Page 189 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 December 2016
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has the opportunity to do that. I will talk more about that tomorrow, so I will not take the time today, but it is an initiative that I think will make a real difference on the ground here in Canberra for people with mental health issues.
There are a range of quite progressive issues that are not in the parliamentary agreement and on which perhaps we have not reached agreement in this place yet. I look forward to progressing some important issues through the course of these four years. One is the issue of medical cannabis. We started a significant discussion about that last term, and I think we have made a lot of progress. I look forward to seeing the arrival of that program in the coming calendar year so that people in Canberra who are suffering can access that.
In the area of drug law reform, we have a lot to do. We have a vast range of areas to tackle. Pill testing is one place where we can make significant progress. There are people in Canberra who want to do this, who have the capability. This is a very important harm minimisation measure where, with some careful work and some thoughtful approaches, we can offer a very important reform that will potentially save young lives in our city.
We need to do work to clean up political donations and restore the strong donation laws in the ACT. The ones we had before the 2012 election were far preferable to the ones we have now. I look forward to the fact that tomorrow, assuming the Assembly agrees, we will establish a select committee to look at a range of electoral issues. This is a topic we should be discussing there. We saw the Labor and Liberal parties come together last term to widen the scope of political donations. I think that was a regrettable decision, one that I hope we can correct in this term.
Finally, we need to make significantly more progress on poker machines. They are addictive and manipulative. Individual punters cannot bear the sole responsibility for the damage that these machines do to people, their families and the community. As a government, as the leaders of this community, we need to stand up and take responsibility to combat the addictive and deliberately manipulative nature of these machines. We have so much more we can do. There are two issues that the Greens particularly have spoken about: one-dollar maximum bets and mandatory precommitment. These are the two key issues identified by the Productivity Commission, and we need to move forward on them.
MS BERRY (Ginninderra—Deputy Chief Minister, Minister for Education and Early Childhood Development, Minister for Housing and Suburban Development, Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Minister for Women and Minister for Sport and Recreation) (5.18): I would like to thank Mr Steel for bringing this motion forward today. I know that I will probably be repeating a lot of what has already been said from this side of the chamber, but the motion goes to issues that I feel strongly about, that matter deeply to many in our community and that the ACT government has continued to step up for in our community.
I first want to talk about safe schools. We know that one in five lesbian, gay or bisexual Australians currently experience depression. This is more than triple the national rate. One in three from this community experience an anxiety-related
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