Page 2112 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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We should all resist the temptation—as we proceed with this debate in the lead-up to an election and the temptation is there—for my side of politics to say that Mr Pettersson wants to legalise all drugs and for the Labor Party to say that the Liberals want to roll out Philippines-style drug policy. I do not think that would be helpful. We have found ourselves in those sorts of circumstances before, on both sides; let us not do that.
We are supporting this motion today, and we are doing so because the evidence—demonstrated over a large number of years as to how these simple offence notices apply to cannabis—demonstrated that that was an effective system that achieved a good balance in relation to harm minimisation for cannabis. If that model can be applied to certain other drugs in certain circumstances, as it was to cannabis, that is worth having a look at.
It is not that I agree with everything in Mr Pettersson’s motion, but when it comes to the crucial issues—the recognition of the health impacts, the need to better integrate health services and the potential for a simple offence notice to be applied more broadly—we need to make sure that when we as a community work to reduce the amount of drug taking in our community, we do not do so in a way that unnecessarily harms people who may be caught up in the criminal justice process.
I thank Mr Pettersson for bringing this debate before us today. We will support the motion. Should the government change in October, we will be happy to continue to look into this issue to see whether the simple offence notice is something that we can broaden and apply to limited numbers of illicit drugs in certain circumstances.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong) (4.15): The ACT Greens will be supporting this motion. I will later move the amendment that I have circulated that I think represents very tangible proof of the intention of Mr Pettersson’s motion.
Mr Pettersson quipped that the Assembly has come a long way, and indeed, it has. In March 2016 I put forward a motion in this place calling on the ACT government to “focus its drug policies to prioritise treatment and harm minimisation and emphasise a policy approach that treats personal illicit drug use as a health issue, rather than a criminal issue”. We had a 17-member Assembly at that time, and I lost that vote 16-1, receiving no support from anybody in the place. It is brutal when you lose a vote 16-1, but it underlines that both Mr Hanson’s speech today and where Mr Pettersson’s speech came from are a vast improvement on that situation just a few years ago.
I also note that during debate on Mr Pettersson’s cannabis legislation last year, I was unsuccessful in introducing a set of objectives for the Drugs of Dependence Act 1989 to reflect a commitment to harm minimisation and the treatment of drug use as a health issue. These objectives were, and remain, aligned with the COAG-agreed national alcohol and drug strategy, which addresses supply, demand and harm minimisation, but at that time we could not get support in this place for that proposal to get harm minimisation into the act, in the objectives.
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