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House of Assembly - Fifty-First Parliament, Second Session (51-2)
2008-05-07 Daily Xml
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APY LANDS

Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:24): I have a supplementary question for the minister. If the government is doing so well in relation to the lands, why is the government now refusing to publish last year's figures for marijuana cases on the lands, which were 519 in the year before?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Minister for Families and Communities, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation, Minister for Housing, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Disability, Minister Assisting the Premier in Cabinet Business and Public Sector Management) (14:24): I will not dwell on the obvious point which is that, as appalling as marijuana use is, it is a different order of magnitude from the damage that petrol can do to a young person's brain, but this indicates how wrong the Deputy Leader of the Opposition can get her facts. It is important to go through the material here because it demonstrates the lack of attention to detail that the Deputy Leader of the Opposition pays, and she consistently comes in here and attempts to mislead the house and also those who listen to these proceedings.

Let us take you through the material. I cannot remember the precise year when Nganampa Health actually carried out its survey, but that organisation is, in fact, the independent community-run organisation that carries this out. I think we supply it with a little money, but we do not tell the organisation what to measure nor, indeed, how to measure it. It is an independent body and we rely upon the material that it puts out. When it carried out its survey for the first time, of its own volition, it decided to choose to measure marijuana use, in the process of measuring petrol sniffing (which is what it had been doing every year).

What it found, having measured petrol sniffing, was an extraordinary reduction in petrol sniffing, so much so that instead of waiting for the next annual occasion when it was to measure what it would usually measure, the organisation decided to do another measurement—an extraordinary measurement just of petrol sniffing. When it carried out that further survey of petrol sniffing it, in fact, confirmed the dramatic reduction in petrol sniffing. In fact, that is the reason why marijuana use was not measured; it was because the survey was specifically commissioned for another purpose.

So, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition comes in here and seeks to suggest that somehow we have bodgied up the survey results by suggesting to an independent organisation that never asked us anyway about what it was going to measure—

The Hon. P.F. Conlon interjecting:

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: Exactly. I have always attempted to maintain in this place—or to use whatever endeavours I can to maintain (and it has often come with a lot of provocation)—some bipartisanship in relation to this issue because I believe it is absolutely critical that we do work together on this. There are ample opportunities for one or other of us to make political points about how awful things are—and things are awful, but let us not become paralysed by how awful things are. Let us work together, let us recommit ourselves to actually moving forward.

I remind members of the house that the reason we are even debating these points, the reason we are even asking these questions today, is not that an inquiry has been established off the back of some crisis: it is because we went to a summit and asked for this inquiry. We asked to know more about what we knew was going wrong in the lands. This is a government seeking to ask itself the hard questions. There was no call for this inquiry by those opposite, and that is completely consistent with their behaviour in relation to the APY lands.

I am content to stand here and be embarrassed about what is not going on in the lands, but I will do that day after day because we are concerned about getting results on the lands and we will continue to commit ourselves, just as we were last week up on the lands consulting about housing, and just as I will be up there with Jenny Macklin, the commonwealth minister for Aboriginal affairs, in a few weeks' time making further decisions and agreements with the community up there to make things better.

I invite those opposite, just as in the federal parliament they seem to have belatedly managed a modicum of bipartisanship, to join with us; not to climb on our back and make cheap politics out of what is a national tragedy.

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