Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We have the festival season rapidly approaching, so we have a time limit here. We can choose to follow what the evidence tells us, and the evidence tells us that when we have pill testing we save people's lives, and that when we don't use it people die. It's a pretty simple proposition. It's a pretty simple equation. We have a whole range of experts, community groups and stakeholders who are saying they are prepared to provide this service for the community so that they can help save people's lives. It doesn't matter what we say in this chamber. We can tell people to stop using these substances and they won't listen to us. They'll continue to make this choice. So the question for us is: should they pay for it with their lives? That is the choice right now. We say no. We say young people occasionally make risky choices and it's up to us as policymakers to ensure that we look after them, because we don't want to be explaining to the parents of families who lose their children that we had a chance to save them and we squibbed it.