FDS Insight Magazine Jun - Sep 2023
21 that exists within the new cabinet. Along with transport minister Jo Haylen, she was one of two cabinet ministers who were part of the parliamentary patrons of the NSW Labor for Drug Law Reform during the last term of parliament. A lab technician conducts a demonstration at the CAHMA pill testing site, which opened in Canberra last year. Credit: Martin Ollman As recently as last November, Haylen told parliament: ‘When we sort through the evidence that has been laid out for us by experts, all signs point to decriminalisation. We cannot arrest our way out of the problem.’ Labor has promised to hold a drug summit in its first term modelled on the success of Bob Carr’s in 1999. That summit led to a series of ambitious reforms, including the medically supervised injecting room in Kings Cross. The summit has been the subject of some criticism because, experts say, it is unnecessary following the former Coalition government’s $11 million ice inquiry, as well as a string of recommendations by state coroners to implement pill testing and decriminalise drug use. ‘We shouldn’t have to wait for a drug summit to get what we already know works,’ Harm Reduction Australia President Gino Vumbaca said. But in the speech Jackson said the summit would ‘get our state back on track in exploring evidence-based policies that recognise problematic drug use is best managed as a health issue, not a criminal justice one’. She also indicated controversial policing tactics such as strip searches at music festivals should be part of the reform ‘conversation’ and said the state’s current laws were ‘ruining families’. ‘I know we have to have a conversation about how policing works, about how strip searching works, and how sniffer dogs are used,’ she said. But ‘an important first step’ was to ‘establish the idea that people who go to music festivals in NSW are able to access the same drug checking that they can in the ACT and soon in other jurisdictions like Queensland’. ‘This reform is supported by medical experts, the industry and perhaps most importantly, the families of the young people who have tragically died.’: Youth and Homelessness Minister Rose Jackson. Pill testing was a key issue during the last term of parliament, and former premier Gladys Berejiklian was fiercely criticised when her government immediately ruled out a trial despite it being one of the key recommendations of the ice inquiry.
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