BEAZLEY'S DRUG PLAN AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES

AS THE Howard Government flails about in search of a way back into
electoral favour, it is easy to overlook some of the Labor initiatives that
are gradually forming the outlines of the government-in-waiting.

At such times, we tend to see the Opposition as the panacea; we project on
to them our wish lists for change, and when it turns out differently we
feel betrayed.

So let's recall last week's launch of Labor's drug policy by the
alternative prime minister, Kim Beazley.

He will not, I suspect, thank us for doing so.

If you blinked, you'd have missed it. His minders chose a suburban
Melbourne venue for a quick morning announcement of a 10-point plan, a few
questions from local reporters and that was it.

Among the major metropolitan papers, only The Canberra Times gave it much
prominence in the news columns and only the Age bothered to editorialise on it.

The natural tendency would be to presume that Labor stands for a break in
the cycle of prohibition, official corruption, pyramid selling and growing
incidence of housebreaking.

You might think that Beazley and his team would take a leaf from the Dutch
and the Swiss authorities, whose enlightened approach to heroin injecting
rooms and heroin trials are bearing such deirable fruit.

You might even have caught the Foreign Correspondent story this week, which
revealed the massive increase in heroin production in Afghanistan and the
counter-productive effects of prohibition in neighbouring Iran, and
thought, ''Thank goodness our alternative national government has a few
brains, so we won't be going down that route.''

Or you just might have noticed the initiative of Victorian Premier Steve
Bracks for a community summit in a joint sitting of his Parliament to chart
a 10-year plan to fight the scourge, and thought, ''Isn't it good to see
some progressive thinking from the Beazley side of politics.''

If so, then in each case you would have been sorely deluded.

For the truth is that beneath the waffle Beazley's approach is practically
identical with that of the rigidly tunnel-visioned John Howard and the
Salvation Army enthusiasts who currently run national drug policy.

Beazley's 10-point plan pretends that he is in favour of heroin trials and
heroin-injecting rooms. But beneath the persiflage, it simply isn't so.

First, Beazley says that such trials and rooms are not the main game and
the states won't take the initiative anyway. Then he says his government
would only agree to support them (as it must if they're to go ahead)
provided they did not break international treaties to which Australia is a
signatory.

And since Australia did sign the American-sponsored treaty with all its
blinkered blather about the ''war on drugs'', a Beazley government could
not be party to the new approach.

Beazley skated over these elements in his policy launch. Instead, he
concentrated on some ludicrous imagery by which the drug barons, those
mythical creatures so beloved of politicians, would be ''sitting penniless
in the gutter'', while their former victims, miraculously rehabilitated by
Beazley's beatitudes, strode by with scarcely a scornful glance.

It was all a mad fantasy. But in the absence of courage and thoughtfulness,
that's what politicians do they try to convince themselves that they are
doing something useful by painting imaginary pictures in the air.

Actually, it's sadder than that. Beazley is a relatively intelligent man.
But he appears to be an addictive personality because of his difficulties
with his weight problem.

And because something is missing in the Beazley make-up, he thinks the rest
of the world is similarly constructed.

Moreover, he equates drugs with evil the way that religious people of the
Middle East used to equate women with temptation.

Thus, the Eve myth in Christian theology; thus the purdah of Islamic custom.

They do not understand that the solution is not to be found in banning
drugs or hiding women's curves, but in fashioning an outlook on life that
puts them in a healthy perspective.

There's little that can be done to make this core of understanding take
root grow in a man like Beazley. Some of the most intelligent people in the
world are similarly disabled.

But in Beazley's case, there's an added impediment (or is inducement a
better word?). There's probably still some votes in appealing to the
ignorant and the timid.

Even for the man who trumpets the Knowledge Nation.