Psychoactive Substances (Increasing Penalty for Supply and Distribution) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Madam Chair. I rise to speak on behalf of New Zealand First on this bill, and also would like to start by commending the member Simeon Brown on bringing this bill forward and seeing an anomaly within our current laws and looking to amend them. I also would like to speak more broadly on Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 23 brought forward by my colleague Darroch Ball, and I will get to that shortly.

The issue here is that these are hideous substances. These are doing great harm. They are causing death and mayhem on our streets, and we need to act and act swiftly. I hear both sides of this debate, and on this side of the Chamber, the argument is that it’s a health issue. Many of those arguments hold true; they are absolutely correct. This is not an either/or; this is a “both”. This is how New Zealand First sees this. This is a “both”.

The work that this Government is doing around the health side of things, dealing with addiction services—50,000 people last year accessed addiction services. It’s a massive issue for us as a country, but we also have to deal with the supply, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that two years is the maximum penalty for people who are peddling substances that are causing deaths at this scale. New Zealand First will not stand by and allow this to happen. We are going to bring the full force of the law towards those people who are peddling these substances.

Let’s be clear: in my colleague Darroch Ball’s SOP, he talks about our wanting this to go to 14 years, maximum, to bring it into line with class B substances—and that is a maximum sentence. So the argument that, somehow, people who have got caught up in using this and are peddling a little bit to fund their habit—those people aren’t going to get locked up for 14 years. Hopefully, they will be brought into our health services. They’ll be treated with some leniency in the first instance, but when we get these purveyors of poison who are peddling this stuff that is killing our citizens, we need to come down on them and we need to come down on them hard. New Zealand First is calling for tougher penalties, and we are calling, in this SOP under my colleague Darroch Ball’s name, for the maximum sentence to be 14 years, in line with what it is for class B drugs.

We will not stand and see this mayhem on our streets, but we will also engage constructively with our colleagues on this side of the House because we know they are looking to address exactly the same issues from another angle—the health side of it—and getting alongside the people who have been caught up with these insidious substances. We know, through the debate that we’ve had so far, that the substances get changed around by the chemists so that they evade detection. Those are the issues that we will be looking at on this side of the House with the health stuff that Dr Clark is leading, and we will support that.

New Zealand First absolutely supports that intent, and we will listen to good argument—the arguments that the likes of Chlöe Swarbrick bring up, and she leads some very important thinking in this House for a new generation coming through. It’s absolutely valid, the points that she is raising, but they’re dealing with only one side. We also need to deal with supply, and New Zealand First firmly believe that we can only deal with supply if we come down tough. Two years is a ridiculously short time, and that’s why I commend Simeon Brown. Even though we have not totally landed on the same length of maximum sentence, we absolutely respect and support the intent, because two years is ridiculous. This is a substance that can kill people, and two years is just unacceptable.

So we contend, under Darroch Ball’s SOP, that it should be a 14-year maximum sentence in line with other similar class B - type drugs and that is how we’ll be voting on this bill, and our support will be conditional on that SOP being voted by majority. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to speak on clause 4, which is the clause that is really the guts of this amendment bill, which addresses the penalty for suppliers of synthetic drugs.

Currently, we have a mismatch in the legislation. If someone is found guilty of supplying synthetic drugs—drugs that are killing dozens of people up and down our country—the maximum sentence that they can get is two years’ imprisonment. That means someone can be supplying drugs at a commercial level—these drugs at a commercial level—and the maximum sentence they can get is two years in jail. If they’re supplying cannabis, the maximum they can get is eight years. There is a complete mismatch in the legislation, and that is one of the reasons why this legislation is so important to address that mismatch from a law and order approach to give our police and law enforcement agencies the ability to address the harm by cracking down on those people who make money from people’s misery. They make money from people’s addictions.

I understand the arguments that have been put forward in this committee, and I’ve addressed the arguments that have been put forward in the House in the first and second readings about the need for more support to address those who are suffering from addiction. Let me be very clear: this bill does not target people who are users—that is section 71 of the principal Act. If the Ministers and the members in the committee wanted to address those who are the users of these substances, they would address section 71 of the Psychoactive Substances Act. I’m not touching section 71 of the Act. My bill is addressing section 70 of the Act.

I’d like to address the point made by Mark Patterson, which is that New Zealand First has put forward Supplementary Order Paper 23, in the name of Darroch Ball, which is to increase the sentence to 14 years, which is a further increase, aligning it with class B drugs. When I first put this bill in the ballot, which was earlier this year, we knew that there was severe harm caused by these drugs. We could see that there were people dying from these drugs and we put it in the ballot as a class C, and since then we’ve seen the coroner’s report—45 deaths from synthetic drugs over the past 12 months, and more and more happening every single week. Parliament needs to send a very clear message that if you are going to supply or distribute or—sorry, Madam Chair. If people are going to supply and manufacture and distribute these substances, then they will face the full force of the law, and Parliament will take this issue very seriously.

So we as the National Party have decided that we will support the Supplementary Order Paper, because these substances are worse than marijuana. They are substantial, significant problems, and they need to be addressed, because the seriousness is very clear, and we see it every day in the community. So we will be supporting the Supplementary Order Paper, which will increase it to 14 years.

