Page 5492 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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much-needed area of road safety reform, and we see that the ACT now remains the only jurisdiction without a fully rolled-out random drug testing regime in place.
It is even more curious when you consider that this legislation merely proposes to give the police the powers to actually enforce existing territory road law. It is already an offence to drive whilst impaired, whether it is by alcohol or drugs, but random testing, as for alcohol, will simply provide the deterrence. So why is it so different to have this legislation in place for alcohol but not for drugs?
Given the weight of evidence in favour of introducing RDT, I still fail to see why the government have been waiting for so long, and why they continue to wait. The comments by the Chief Minister and the Attorney-General in recent days in relation to the opposition’s continued and demonstrated leadership on this issue have been the subject of scorn and derision by members of the public as well as by the police force.
The public is rightly questioning why the government continue to deny the evidence in support of introducing RDT and why they refuse to do nothing about this issue. A number of years have now passed, so they cannot claim that this is some sort of knee-jerk or ill-thought-out proposal. Let me remind members again that RDT exists in every other state and territory.
It is worth looking briefly at the other jurisdictions. Victoria introduced the world’s first roadside trial in 2003 in response to the growing trend of drug driving, and I applaud them for doing so. Due to the overwhelming success of the trial, the Victorian RDT program became permanent law on 1 July 2006.
Tasmania introduced their RDT legislation in July 2005. It is worth noting, and the Greens members of this Assembly should heed this, that when this legislation was introduced in the Tasmanian parliament their Greens colleagues in that state supported the RDT legislation because they sensibly saw this as a road safety initiative. In addition, when Tasmania introduced trace particle testing as a cheaper and faster means of detecting the presence of drugs, the Tasmanian Greens supported that initiative also. I was very pleased to see that the Tasmanian Greens had agreed to do that and I would urge our local Greens to do likewise. But it does serve to demonstrate that ACT Labor’s position on this is actually sitting to the left of the position of the Tasmanian Greens.
In December 2005, the South Australian parliament passed the Road Traffic (Drug Driving) Amendment Act, which legislated for random drug testing in that state. New South Wales did so in 2006, Western Australia in October 2007, Queensland in December 2007 and the Northern Territory in 2008. So every other state and territory has introduced and rolled out fully functioning RDT regimes, and the legislation I propose is similar to that introduced in these other jurisdictions.
The opposition’s proposal has the backing of the AFP. I quote from a press release released by Mr Jim Torr, the CEO of the AFPA:
The Australian Federal Police Association is concerned that Jon Stanhope is putting politics above public safety as he refuses to take action against drug driving in the ACT.
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