2016-09-14
Speech in parliament: I rise to speak on the motion put forth by Ms Patten. The current legal and law enforcement regime with regard to the possession, use and cultivation of cannabis for personal use is failing our community. The Greens here in Victoria and federally have led the debate when it comes to the urgent need for drug law reform. For example, across Australia we have led the charge when it comes to medical cannabis. As a result we are seeing groundbreaking reforms both here and in other jurisdictions around the country following the lead taken by other countries, including Uruguay and Spain.
The Greens led on this issue because of the ever-increasing weight of evidence, both here and abroad, that tells us the criminal and civil penalties for cannabis and other recreational drugs are ineffective. Worse still, this punitive approach actually increases harm and costs lives because it acts as a deterrent for users to seek medical care. This approach can also leave users with a criminal record that hangs over them for the rest of their lives, so neither the individual nor the community, nor our law enforcement institutions, are better off adhering to this approach. On the contrary, it comes at a huge social and financial cost with no identifiable benefit.
The so-called war on drugs has been waged in Australia for decades, and yet still today we have one of the highest rates of drug use in the world. Here in Victoria hundreds of people still die every year from drug overdoses. In response the Victorian Greens have renewed our calls for a dramatic increase in investment in harm minimisation, including campaigning for pill testing and drug health warning systems in Victoria.
Drug harm minimisation is an issue close to my heart because of the impact of drugs on my community in the western suburbs, which I represent. The failures of the current approach are more evident there than in any other part of Victoria. As far back as the 1990s I was an outspoken advocate for drug law reform, and I could see back then the inherent destructive failings of our current approach. At the time I lived very close to the Footscray railway station where people would buy heroin and then come into my street to inject. Often they would actually do that on my front verandah. At that time I knew very little about illicit drugs, but I became extremely concerned that I would come home one day to find someone dead on my verandah. While other people would criticise people who take drugs, my feeling was that this was someone’s son or daughter, brother or sister or friend and that they deserved to live with some dignity.
It was because of those concerns that I became an advocate and a champion of safe injecting rooms, needle exchanges and the establishment of drug and alcohol support services in the western suburbs over the past 20 years. Since Health Works was established in Footscray, it has been an incredible asset for the community. People using drugs have a safe place to go to get health care, clean syringes and support to get their lives back on track in a non-judgemental environment. One of the other significant programs that has been run out of Health Works is the collection of syringe litter. The thing that frightens residents more than anything else is to have used syringes on the streets and in their back lanes.
The safety of this area has improved significantly, but we still need to do more to give comprehensive care. For years I have personally called for supervised injecting services to be set up at Health Works, and this is in my neighbourhood. I am not one of those people who says, ‘Oh, let’s set up this service, but it has to be 10 kilometres away’. I am more than happy to have it in my neighbourhood because it affects people in my community. There are obviously other areas of need, such as Richmond and St Kilda, and we need to look at innovative ways of dealing with this, not just with a fixed supervised injecting room but possibly looking at mobile services as well, which have been extremely successful in terms of delivering clean syringes.
I consider these to be life-saving services for people in desperate need. We have seen the evidence of the great success of these services in Kings Cross, and yet no other state government has had the vision or the political courage to put them in place. In this house of Parliament I have called for reform and questioned the government over its approach to drugs on countless occasions, as have my Greens colleagues—especially in relation to the Yarra City Council area. I am concerned that the cause of reform when it comes to the legalisation of cannabis is actually not well advanced by this motion. In fact this motion put to the house carries with it a risk of setting the cause of drug law reform backwards. The motion may be well intended, but I believe it is ill conceived and ill considered.
Turning to the content of the motion, it opens with the statement that ‘every member of this house and the other house has failed the Victorian people on the issue of drug law reform’. I do not believe the Greens members of Parliament have failed the community in any way, and in fact for years the Greens have been a lone voice courageously calling for drug law reform. Often that was used against us in elections by the media, and there have been memorable occasions when certain newspapers have come out and said the Greens want to just line up your children on street corners and give them drugs. They never actually bothered to read our policy, so this has been at some risk that we have been prepared to take a stand.
Now, I move on to the substantive content of the motion. The case for reform when it comes to possession, use and cultivation in relation to personal use of cannabis by persons 18 and over is based on minimising harm to individuals and the community. It is not, as outlined in this motion, a revenue raising opportunity for the state. In fact we believe it is deeply problematic how this would work or how it would improve Victoria’s bottom line by millions of dollars. The notion of imposing a tax on farmers who may choose to harvest cannabis is concerning, when over the past two decades, since the introduction of the GST, we have been doing away with this approach to taxation because the state has believed it was poorly conceived.
Further, we have already seen the harms of the Victorian government becoming addicted to the revenue from poker machines—and there is no pun intended in this. So we do need a considered approach to this issue. It is not helpful, I believe, at this stage to single out criminal syndicates such as the Australian-Italian mafia and outlaw motorcycle gangs as a primary reason to legalise cannabis. It was my understanding that those organisations are into a range of drugs, not just cannabis.
The case for the legalisation of cannabis rests first and foremost with harm minimisation—with protecting lives and community health and safety—rather than the current approach that overwhelmingly targets individuals. As parliamentarians we need to lead a sophisticated, carefully considered, evidence-based debate that takes the community with us. Considering tomorrow the first meeting of Parliamentarians for Drug Law Reform is to happen, I think this kind of motion would have been good coming out of that group.
As with all our policy priorities, there are principles that guide and determine the approach of the Greens when it comes to important legislative reform. By contrast this motion meets none of these criteria, and we fear it sets up a debate over drug law reform in a way that is guaranteed to fail. Unfortunately we believe that the motion looks more like an opportunistic stunt than a considered and meaningful contribution to this critically important issue. I believe it lets the cause down.
While the Greens disagree with much of this motion, particularly where it seeks to insult members of parliament, some of the core issues and principles behind it we believe are part of the need to rethink our approach to drugs and are the points the Greens believe must be discussed further in the Parliament and in the public arena.