NSW Health Minister, Carmel Tebbutt today introduced legislation into the Legislative Assembly that would remove the Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre’s trial status, making it a permanent fixture.
This is despite the fact that research by Drug Free Australia shows the “overdose rate in the injecting room was 36 times higher than on the streets of Kings Cross”. You can read DFA’s excellent document The Kings Cross Injecting Room: the case for closure by clicking here.
With only a handful of parliamentary sitting weeks left before the state election in March it is hard to understand why the Parliament is spending so much time advancing a radical social agenda. NSW voters are expecting their MPs to get on with the job of improving roads, rail, hospitals and education.
NSW needs civil engineers, not social engineers.
The injecting room legislation is just another bill in a long line of radical so-called ‘progressive’ proposals indulging the parliament’s time. Same-sex adoption, same-sex surrogacy, injecting rooms and euthanasia are not priority issues for NSW.
I don’t expect our feeble Federal Government to actually enforce the relevant laws in this regards, especially since the Howard Government took flawed advice from the relevant advisors and couldn’t bring themselves to enforce the laws at the time for failure of exposing their lack of a backbone on this issue but it is noteworthy that on any view the illicit drug use room funded by the NSW Government is in breach of numerous Federal Customs laws and therefore unconstitutional.
To date they’ve gotten away with circumventing the UN conventions by claiming its a medical trial only, that loophole expires when they close the trial status and make it a permanent fixture … so will the UN act?
That is a matter for the UN, what is a matter for the Australian people is why the Federal Government isn’t enforcing Customs laws which apply both at the nation’s borders and inside them. NSW cannot do whatever it wants, it is bound by the Constitution to obey and in fact enforce Federal laws. Police Officers are required to enforce federal laws that prohibit anyone from aiding and abetting someone from preventing the seizure of federally prohibited substances and that includes by injecting them into themselves (which of course would prevent seizure.
If the government can’t see that helping people to hurt themselves is a waste of money that should be better used for prevention, intervention and rehabilitation then at least it should uphold and enforce the valid laws that currently exist ….. or admit we live in a lawless nation where law enforcement is haphazard and a spasmodic farce.
“With only a handful of parliamentary sitting weeks left before the state election in March it is hard to understand why the Parliament is spending so much time advancing a radical social agenda”
No its not. When you have a left government in it’s death throws why not push through all of its extreme left policies now as it won’t get another chance for a dozen years at least.
As with Federal Labor the state government will do any deal it can with The Greens to keep the slim hope of preference deals keeping them in power (very very slim) so will allow all of their extreme social policies to be put forward
@PaulW
Are you kidding me? Giving heroin users a safe place to inject is “advancing a radical social agenda”? How exactly is this a bad thing? These people are going to use heroin with or without the proper facilities. You’d prefer they do it out on the street with second hand syringes? And I’d hardly call the Labor government’s policies “extreme left”.
A good example matter of “double speak” is this: to seek legal endorsement for the use of illicit drugs. When will our parliamentarians ever start to think?
I’m troubled by the DFA report because it is in essence a document in support of a particular position (ie. closing the injecting room) rather than an even-handed assessment of the evidence for or against the injecting room. That is, they have decided their position before gathering evidence.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with their position. However, by putting ideology first we may be overlooking medical data that validates the injecting rooms (or invalidates it, as the case may be).
What if the injecting room wasn’t part of a “radical social agenda” but was actually the most effective form of treatment for the drug addicted