I think it’s important to point out to the committee that this is a catch-all provision. This means that every type of synthetic drug or every concoction that synthetic drug dealers dream up, or the chemical combinations that they might change it to, are captured. So it doesn’t mean that the Minister of Justice has to go through a year-long process to go under the Misuse of Drugs Act and classify a drug. This puts in place legislation to say that from the time this legislation comes into effect, the law enforcement agencies will be able to crack down on those people who are supplying synthetic drugs and will be able to ensure that they are targeted and that they are put in prison, if that is what the courts enforce as part of their sentencing.

So we will be supporting the Supplementary Order Paper in the name of Darroch Ball. We do take this issue seriously. We will not stand by as more people die. We will ensure that New Zealanders know that Parliament will take this issue incredibly seriously, and we will progress this bill through the House. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I think the member in the chair, Simeon Brown, makes a very good point, which is that he considers that his party, at least, by passing this bill, is not standing by while people die. In fact, by passing this bill, that is exactly what this House is doing. It is standing by, doing more of the same, and achieving the same hopeless result. The inflammatory member the Hon Dr Nick Smith, opposite, who sits there chirping away, saying that everybody over here has got blood on their hands and they are standing by watching people dying—but, actually, it was his Government that passed the last legislation that has been an absolutely dismal failure, and now they want to do more. And so they sit there beating their chests, using the dreadful old rhetoric and the silly, hackneyed old rhetoric of “tough on crime, soft on crime.”, and that is the disappointing thing.

That is where they are letting New Zealanders down, right there, because New Zealanders expect better. What New Zealanders expect is that when they see people dying because of the consumption of substances that are so dangerous and so toxic, actually, we will do something serious about it.

The member in the chair, and, indeed, Mr Patterson, when he spoke, said, “Right, that’s it. We’re going to catch all these people.” Well, if we’ve had 25 or 45 people who died under the last Government’s watch using these substances, the so-called suppliers have not been convicted in relation to those deaths, because they simply are not caught. The reality is that if administering a toxic substance like this is causing death, then that, actually, is prima facie an allegation of manslaughter. If people are having administered to them stupefying substances, there is a crime related to that. We can charge people for those sorts of crimes right now, even without this legislation. There is recourse that we’ve got in our criminal statutes that allows us to deal with it, in event that we catch somebody peddling the stuff.

What it comes down to is this—and I don’t expect members opposite to understand, because they live in an ivory tower. They live in a comfortable middle-class world. They don’t support middle New Zealand—we know that. They don’t want them to get their own houses. They live in this comfortable, blinkered world. They don’t know what is going on in large parts of New Zealand, but in large parts of New Zealand, there are young people who are totally disengaged—some who’ve been kicked out of home—who resort to these substances and die as a result. And, yes, their parents get passionate about it. There’s a lot more going on than that. But young people who are disengaged, marginalised, have given up hope, resorting to these substances—there’s a number of other things going on, which is why anybody with experience and expertise who has looked at this issue and looked at this bill has been very consistent in saying that threatening longer penalties isn’t going to change people’s behaviour. You’ve got to have the means to let people who need help get help. There’s not a lot of distinction between those peddling the stuff and those using it. They are actually, largely, one and the same people, with the same problems and the same challenges.

💬 Hon Maggie Barry: What about Sroubek? Answer that one.

I know members opposite like Maggie Barry don’t care about people who don’t live in the kind of comfortable middle-class world that she’s grown up in and lives in. She doesn’t care about those people. The National Party never has. They don’t care about them. Their only response to people who do it tough and do it hard and find themselves resorting to these substances and killing themselves is to beat their chests and say, “Let’s get tough on crime. Let’s lock them up for longer.”

We’ve done that before. We’ve done it in other instances. We’ve done it in other cases, and it doesn’t work. When you’ve got people who are so desperate they resort to substances like this, they don’t care what they’re consuming. They are reckless about what they are doing to themselves. There’s something else going on. If this House is serious, and members in this House are serious about their moral duty to every New Zealander to make our communities safe and safer, we wouldn’t be wasting our time on silly gestures like this. We’d be focusing on what the real problems are and where the real solutions lie. The real solutions lie, in a problem like this, in making sure that those whose lives are so desperate get the help that they need—those who have been kicked out of home get the help that they need—and not silly threats, and they get good help and information.

The member in the chair, Simeon Brown, is far closer to the real world of psychoactive substances than that appalling speech from the Minister of Justice, which just reinforced everything in this Government, including the decision today on Karel Sroubek—that this Government is soft on drugs.

💬 Hon Andrew Little: I raise a point of order, Madam Chairperson. You made a number of rulings about the tightness of this debate, and although clause 4 goes to the heart of what this bill is all about and there’s got to be some scope to talk about the underlying policy issues, this is nothing to do with a person who is currently in prison on matters completely unrelated to psychoactive substances. The member who’s just now been speaking—on his feet—should be called to order as a result.

CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): You can’t cast reflections on the Chair. I agree with the member, but he actually only uttered a couple of words. If he had gone on further—you are quite right—I would have pulled him up, but I give a great more latitude to members on this side.

This clause has a very simple question for Parliament: should the people—

I’m sorry to interrupt. The time has come for me to report this bill.

House resumed.

The Chairperson reported the Consumers’ Right to Know (Country of Origin of Food) Bill without amendment, and progress on the Psychoactive Substances (Increasing Penalty for Supply and Distribution) Amendment Bill.

Report adopted.

Sitting suspended from 9.57 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Thursday)