TESTING RIGHTS

The principal of St Andrew's Cathedral School, Mr Phillip Heath, deserves
the support of the community and officials for his forthright and public
implementation of a year-long drug testing program for the school's
students. Principals are generally reluctant to talk about the drug problems
in their schools and the programs they have set up to prevent them. For some
people there is always the implication that schools that acknowledge the
existence of drug problems with their students, or even the possible
existence of problems, are somehow slack in their discipline or their
pastoral care of students. Such an implication makes little sense. For it is
schools that acknowledge such problems that are in a position to do
something. If drug problems are not acknowledged, or are swept under the
carpet, the chances of the school doing something for students in need of
counselling and supervision become remote.

The St Andrew's Cathedral School trial, which will run for a year, provides
that when students are caught with drugs they will not be expelled if they
and their parents agree to a range of measures, including drug tests and
counselling. Parents will be asked to take the child to a doctor for
broad-screen urine tests, the results of which will be sent to the school
within five days. Clearly the point is not to catch drug users so they can
be expelled; it is to identify drug users so they can be counselled and
helped to end their drug experimentation. Mr Heath underlined this approach
with a wise and compassionate statement: "We are trying to find a model of
repentance, restoration and reconciliation in this debate."

The Privacy Commissioner, Mr Chris Puplick, has failed to show similar
wisdom in his statements on the trial. He has told the school he considers
drug testing violates children's rights to privacy. He justifies this
curious claim by quoting Article 16 of the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child, which proscribes children being "subjected to arbitrary
or unlawful interference with his or her privacy ..." If there is to be an
exception, to allow drug tests, it must be the student, not the parents, who
agree, Mr Puplick says.

Under the Puplick regime parents appear to have no rights when it comes to
knowing whether their children are breaking the law. No rights either,
apparently, in helping their children get rid of a drug habit when the
children might want to continue with drugs. The school's role in loco
parentis is compromised, too, by Mr Puplick's unacceptable interpretation of
what represents an invasion of privacy. His interpretation seems to hold
that privacy rights rank above parental and community rights. A student who
is using illegal drugs in a school environment is as harmful to that
environment - and generally more so - than a student who terrorises his or
her classmates. Privacy rights must yield at times to the superior rights of
the community and parents, and surely should in this case.