David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thanks, Acting Deputy President. The coalition doesn't like what territorians have done. They don't like the fact that the people of the ACT have fundamentally rejected the coalition's failed war on drugs and have instead listened to the experts on addiction and illegal drugs. They've spoken with the overwhelming majority of the legal profession whose job it has been, up to now, to so mismanage the possession of illegal drugs. They've listened to the evidence and they've changed the law—not, as the shadow Attorney-General would suggest, to make it legal to have illegal drugs in the ACT. No. It's a decriminalisation path. If people are found with personal use quantities of drugs, the drugs are confiscated and a civil penalty is issued. Did you ever hear that from the shadow Attorney-General in her rant? No, because it's inconvenient to their post-fact view of the world. Did you hear the shadow Attorney-General mention the five days of hearings that the ACT Legislative Assembly had on this? The committee accepted submissions from across the ACT and had five days of hearings on the bill. They heard from the public in Canberra and the ACT, and they overwhelmingly supported these changes. Did you hear that from the shadow Attorney? No, because that's an inconvenient fact. The shadow Attorney-General then comes up and says, 'The Senate must have an inquiry.' Surely if you're going to make that kind of claim you do your research, at least, and if you do your research you speak the truth about this. The ACT Legislative Assembly had five days of hearings for the inquiry into this. They received over 50 submissions and hundreds and hundreds of survey responses, and the people of the ACT overwhelmingly backed in this reform. But that's too democratic for the coalition, isn't it? They hate the idea of self-government in the ACT. This is not the first time they've tried to overturn the ACT as it takes through progressive laws. We saw the same on the euthanasia bill, desperately trying to overturn self-government in the ACT. Now they're trying the same trick; they're trying the same deeply undemocratic attack on the groundbreaking law reform on drugs of dependence.

I think I know the thing that's really getting the coalition here, the thing that's keeping them awake at night. The thing about the recent law reform in the ACT that's making them wake up in a cold sweat of fear is that these laws are going to work. Getting away from the endless, losing, life-destroying war on drugs, which stops people getting treatment, criminalises addiction and has failed in every jurisdiction it's been tried in—when the ACT steps away from that with a decriminalisation model, it's actually going to work. That's what is really getting the coalition so hot under the collar here—that this is actually going to work.

When we heard the lies that the ACT government has not put in place additional funding for addiction and drug dependence, again, it does the coalition no credit. First of all, you have to realise there was a five-day inquiry. Then you have to read the report from the inquiry. Then you have to read the government's response to the inquiry. None of that has been done by the coalition, who try to pretend there hasn't been an inquiry. But, when you read the ACT government's response to the inquiry, one of the recommendations was that the ACT government should significantly increase its investment in alcohol and other drug services. Absolutely they should, and my Greens colleagues in the ACT have absolutely been pressing for this investment for years and years.

Now it is actually happening. People who have addiction are getting more services to have their addiction treated. They're not being put into jail. They're not being dragged through the courts. They're not being treated like a criminal because they have an addiction. They're actually going to get the treatment they need. That's what the ACT is doing, and that's what the coalition hates. They want to see money spent on courts, police and jails and not on opiate treatments, not on addiction treatments and not on drug and alcohol treatments. How has that gone? How many lives has that destroyed? How many more lives do you want to see destroyed?

This is what the ACT government has agreed to. I'll read from their response:

The Government has invested nearly $20 million in new funding for drug treatment and harm reduction services through the 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22 Budgets, supporting implementation of the ACT Drug Strategy Action Plan 2018-2021. This includes:

•   expanding the capacity of Canberra Health Services' drug diversion service;

•   expanding drug treatment capacity at the Alexander Maconochie Centre;

•   increasing funding for distribution of the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone and sterile injecting equipment to reduce harms from drug use;

•   increasing funding to the alcohol and other drug treatment and support service sector to provide treatment services to the ACT Drug and Alcohol Court;

•   joint funding of a mobile clinic operated by Directions Health Services to provide alcohol and drug, mental health and primary care services to disadvantaged community groups; and

•   establishing a northside Opioid Maintenance Treatment Clinic.

They've also established a national first with a permanent pill testing service, and they even managed to squeeze $4.3 million out of the federal government to provide some of these services and additional services.

When you take resources away from police, courts and jails when it comes to people who have an addiction and a health problem, you free up resources to deal with addiction—to keep families together, to provide alternative options and to give people a pathway out of their addiction, rather than jail them, take their jobs, take their hope and force people down a pathway of addiction. That's what the ACT government is doing.

This mob is a bunch of 1950s war-on-drugs types. Some of them might be Nixon war-on-drugs types. Some of them might have dragged themselves into the early 1970s. That mob think the answer to addiction is putting people in jail. What an absolute disgrace. Not only do they want to jail people because they have a health problem; they also want to tear down self-government in the ACT and they want to do it all in the one motion. What a disgrace.

This motion should never have been brought. The coalition needs to drag itself into the 21st century and realise two things. Who best decides the future of the ACT? People in the ACT, the ACT assembly, who went through good process, had an inquiry and backed in their laws. What should we be doing with drugs of addiction and the health and social concerns that come out of drugs of addiction? Treat it like a health problem. Invest the money where we save the most lives. Don't put people in jail for addiction.

If you look at what the coalition have done over the last 12 months, the last five years, every chance they've had to drag this country backwards, they've taken. They tear down the hopes of First Nations justice reforms. They were willing to run deeply offensive, fact-free attacks on refugees. Now they're playing the ugly politics of trying to criminalise people because they have an addiction. Well, shame on them. The Greens will never support that. We won't support this inquiry. We back in what the ACT government has done with the support of the ACT people, and we call on the coalition to grow a heart, to grow a brain and to stop with this nonsense.