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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 09 Hansard (Tuesday, 17 August 2004) . . Page.. 3697 ..

community—our youth in particular—are ineffective. Whilst I congratulate the government on putting forward a sensible bill, I have some concerns. I am concerned that, whilst we have an effective bill, we do not have effective preventative programs. To my mind, you need to have both. You need to have a bill that spells out clearly the responsibilities of people, but you need also to have in place preventative strategies for intervening to make sure that young people do not go down the wrong pathway.

For example, I am concerned that the drug education program in schools is not adequate. I know that a number of schools carry out drugs programs effectively. There is a policy that says that if a school wants to get into a drugs education program it can and there are some tools available to help those schools do that. But there is no departmental benchmark. There is no clear ACT standard whereby there is a directive to schools to carry out drug education to a certain level. Lots of teachers I have spoken to privately have reinforced the view that drug education is random. There is very little in the way of external assistance to schools to help them carry out drugs education effectively.

I was talking to a teacher who said that in her class of 16-year-olds she heard a couple of boys say, “Let’s go out and do some cones,” and they just left the classroom. A little bit later these two boys were caught by police smoking bongs in an underpass on school property. The police were looking for a missing bicycle and caught them only by accident. It seems to me that that teacher and that school did not have the support mechanisms available to try to intervene with those kids, who were known to have a strong drug habit.

There is no intervention program for schools to target those kids who are known to have a strong habit. Some schools have sufficient counselling services for them to try to intervene, but there is not a broad standard to make sure that all schools have this type of support. Not only do we not have that sort of support for those particular kids who are known to have a habit, particularly kids from broken families, but also there is not a reliable, effective, general education program to make sure that all the kids in those classes, particularly those in the early high school years, are continually taught the concerns about drugs and how not to go down that wrong pathway.

Whilst we have here an effective bill, we do not have effective preventative programs, and you cannot have one without the other. You have to have a whole-of-government program. For example, I have not seen in schools a composite program being run by education, family services and the police to properly engage youth at risk and to engage their parents. I have seen lately a couple of high schools which do have some good programs like that and a fair effort is made by those high schools to engage with parents of children at risk, but when I investigated further I found that there is no standard, there is no benchmark, for all schools to be provided with sufficient support to make sure that that happens.

As I say, you cannot go down this pathway of making sure that we have a bill in place which clearly extols the virtues of proper community behaviour and which clearly outlines the responsibilities of youth about not taking up a drug habit without having preventative programs in place. Whilst this bill is effective, it will be undermined if this government does not ensure that the realities of the penalties and the responsibilities on youth not to engage in drug taking are enshrined in obligatory values education and drugs education in schools. Unless that happens, the bill will not be supportable. The bill

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