Page 3087 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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The model that is being consulted over would have very tight controls whereby a doctor, a treating medical practitioner, would have to form the view that this was something that would assist a prisoner and that they would be issued with a clean syringe only if they returned the dirty equipment, the dirty unsafe equipment, that they are currently using. It is a one-for-one model. There is no wide blanket of just handing out needles to whoever wants one. So it would not increase by one the equipment that is currently available in the jail and it would have to be very, very controlled in that way. That was one of the issues that prison officers raised with me, so we took that away and resolved that, in the model that would be tried, this would address that concern, only to find out that it does not address the concern of prison officers and now there is a move to another concern about the model.
Mr Wall also asked why we do not listen to those that matter the most. I think that, again, indicates the side—if you want to choose a side—that the Canberra Liberals are on, which is that the prison guards or the custodial staff, I think we call them, have more rights than anyone else in this debate; that they have the right to dictate whether or not the government introduces a particular program within their workplace; that they have the right to veto that; and that their rights should be considered well over and above the rights and health needs of a prisoner who is living in that situation.
I would accept that it is very, very difficult to argue that a prisoner’s rights should be the same as those of a worker in a prison. It is very easy to form judgments about this but I think it does require us as community leaders to have a look, fairly, at everyone’s needs within this situation. Opponents to the needle and syringe program will then say, “We will just put in more programs to stop their drug use.” I think that is a very naive view of the population we are dealing with, that you could just send them off to a drug education course and that would solve everything, or send them off to some pastoral care and that would solve everything.
Some of the people whom this program would help will have firmly entrenched drug-using behaviour. Then we can argue whether or not it is right or wrong that people with these kinds of conditions are in jail and why they are in jail. But the reality is that it will be quite often many years, decades, of injecting drug use that they are dealing with. It will be dealing with things like collapsed veins through their injecting drug use so they have other particular health vulnerabilities not just their addiction to a particular drug that also need to be addressed.
Some try to reduce this argument by saying that those who work in this workplace have much more rights and much more say than a vulnerable member of our community who has had their liberty withheld. And let us remember that it is actually having their liberty withheld that is the punishment that this society imposes on someone who has broken the law. It is not then a series of punishments which then happen within it—that, because you are in jail, you have fewer rights and have to be treated less respectfully than anybody else—because the actual punishment is the fact that they are forced to spend time at the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
We should not debate this matter one side versus another without acknowledging that there are legitimate arguments on both sides and we need to work them through. That
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