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

I rise today to speak in support of the surprise announcement from the Victorian government that a second supervised injecting facility will be established in the Melbourne CBD, and that the site of the North Richmond centre will be extended for another three years. I want to congratulate the Victorian government on this courageous decision. It is a decision that will save lives. When we treat drug dependence as a health condition rather than as a law and order issue, we save lives. This is a rare positive moment in the fight for drug law reform and harm reduction that we've been fighting over recent years. We know what works, and yet the government continues to demonise and stigmatise people who become dependent on drugs and, worse still, to starve those drug and alcohol treatment centres that we know help people of the funds they so desperately need. I've said it before: the war on drugs is a war on people, and this government is leading the charge.

If you want to know what drives someone in politics, look at what they did before they came to this place. Before entering parliament, I was a drug and alcohol clinician in Geelong. I worked in India, setting up drug treatment programs and providing clean needles and syringes. One thing I learnt was that when people become dependent on a drug it is no longer a choice. It leads to a downward spiral: families are torn apart, relationships are lost and people lose their livelihoods. They're often homeless; that's not a choice. The real crime here is not the crime committed by a system that says, 'If you take a drug, you're a criminal.' The real crime is denying people the treatment and the support that they need, and that's what this government is doing.

Drug and alcohol treatment works and saves lives, yet this government has starved the alcohol and drug treatment sector of resources. More than one in two people who come in for treatment will be denied the treatment they need. They won't get it. I got sick of looking someone in the eye when they were ready to take those first positive steps towards breaking that cycle of dependence and saying to them, 'We can't get you a bed,' or, 'We can't get you a spot in a treatment facility.'

We know that clean needles prevent the spread of diseases like hepatitis C and HIV, yet still people can't get access to them. In prisons, you're denied access to clean needles and syringes. This is not just about IV drug use. We know that when it comes to things like young people taking pills—and it doesn't matter what anyone in this joint says about it—they will continue to do it. Here's the reason: many of them enjoy it and have a good time when they're taking pills. However, we know that they're putting their lives at risk. We know that they'll take a substance of unknown purity that will sometimes be contaminated with something else, and we've got the potential to stop that through pill testing. Yet, despite successful trials here in the ACT, this government has done everything it can to stop pill testing at festivals. I've met organisers from right across the country who want to introduce it, yet they're threatened with the loss of their licence or with having policing fees ratcheted up when they consider it. We need to see pill testing at all festivals, and we need to see pill testing across fixed sites in the community. That's the Greens' policy.

Cannabis is another area where there's major reform going on right across the country. We know that in Canada right now people can get access to cannabis safely. We know that in many states in the US and in many European countries it's less harmful than alcohol; we know that the major harm is that you're putting someone in contact with criminals. How about we put the health professionals in charge? How about we regulate it tightly, give people advice and have referral services set up for people who get into trouble with their drug use? We could do that, but this government refuses to act.

COVID-19 has shown us what happens when you listen to experts. It's shown us what happens when you have the courage to ignore the rabid right-wing corporate media and listen to the people who know what they're talking about. It's about time the Australian government listened to the experts and did something to help save people's lives.