24/7/00 Australian Financial Review (Australia)
Amsterdam of the South

Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000
Author: Christopher Pearson

(NB Chris Pearson is the editor of the conservative Adelaide Review and is a speechwriter for John Howard).

AMSTERDAM OF THE SOUTH

Political parties, suggests Christopher Pearson, need to address South Australia's growing drug problem. One of the bleaker features of living in a mendicant State is the servile attitude that Parliament - in this case the South Australian Legislative Council - takes towards organised crime. That august body has just voted to disallow a Government-sponsored regulation which would have reduced the number of marijuana plants its citizens can grow, if not with impunity then at most with a $150 misdemeanour fine, from 10 to three. Adelaide has been long a local version of Amsterdam -- a centre for the production and distribution of illicit drugs.

As The Australian's Carol Altmann recently noted, Sydney has 19 hydroponic suppliers. Melbourne has 13. In Adelaide there are 71, many of them owned by biker gangs. If you are unemployed, a student or a sole parent, growing dope can reap you up to $80,000 a year, tax free. In some suburbs the gangs are major institutional landlords, providing more reliable protection than the police. One of the advantages of hydroponics businesses is that they can conveniently launder the money. As well, they provide likely suppliers not only with the means of production "on tick" but also their only plausible, albeit parodic, experience of the work ethic. One of the great successes of the Federal Government's work for the dole campaign has been in pin-pointing the extent to which unemployment has been both partial and voluntary. Being the most convenient source of marijuana has advantages for a depressed regional economy. Individually, it's like becoming a part of what Les Murray calls "the people's other world". The money is easy and the work and risk are negligible. The rot really set in during the Keating era, when interest rates were around 18 per cent. Middle-aged country people, whose delinquencies had never stretched much beyond catching a few out-of-season crayfish and who'd thought of themselves as essentially law-abiding, began growing and selling drugs they wouldn't want their grandchildren to have anything to do with. When people who might once have passed for the salt of the earth find themselves so deeply compromised, civil society begins to unravel very quickly. Lawlessness and normlessness become the norm.

There can be no doubt about the fundamentals in this debate. Permission to grow 10 plants at a time, or 40 a year, results in vastly more marijuana than one person could use. So the legislation connives at trafficking in drugs. The State leader of the Australian Democrats, Michael Elliott, led the charge to disallow the Government's reform regulation. He saw himself as looking after the interests of "disorganised crime" at the expense of the drug barons. When ageing hippies are half your constituency, what else can be expected? It was a conscience vote and neither the Labor members nor the Independents and the Liberal who formed an adventitious majority could manage much in the way of coherent argument. The Government intends to bring the matter to another vote and I expect that next time, under more searching scrutiny, there will be a different outcome. Frances Nelson QC, who chairs the South Australian Parole Board, has been pointedly telling anyone with ears to hear about the recent spate of marijuana-related crime. The picture she paints is much less benign than the class of '68 would allow. Nelson doubts that the category of a "safe drug" is applicable to something which, especially when combined with alcohol, so often leads to horrendous violence. There have been too many cases where psychotic cruelty was plainly drug-related for them to be conveniently amnesed with soothing nostrums about victimless crimes. The Legislative Council is elected by a version of proportional representation. Its members seldom feel the chill wind of popular rage and can afford a certain insouciance, unlike their colleagues in the Lower House. Councillors with the buffer of very long terms can allow themselves the self-indulgences we've come to expect of "the anti-Vietnam RSL". In the House of Assembly, where issues such as this can quite markedly affect electoral outcomes, both of the major parties must declare their hands. The Premier and the Leader of the Opposition must turn this issue of conscience into a matter of party policy or live with the consequences.

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