Page 1001 - Week 03 - Thursday, 10 March 2016
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certainly not a path that the Liberal Party would endorse, and I am glad to hear that that is not a path that the Labor Party will go down. It is a path that the Greens want to go down, that Mr Rattenbury wants to take. If he does so, he does so on his own, but against the will of 16 other members in this place. I move the following amendment to Mr Corbell’s proposed amendment:
Add new paragraph (2)(c):
“(c) refuse calls to decriminalise Ice, heroin and other dangerous illicit substances.”.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.06): I will both speak to the amendments and close the debate, if that is agreeable to colleagues. I will not be supporting either Mr Hanson’s amendment or the government’s amendment. As I said in my comments earlier, this is not a motion to congratulate the government on what it is doing and it is not a motion to endorse the status quo. It is, in fact, a motion to say that we need to go further and we need to do more. It is a motion to emphasise that the ACT actually seems to be losing touch with the evidence and it is slipping on its apparent commitment to harm minimisation and treatment.
The proposed amendment says that the government already prioritises treatment and harm minimisation and that it already treats personal illicit drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal issue. If this is the case, the government should then be willing to sign the Canberra declaration on illicit drugs, because this is exactly what it says. I do not think that the ACT government fully embraces this health focus to the extent that it could or should. Nor is it reflected in our distribution of funding. Yes, there are treatment and harm minimisation programs occurring, but I think it is hard to argue that they form the central focus of the ACT’s response to illicit drugs.
I agree that some of the ACT’s existing efforts and programs are good, and I would be the last to want to disparage them. I already mentioned the naloxone program and the work being done on the NSP as examples. Our drug diversion programs, which can be used as an alternative to referral to court, are another good example. The point remains that these are small examples in a system that overall is focused on an enforcement approach.
Despite this enforcement focus, it is interesting to note that in the ACT our five-year statistical data shows illicit drug offences are trending upwards. There has been a decrease over the last year, but the five-year trend is still up. At the same time, our five-year trend for drug diversions remains relatively flat. So, again, we are seeing a greater emphasis on enforcement than on the recognised pathways to reducing drug use. It is also worth noting that we have a civil penalties scheme for cannabis. Essentially that is decriminalisation. The diversion programs we have in place for other illicit drugs are a form of de facto decriminalisation. Similar schemes exist in most other jurisdictions.
I hear from members of the Assembly today that they are not interested in expanding any of these decriminalisation initiatives, nor are they interested in exploring new opportunities for harm minimisation, such as pill testing, an obvious harm reduction
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