Page 4703 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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drugs out of the prison, so we may as well go with the flow. And I do not think that the people of the ACT expect that sort of defeatism from their leaders. I think that the people associated with corrections, the families of people who are in the ACT prison system and who want to see their loved ones reformed and back on the road to living as useful members of society when they leave prison, do not want that counsel of despair. They want some hope that the large number of people who end up in prison because of their drug addiction, because of their association with drugs, will have that opportunity to get off the stuff.
We see that when there are good programs in place people are able to use the time that they are in prison to get off drugs. There would be no incentive for people to get off drugs in the prison if this minister and the Greens succeed in pushing their proposal for a needle and syringe program. You will be undermining the programs in the prison which are aimed at getting people drug free, aimed at getting people dried out.
There are serious problems; Mr Hanson touched on them in his speech. The litany of things that the Hamburger report highlighted as being wrong in relation to the application of drug policy in the ACT prison system is a very long one. We have to be concerned when we hear that people who have dried out in the prison system then have another opiate pushed their way in the form of methadone. That is appalling. It is appalling that people go through the effort of drying out but because of the way the prison system works they end up back on methadone, the thing that has been described as “liquid handcuffs”.
This is a problem that this minister will not address. She wants to be the first to do something: “I want to have something new and innovative,” because new and innovative is what the Labor Party thinks we need to have in every area. What we need to have in every area is good, hard work, delivering basic services for the people of the ACT. And the people of the ACT and many of the people who are the inmates of the ACT prison want a clean prison where drugs are not pushed; where drugs are interdicted, where people who push drugs in the prison are found and apprehended and dealt with. They do not want a system where we have a de facto free drugs policy. Once you have a needle and syringe program you have to create this myth that a prison guard taking someone to the needle and syringe program knows what that person is carrying and cannot do anything about it, knows that that person is breaking the rules of the prison but cannot do anything about it because of their special status of being involved in the needle and syringe program. It creates huge problems.
Ms Gallagher said in her comments that by more than two to one people were turning out in favour of a needle and syringe program and that her job was to weigh these things and she was not going to be sort of brought into line by the prison officers. I put it to you, Mr Assistant Speaker, that the prison officers and the nurses who administer this scheme, who have grave doubts about the scheme, are the people at the coalface who are most going to bear the consequences of this. They do not want to see this happen because they are concerned about the consequences for their own personal safety, for the legal position it puts them in.
This is the problem that this minister cannot or will not address. What Mr Hanson has called for today in this motion, the cessation of the discussion about this flawed policy,
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