Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate that senators want to speak to other things, so I will try to be brief. I often talk in this chamber with concern about the slowness of government responses to committee reports. I was a member of the Joint Standing Committee on the Australian Crime Commission for only the very last period of this inquiry but I was able to review some submissions and certainly considered the draft report, and so I am happy to be part of what is the unanimous report of a cross-party committee.

As I said, I am often concerned about how slow the government is in responding to reports. I suppose in one sense I should therefore be pleased that the Assistant Minister for Health and Ageing, Mr Pyne, who has already dismissed this report, responded so quickly. It was almost in record time. I think that within about an hour of the report coming down he had already dismissed key recommendations. Whilst I would like things to be a bit quicker, maybe we could get it to be somewhere between one hour and one year. Maybe if the government took a couple of months after reading a report before they dismissed it that would be a little bit more acceptable, particularly on an issue as important as this and after the committee had done a lot of work. As I said, I joined the committee only relatively recently, so I do not put myself in that category, but I know that the committee members as a whole did a lot of work.

Obviously a lot of people from the community contributed to this. They came from across the community—from the law enforcement agencies, from the health sector, from the people are developing our policies, from drug users and those who are touched by the harm that drugs can cause. All of those people participated, and the committee thought long and hard about how to put this report together and worked together to get a unanimous, balanced and certainly not radical report. If it was left to individual members across the spectrum to put their views, I am sure they would have had much stronger emphases on particular areas. But for the assistant minister, Mr Pyne, to totally dismiss key recommendations from the report straightaway is an absolute tragedy and a real contempt not just for the Senate but for the people in the community who are trying to get a better solution on this.

The report had a range of balanced and reasonable recommendations about ways that we can be more effective. This is an area that costs a lot of money. As the minister himself said, we spend $1.3 billion. If we are spending $1.3 billion, don’t we want to look at how we can be a bit more effective at spending that money rather than just using it as a way of dressing up the minister as though he is some sort of little assistant general in a tin-pot war? This sort of reproach is just so irresponsible when you get a considered report and people are prepared to put all their prejudices and preconceptions to one side and look at the evidence. The evidence was quite clear. It found that some people are missing out on getting the treatment they need. The assistant health minister should be listening to this. He should be looking for ways to improve the health outcomes for people who need treatment. Some of them are missing out on treatment because of the fear they have of the criminal sanctions that might apply.

The committee gave the unanimous recommendation that the National Drug Strategy would be more effective if more resources and focus were put on harm reduction. That does not mean ‘Legalise everything and tell the police to lay off.’ It means ‘Change your priorities and emphasis because if you put some more in this area we reckon it could have a better effect; we reckon it could help people.’ What is so terrible about that? We had Assistant Minister Pyne straight away saying:

... now is not the time to be showing weakness in the face of the war on drugs ... Now is not the time to be wavering in the war on drugs by embracing harm minimisation over a tough-on-drugs approach.

Please! How pathetic can you get? That might have been a nice two-second radio grab, but we are talking about people’s lives here. We are talking about how to make taxpayers’ money more effective. Why give such jingoistic responses to what was quite a moderate recommendation about changing the emphasis a little bit, and why immediately wave the flag of being tough in the war on drugs?

It is bad enough that the Prime Minister is completely ignoring reality with the war in Iraq and continuing down the same path, completely blind to whether or not things are getting worse, deciding to tough it out and stay the course. When you are a policy maker or politician, you have to continue to assess the evidence. If the evidence shows that what you are doing is not working then, even though you might think you are being tough and determined to stay the course in your so-called war, frankly, you are just being an idiot if you are ignoring the evidence purely for the sake of maintaining a rhetorical purity or whatever you think might score you the best political points in the short term.

Frankly, I do not think the public across the spectrum are on the whole particularly interested in that rhetoric. They are not interested in the ‘legalise it’ versus the ‘tough on drugs, zero tolerance, heavy-handed law enforcement’ debate. For most people, this is not about using the drugs issue as a way to reinforce their own morality, political ideology or vote-winning strategies; they just want to see policies that will work. This was an inquiry that listened to the people who are involved. I imagine most of us here are not partakers of amphetamines or other synthetic drugs and most of us have probably never been, I suspect.