Former ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope will use an address to university graduates tonight to castigate his own union for failing to represent its members.
The Community and Public Sector Union is the ACT Labor Party's largest affiliated union, equal in size to all the territory's other unions combined.
But Mr Stanhope will argue the left-wing union, which bitterly opposes a needle and syringe program trial at the Alexander Maconochie Centre, is not representing the views of the majority of its members.
The 2010 National Drug Strategy Household Survey report revealed 71.7 per cent of Canberrans support needle and syringe programs, the highest in the country.
''I believe that probably between 75 and 90 per cent of the ACT's ALP membership support the needle and syringe program and I had always taken it as a given that the whole of the Left faction supported the program,'' he will tell tonight's ceremony. ''Yet at this stage it appears that the CPSU veto will succeed. It will succeed despite the fact that in my estimation at least three-quarters of its own membership, of its faction, and of the ACT Branch of the ALP, to which it is affiliated, don't agree with it.''
Mr Stanhope, who joined the University of Canberra last month after retiring from politics in May, will be awarded an honorary doctorate during tonight's graduation ceremony. During his address, Mr Stanhope will call for political parties, and other community organisations, to stand up for their member's views.
''We don't implement controversial policies that have stood in our party platforms for decades, and we say it is because of resource constraints or isn't a priority,'' he will say.
''We coin convenient little slogans like 'politics is the art of the possible' to comfort ourselves.''
He would not comment on federal Labor's refusal to implement its policy commitment to onshore processing of asylum-seekers.
But in the ACT, he will argue, the CPSU is failing to represent the majority of its members by fighting the needle program on behalf of its prison guard members.
''The CPSU is the largest union in the ACT. It represents not only prison officers and those employed at the prison but indeed all clerical staff in the public service in the territory.''
He was not surprised by the opposition of the Canberra Liberals to the needle program.
''It doesn't surprise me or distress me as much as a left-wing union being willing to get in bed with them.''
In a meeting between Chief Minister Katy Gallagher and the CPSU last month, union delegates said their members would block the proposal at every step, even if the Government made a needle and syringe program a legal requirement for the operation of the jail.
''It is not alarmist to suggest that some time, assuming it hasn't already happened, an inmate at the Alexander Maconochie Centre will contract, from a dirty needle, a major blood-borne disease and may die from it.''
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