Page 4702 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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got to say about this, but it now sounds as though she is more concerned about tattooing. I know that she said previously, and it is in the Hansard during annual reports or estimates hearings—I cannot remember which—that her major concern about health at the AMC was smoking. It was not the fact that drugs are freely available. It was not the fact that prisoners were injecting drugs. Her major concern, when she was asked about this in annual reports hearings, was that they are smoking. What we are getting from this Chief Minister is an incoherent response and it moves as the debate moves.
What we are lacking here is leadership from the Chief Minister. What we have seen is this debate going on for years. You would be well aware of it, Mr Assistant Speaker, inside the Labor Party. The left was opposed to the right. The right did not want it; the left wanted it. This is a debate that has been going on for years. We have seen the Burnet Institute report. We have seen the Michael Moore report. We have seen the submissions. We have had extensive debate in this place and in the community—and it is time for the Chief Minister to make a decision. It seems that she is utterly conflicted in this because she wants it as health minister but is too weak to do it as the Chief Minister.
So we will not be supporting this amendment. The amendment is a “get out of jail” from a Chief Minister who is not prepared to make a decision. It is, “Let’s have some words that sound good, that sound supportable, but we are not going to have a decision here about whether we are going to have an NSP or we are not going to have an NSP.” The government are going to let this debate drag on in this place and in the community, all the time detracting from the important work that people need to do in the corrections environment. What we will continue to see is the litany of failures occurring at the AMC. So we will not be supporting this amendment.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.01): I thank Mr Hanson for bringing forward this important motion today. It is an issue which should occupy the minds of all of us who want to ensure that the corrections system, and the prison in particular that the people of the ACT have paid so dearly for, has the results that the people of the ACT expect.
One of the most troubling things about the debate about a needle and syringe program for the prison is that which was touched on by Mr Hanson when he said that the creation of a program creates a sort of de facto legalisation for drugs inside the prison. As someone who observes this debate at fairly close quarters, I am somewhat appalled at the notion of the people who are pushing this argument that we must have a needle and syringe program. We just throw up our hands in despair when they say, “You can’t do anything about drugs in prison”.
We know that keeping drugs out of prison is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, even when they are not being lobbed over the perimeter in tennis balls to be picked up in the grounds later on; it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. But, if we send the message that it is all right, how do you stop people bringing contraband into the prison if once it is in the prison it becomes a situation where prisoners are able to use because they are signed up to the needle and syringe program?
This is a serious problem that no-one who advocates, who pushes, this program has had an answer to. What we are seeing is a counsel of despair: we cannot keep the
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