Peta Credlin: Victoria set to decriminalise drugs if Andrews wins next election

Liberalising drug use has been the hard-left of the Labor Party’s holy grail for years with Victoria’s Andrews government leading the charge, writes Peta Credlin.

The Andrews government in Victoria is edging ever closer to drug decriminalisation. It says that it’s going to vote against the so-called Reason Party’s decriminalisation bill – no doubt because an election’s coming and the Premier doesn’t want a backlash from voters – but the new announcement of an “expert panel” to advise on “trials” shows what’s bound to come if Daniel Andrews is re-elected.

Remember: this is the Premier who solemnly promised before the 2014 election that there would be no heroin injecting room, only promptly to put one on the CBD fringe in North Richmond that’s become a honey pot for dealers, ruined the famous Vietnamese food strip in the area and is a blight on the community.

It was only a couple of years ago that two staff from the community health centre were arrested for being dealers themselves; backing up why the Police Association opposed the injecting room in the first place.

With a second heroin (and ice) injecting room to go in Melbourne’s city centre, don’t think this isn’t coming to a suburb near you. Daniel Andrews is the hard left’s battering ram and what he can get away with in Victoria via a weak opposition, an even weaker media and a compliant crossbench becomes the template for Labor governments in other states: think the legalisation of euthanasia, late term abortion laws, and the normalisation of gender fluidity in schools.

Daniel Andrews is edging closer to decriminalising drugs in Victoria, writes Peta Credlin. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Luis Enrique Ascui

Given his record, Victorians are right to be concerned.

This is the government with the worst record in managing the pandemic, with the world’s longest lockdowns in Melbourne, the thuggish enforcement of oppressive health orders and something that still shocks me to this day, the use of rubber bullets against protesters. Worse still, it’s a state that has a health system that routinely can’t cope with everyday incidents with shocking revelations last week that 12 Victorians have died over the past six months because people have not been able to get through on the triple-0 emergency line.

In one tragic case, a call took 16 minutes to even get answered. The last thing Victorians need is the further burdens on the health system that more drug abuse would bring; yet that’s the almost inevitable result of the mixed messages now being sent about illegal drug use. Calls for drug de-criminalisation always begin with the cry that the so-called “war on drugs” has been comprehensively lost. In other words, people are still using drugs, so we should just give up and go from trying to stop use to allowing a free-for-all.

This defies logic on two fronts; the first is that we’ve even bothered to wage a war on drugs in recent years.

When was the last time you saw a campaign to educate young people about drug risks? Instead, all they see are high-profile celebrities using ‘white powder’ (or other party drugs) with no consequences. And the other point that defies logic is that idea that we just give up.

There’s hardly been a time in human history without murder or theft, but we still regard both of these as crimes even though we’ve never eliminated them, and haven’t ‘given up’ punishing them severely either.

The point of criminalising recreational drug use is to minimise it. The obvious and inevitable consequence of decriminalising recreational drug use is to increase it. That plainly doesn’t worry the former Sex Party and now Reason Party libertine Fiona Patten but it should worry a political party that wants the responsibilities of government.

Fiona Patten of the Reason Party is behind a push to decriminalise drugs: NCA NewsWire / David Crosling

Given Patten’s consistent record of horse-trading to support contentious Andrews government measures in the upper house, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that drug decriminalisation trials were the blood price extracted for supporting the recent emergency powers bill. It’s appalling that the government should contemplate taking Victoria further down the path to social dysfunction in order to maintain the virtual health dictatorship of the past two years.

But that’s what this so-called expert panel of police, health professionals and “addiction specialists” is softening us up for.

There is already an abundance of diversionary options for drug users other than heavy fines and jail time. There are already legal drugs (such as methadone) for addicts who want to avoid crime. But that is not what this is about; it’s not about the addict. It is about liberalising drug use that’s been the hard-left’s holy grail for years.

It strikes me as nonsensical that we can have a zero-tolerance approach to violence against women, racial stereotyping and sex crimes against minors, but somehow on illicit drugs we
just give up, that we’re so weak we simply can’t tell young people “no”?

The de-criminalisation push is not about minimising drug use but normalising it.

WE NEED MORE GEMS LIKE KITCHING

THERE’s a lot of grief in Canberra over the shock death of Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching, aged just 52. Senator Kitching was a foundation member of the “wolverines”, a cross party grouping of MPs concerned about the rising aggression of China.

She wasn’t your standard MP who carefully weighed every word against the talking points from the leader’s office and who gauged everything she did against the yardstick of whether it would help hold her seat or gain her promotion.

She was a daughter of Labor but very much her own woman.

Kimberley Kitching has died at the age of 52. Picture: David Geraghty / The Australian.

Indeed, it was precisely because she was a free spirit who spoke her mind that she was facing a preselection challenge; and that, according to her best friend in the parliament, former leader Bill Shorten, these backroom manoeuvrings may have added to the stress in the lead up to
her death.

Now, both her friends and her foes are united in mourning her: some, Labor and Liberal, because they miss a political soulmate; and others, perhaps, because they feel slightly guilty about making her political life harder.

Kimberley Kitching exemplified two important points about our parliament: first, there are still genuine friendships across the aisle; indeed, sometimes it’s easier to trust people on the other side because they’re not potential rivals for promotion.

And second, there are still people in public life for all the right reasons: to speak the truth as they see it, to fight for a cause, to make a difference for our country, and not just to climb the greasy pole for themselves and do what they’re told.

I just wish there were more like her.

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