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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 5 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1652 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

system is extremely violent, so any way we can avoid putting people into that system must be supported. Community service orders are one such alternative.

I agree with Ms Dundas that we must keep looking at different ways of dealing with people who have broken the law because we know that, by sending them to prison, we are likely to inflict on them a very dangerous environment. We have a duty of care in this matter and I do not think it is taken seriously enough.

The periodic detention centre has a number of problems of which I am aware, particularly for people who are drug affected. I do not know whether this is also an issue with community service orders. However, we cannot talk about punishment as a response to breaching-we should work out whether there are reasons why people are breaching.

I know that, with the periodic detention orders, there are real issues for people who are drug affected and drug addicted who go into the centre. They go in on the Friday night and by Saturday or Sunday, they are pretty sick. There is nothing there to help them, or to deal with that. They will be sent home; they will then be breached; and they end up in Goulburn. We heard this story when the Health Committee had a forum recently on access to clean syringes for addicted people-injecting drug users.

The question of access to clean syringes for people in prison, remand centres or on periodic detention came up as well. In that forum, we had some very interesting input from people who work in the field. One person spoke about what she knows to be occurring in Canberra with weekend detention. She works there, and this issue came up.

This is another example of not looking just at the surface question here and saying, "Well, people are breaching-we will have to make it so they don't breach"and, "They are being bad."We should work out if there are real reasons why they are breaching that we can deal with, on which we can support them. In the long run, for them to end up in Goulburn jail because they have been breaching is not going to serve them or the community.

MRS BURKE (3.43): Hopefully we have the maths right now, but I guess it is still a debatable point. Nevertheless, I still think Mr Stefaniak's motion to bring this on is a worthy one, because it is bringing this matter out for debate. As Ms Tucker has said, we heard evidence in the Health Committee. There are many facets to this-it is not an easy issue.

However, I think it needs tightening up, Mr Speaker-or why bother to have these orders made? If they are going to be breached continually because of problems such as compounded health problems, we should be looking into this. I applaud Mr Stefaniak, and I know my colleagues are supportive of what he is trying to do here.

He has obviously been on a mission for a while to keep the pressure on, to ensure that Canberra is a safer place to live. I certainly appreciate that. People in the community deserve to feel safe and secure, and I am sure the Attorney-General would agree with that. They deserve to be secure in the knowledge that, when people commit an

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