SHOOTING GALLERY PLAN HITS PROBLEMS

Cabinet and Opposition pressure has forced Health Minister Michael
Moore to withdraw his new safe-injecting-room legislation until key
legal issues are resolved.

The legislation was to be introduced in the Assembly yesterday but Mr
Moore said Cabinet had decided to get a further legal opinion on
aspects of the Bill.

At the same time, the Australian Federal Police Association has warned
that officers would refuse any orders to ignore drug users going into
so-called safe-injecting clinics to shoot up.

In an unexpected move, the association threatened that police would
ignore orders to turn a blind eye to heroin use and would enter any '
shooting gallery' in Canberra to arrest those carrying heroin.

Mr Moore rejected yesterday the suggestion that a recent ACT Liberal
Party motion which compelled members not to support the proposal
without a community referendum had presented a hurdle in Cabinet.

He said the Cabinet majority had ' reiterated' on Monday its support
in principle of a safe-injecting room.

' What they are interested in doing is taking just a little bit more
time to look at this legislation and get a further legal opinion,' he
said.

' From my point of view there is no complication from the Liberal
Party policy stance. I need the numbers in the Assembly - I have the
numbers in the Assembly. I have the numbers in Cabinet and I will
continue to push ahead with this.'

Chief Minister Kate Carnell and Urban Services Minister Brendan Smyth
have split from Liberal Party policy on the issue and with Mr Moore
they form a Cabinet majority.

Mr Moore said that, once the legislation was passed in the Assembly,
Government Members who opposed it - including Attorney-General Gary
Humphries, who said he would follow Liberal Party policy - would be
compelled to implement it.

But Mr Moore faces an uphill battle to get Opposition Leader Jon
Stanhope to agree a last-minute change to the Bill which has the
effect of decriminalising heroin use inside the facility for the
purposes of the two-year trial.

Mr Stanhope said this change created a ' major perceptual difference'
and he went to the community with the promise of a protocol between
the Attorney-General and the Director of Public Prosecutions which
would prevent police from prosecuting inside the facility.

He was meeting Mr Moore today but he would not budge on this point. '
He will either have to move or the Bill will go down,' he said. ' It's
the one and only sticking point. We simply won't support the
legislation if it contains the decriminalisation of heroin.'

Mr Moore objected to the word ' decriminalisation' and said the late
change was in response to representations from the ACT Director of
Public Prosecutions and police, who would prefer to remove criminal
liability inside the safe-injecting room. A protocol would be written
for outside the room.

The new approach was also in line with NSW legislation to set up a
safe-injecting room.

' We've decided that if we can keep as close as we can to NSW then
when we have our scientific trial done we will able to examine the
results most clearly with the minimum number of confounding factors,'
Mr Moore said.

' The way I would describe it is that we are suspending the
criminality of these issues for two years so that we can conduct a
trial.

' I am still expecting to introduce the legislation and have it
debated before the end of the year.'