If Melbourne is Australia’s Wokest City, it’s not for want of Canberra’s trying. It’s a city, after all, built solely to house public servants, who are lefties without peer. This is why every Labor government burdens the Australian taxpayer with more and more of the lazy, grifting bastards.
In a wholly predictable feedback loop, Canberra has been run by Labor/Green governments for 30 of the 36 years it’s been allowed to ‘govern’ itself. And it shows. Canberra was, for instance, the only state or territory to vote ‘Yes’ in the ‘Voice’ referendum, in a near-complete opposite to the rest of the country.
It also has some of the most permissive drug laws in the country – which also shows.
Two years ago, Labor and the Greens introduced massive changes to decriminalise hard drugs, including heroin, ice and cocaine.
As always, the sales pitch was ‘harm minimisation’. They don’t even have the guts to sell it on a libertarian pitch of ‘mind your own business’. Instead, everything has to be sold via self-righteous claims of ‘safety’.
How’s it working out, then?
Two years on, the results are in, and they are very clear – this experiment has failed. Utterly.
Drug usage has gone up.
Drug overdoses have gone up.
Drug driving charges have gone up.
Drug Emergency Department presentations have gone up.
We have the highest rate of drugs overdoses of any capital city in the country.
So much for ‘harm minimisation’, then.
The National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program shows sharp increases in illicit drug consumption since October 2023.
Cocaine use has risen about 70 per cent, heroin 30 per cent, and meth 40 per cent.
The 2025 Illicit Drug Reporting System’s survey paints the same picture: cocaine use in Canberra has nearly doubled, heroin use is the equal highest in the nation, and Canberra has the highest non-fatal overdose rate in the country.
Thirty per cent of Canberra respondents to the survey reported an overdose in the past six months — more than double Adelaide’s rate.
Jeez, when your city is even duller than Adelaide and driving everyone to hard drugs, you really have a problem.
From January to September this year, there have been 16 suspected overdose deaths.
Drug-induced deaths rose from 26 in 2023 to 38 in 2024. Drug-related emergency department presentations also jumped 13 per cent in 2024–25 to 1,166.
As Richard Feynman said, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” So much for the ‘harm minimisation’ theory, then.
How much harm did they even ‘need’ to minimise, in the first place?
When these changes were introduced, we were told it was to ‘reduce harm’, that too many people were being criminalised for possession. But in the year before decriminalisation, Minister [for Health, Rachel] Stephen-Smith’s office confirmed just eight people were convicted of drug possession as a standalone offence.
The government went soft on drugs to fix eight cases – and in doing so, unleashed far broader harm across the community.
Nor did the other huckster selling point come true:
We were also told police would shift their focus to dealers and traffickers. Instead, reported deal and supply offences have halved.
In 2020–21, there were 85 such offences reported. In 2024–25, there were only 36 – despite surging drug use, overdoses, and deaths.
If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Given my generally libertarian bent, I’d have respected Labor and the Greens, just a little, if, as I say, they’d had the guts to make the libertarian argument. If someone wants to shoot up heroin, that’s their own stupid lookout. The only problem is that No Man is An Island, as Peter Hitchens once pointed out. Hard drug users don’t just wreck themselves, they wreck everyone around them.
Rather than solving a health problem, decriminalisation has made the problem worse. Drug users are now turning up to hospital in larger numbers, stretching already overworked nurses and doctors.
ACT Policing has reported 423 drug-driving charges from January to September this year, already exceeding last year’s total by 20 per cent.
Civic [Canberra’s town centre] is becoming increasingly unsafe. A business owner described the impact of hard drugs on antisocial behaviour with one man “shooting up with needles out in the open” causing violent chaos and being hit by a car […]
As road safety advocate Tom McLuckie has put it: “We have had more increases in deaths due to overdoses than the whole [eight] persons the year previous who were being ‘criminalised’ by being charged and convicted with drug possession offences.”
So, rather than minimising harm, they’ve increased it.
