Page 1167 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 9 April 2008
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constituency in the ACT, and they know what they are talking about. They are alarmed by the growing trend of drug-affected driving. I have spoken to police, formally and informally, in my capacity two years ago as the shadow police minister and also unofficially since, and police strongly believe that there is a need for random roadside drug testing. They are the people that we entrust with the policing of our laws. The police are the people that we entrust with determining and analysing the risk to our community. We pay them to do that, we trust them to do that and we have every confidence that they are qualified and trained to do that.
If I am getting good, logical, calm advice from ACT Policing that there is a need for testing for drug-affected driving, that is pretty damn good for me. That is in addition, as I say, to the regular feedback that we have had from the NRMA and from the community itself. When we are out there talking to the community, we note that the community is talking increasingly about the habit of drug-affected driving. In many cases, it is by parents who are worried about their kids. The parents know what is going on; the kids talk about this. Increasingly, people are expressing that there is a need for random roadside drug testing.
If the opposition, with our meagre resources—about 15 to 20 per cent, if we are lucky, of those that the government has available to them—have come to this determination then why haven’t the Stanhope government come to that determination? They have; logically, they must have. Why have they not come to this determination? Because they are being blindsided by ideology. They are being blindsided by lobbyists who talk about the human rights aspects involved in random roadside drug testing. They are being blindsided by their fear that they might compromise the principle that they like to exercise—what is known as harm minimisation. Harm minimisation is a very important strategy in our community for combating the problem with the scourge of drugs in society. But it is not an instrument that should be allowed to impede the enactment of sensible law to protect our broader community from drug-affected driving.
What we are seeing here is simply inaction on the part of this government. Let us just go back again and have a look at the mounting evidence—evidence, I say again, which this government has had available to it since 2005. If it did not believe the evidence that the opposition tabled in 2005 then it has been getting that evidence from many other sources regardless.
In 2005, research conducted by insurance company AAMI showed that 10 per cent of ACT motorists believed using recreational drugs did not affect their driving ability and that 12 per cent of Canberra drivers had admitted taking to the roads after using drugs such as marijuana, cocaine or ecstasy. If I recall, the sample involved in that study was somewhere in the region of 2,000. I will stand corrected on that and, if I am wrong on that point, I will rectify it in my closing statement. So 12 per cent in 2005 admitted they had driven after using marijuana, cocaine or ecstasy.
We know that people who are deeply drug affected by methamphetamines or ecstasy tend to react in very extreme and often violent ways. Can you imagine how they react when they are behind the wheel of a car and doped to the eyeballs? And what is a car? A car, potentially, is a lethal weapon. We trust people, we license them, we train them
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