Page 2041 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
hear, all the time, tragic cases in the media, none more so than this week. I will not touch too much on that, but obviously there are some clear cultural problems and societal problems.
I have to say that Dr Foskey and I agree to disagree on some of the aspects of this. She almost appeared to fully condone drug use, saying that people can exist on drugs and have quite a normal life—
Dr Foskey: I did not say that.
MRS BURKE: I did not say you said that. I said you appear to fully condone drug use but people do say that you can live a normal life taking drugs. If it is medication then that is fine. But we are talking here about an illegal substance. As with any other illicit drug, it is illegal. To say that we should be sustaining people’s lives and allowing them to continue in that lifestyle is wrong.
I think this report shows, points out and tries to give help, support and assistance right across the board, at every point where people take up drugs, where people are fully into the awful situation that they find themselves in once they get on this terrible bandwagon. What we should be doing is not be accepting of this stance; we should be doing more to not allow it to be acceptable in society and, therefore, have more people thinking it is all right to adopt it and take up that sort of lifestyle. We should be assisting people to seek alternatives to getting off drugs wherever we possibly can.
We need to get to the root cause of why people are on drugs and remain on drugs to get through life. Dr Foskey is right. I do know of people that do that. Therefore, we have to not accept that that is the way it is. Dr Foskey is right again. We need to look at some of the work cultures and practices that we have. To me, it is not acceptable that people feel they have to have a hit before they can go and do their job. Again, let us make no mistake: ice is illegal and we need to be doing all we can, and more, to get people off drugs and not really point them in that direction.
That brings me to another recommendation. We do need to exercise care. Look at recommendation 5:
The Committee recommends that information about the consequences and dangers of poly drug use be included in all future community education campaigns, funded by the ACT Government, dealing with licit and illicit drug abuse.
We link that to recommendation 8:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Department of Education and Training develop resilience building education programs for upper primary and early high school children.
Again, I think we have to be really careful. We heard that, recently in New South Wales, probably the best-intentioned people were putting out information about that particular issue and it actually pointed people to again accepting and taking up whatever we were trying to get them away from. So I think we do need to be very careful in that we do stick to the consequences and dangers of illicit drug use.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .