Page 484 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 8 March 2006
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In response to a couple of other points, I remind the house that four out of the seven states of Australia are either trialling or have implemented RRDT—random roadside drug testing. The ACT now says it is thinking of implementing new RDT laws. That is a bit strange. There must have been a seismic shift since December, when I recall the Chief Minister calling this redneck law. I find the inconsistency strange. Does he call random breath testing redneck law? The regimes are exactly the same. Perhaps the government is being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the realisation that there is an essential need for this law. I am glad to see that a working party has been established, but why has it taken all this time, given that other states have been thinking about this for a long time, given that some of my colleagues have raised it here quite often before and given that there is already a truckload of evidence going back a number of years about the threat of drug-affected driving on our community?
The minister says that we need to look at testing. Does that mean we must go through another two or three years to sort out the Sudafed factor? I do not think that is responsible governance. The minister says he does not applaud the idea of a law which might see authorities springing up from behind bushes to nab somebody who is on marijuana. That is not the purpose of this bill. We are not seeking to set up police in ambush to test all citizens who might be on drugs. The primary aim of this law is to protect our drivers and to protect the community. I do not give a damn if that means that habitual drug takers have their behaviour changed because they might run into a roadblock on the way home. That would be a good by-product, but it is not the primary aim. The primary aim here is to protect the community.
The New South Wales civil liberties people, according to the Greens, were concerned about the invasion of privacy. Mr Mulcahy has really made quite a fist of this particular issue. It is not as if the road death of an innocent citizen hit by a drug-affected driver were not an invasion of privacy. It is no wonder that the civil liberties group are treated as an irresponsible laughing stock by the majority of Australians. The Greens also raised the question: how do we know that an RDT regime would influence the habits of young people? When I was a young man, the RBT regime very much influenced my habit of having a few glasses of kerosene on the way home. It changed my life. I became a bit of a chardonnay drinker and drank a lot less. That was the experience of my generation with the drink culture of the early 1970s.
Mr Hargreaves: You should have turned to turps!
MR PRATT: Precisely, minister; turps is even better. Why would history not be replicated? I would like to see a more positive spin from the Greens, rather than the tunnel vision we have here. The Greens ask: where is the evidence that this might occur? There is a truckload of it—and I will drive it down the hallway to Dr Foskey’s office. We are deeply concerned with the irresponsible attitude taken here today by the Greens, who do not seem to want to support any sensible law that might provide better protection for the majority. I am also disappointed that the government did not have the foresight to come here today with some amendments. Could they not have amended our legislation so we could expedite something into the system? We would have been happy to sit down with the government and tweak this bill—to change it—so it could have been rushed into service; so that you, minister, could better protect our community.
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