. Of course it will. Perhaps it is necessary, though, to catch some of our young people who have a strong habit to jolt them into some sort of sense as part of a broader strategy of trying to intervene and save these kids from going down the wrong pathway. The bill has an important role to play in that broader strategy. The Greens and the Democrats, with their overdependence on harm minimisation, are exercising irresponsible concepts. You cannot pursue only that line. That line is soft on crime.

It is very important to send a message to our impressionable youth that the community will not tolerate drugs and that these habits are antisocial. At least this bill does that, although I must say that I am very concerned that the means of informing the

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