Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I claim to have been misrepresented by the Minister for Health and Ageing, who selectively quoted from a speech and suggested, very explicitly, that I was soft on drugs. He quoted one section of my speech. If you read the sentence around it I think he perhaps even excluded words within the sentence. What I said was this:

Reverend Bill Crews runs the Exodus Foundation in Ashfield in my electorate of Grayndler. Every day he deals with the desperation and destitution wreaked by heroin dependence. Heroin is a bad problem. But it is not the heroin per se that causes all these problems, it is often the criminalisation of the supply and use of heroin. Because heroin is illegal, addicts are criminalised. Most addicts do not start as criminals, but their habit makes them criminals. And then, in order to support their habit, a vast proportion of addicts engage in far more serious crimes.

I think that is fairly self-evident.

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