Drug Summit was always set up to fail, and it (largely) did: Greens
The Government’s drug summit has been fiercely criticised by attendees on the last day, many who say that the whole exercise has excluded diverse and marginalised voices and experiences and many questioning the point of the whole exercise, says Cate Faehrmann, Greens MP and drug law reform and harm reduction spokesperson.
“A lot of us feared that the drug summit was set up to fail and unfortunately the experience of the last two days has confirmed that that was probably the case,” said Cate Faehrmann.
“It should never have been held over four disjointed days to finish a few weeks before the end of the year. There was also zero transparency around guest lists and agendas and limited, if any, consultation with those most impacted.
“Attendees were furious when they found out that the Health Minister ruled out decriminalisation behind their backs during a press conference on the first day of the Sydney summit. It only incensed them further when he assured them that ‘everything was on the table’ during his address the very next day.
“There has also been palpable anger at the lack of diversity and representation, particularly of First Nations voices.
“This came to a head today with the equity, respect and inclusion group not even able to choose one single priority from the watered-down, sanitised list given to them by the government to choose from.
“When First Nations people, the LQBTQIA+ community and other marginalised groups are targeted by police at a much higher rate than the rest of the community, it’s frankly disgraceful that diverse voices weren’t front and centre.
“Labor’s long-promised drug summit should have been the opportunity for the Premier to lead on drug law reform to save lives, but instead we got a smoke and mirrors exercise.
“After this embarrassing debacle, the Government will be under a lot of pressure to act on the key recommendations from the summit, instead of just the low-hanging fruit that they’d probably already decided on before the summit.
”The best thing to come out of it is that it’s mobilised a lot more people to ramp up our collective efforts to get sensible drug laws in place and to end the war on drugs,” said Cate Faehrmann.