Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Health: I move, That the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

This bill makes three key changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. The bill classifies AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB as class A drugs. This is in response to the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs, which provides recommendations to the Minister of Health on the classification of substances. The committee recommended the substances be classified as class A due to the high risk of harm that they pose.

The bill affirms the existing police discretion. It specifies that when determining whether a prosecution is required in the public interest for personal drug possession and use, consideration should be given to whether a health approach is more beneficial. The discretion emphasises the Government’s health-based approach to personal drug use and reinforces the police’s focus on those who profit from drug dealing and not on those who use illicit drugs.

The bill enables temporary class drug orders to be made by the Minister of Health. The order will immediately classify a substance, which will be treated as if it was a class C controlled drug under the Act. Penalties for import, manufacture, supply, possession, and use of class C controlled drugs would apply to temporarily classified substances.

These changes are being introduced to address the harm caused by synthetic and other drugs. They increase opportunities for health and social services to be provided to people caught in the web of addiction and to focus enforcement efforts on suppliers rather than on users. This bill is a key milestone in achieving our goal of reducing synthetic drug harm and implementing a health approach to drug use.

I’d like to thank all submitters for their valuable feedback on the bill. Changes have been made to the bill, and I’d like to thank the Health Committee for their consideration of the bill. There were two minor changes, and these were confirmed subsequently. The first is to remove “product name” as a term used to describe a substance in the temporary class drug order provision. The term was used when temporary drug class notices were previously introduced and reflected the fact that there were legal products on the market. Since the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013 came into force, there are no longer legal products marketed under a product name.

The second change is an amendment to better align the bill with the policy intent. The discretion to prosecute in the bill as drafted applies to all offences in section 7, including supply and administration. The intent of the bill, however, is for the discretion to apply only to possession and use offences. The amendment will mean that the discretion applies only to those possession and use offences, as originally intended.

I’d like to thank the committee of the whole House and our coalition and confidence and supply partners in particular for their recent consideration of the bill. One change was made as a result of the committee of the whole House’s consideration, and that was to clause 6. Clause 6 is intended to support a health-based approach to drug use and to reaffirm current police practice. We believe the wording of this clause could have been improved by providing clarity that a health-based approach was a relevant public interest consideration alongside other factors relevant to the public interest test, as set out in the Solicitor-General’s prosecution guidelines. This more closely aligned with current police practice and meant that prosecution was still available to prevent harm and keep people safe if the offence was serious enough. Therefore, I moved the following amendment, which was supported by a majority of the committee of the whole House, and that was, in clause 6, in new section 7(6), after the words “more beneficial”, insert the words “to the public interest”. It clearly confirms and clarifies that the practice had to be in the public interest. The new wording further supports the Government’s intent to strengthen a health-based approach to drug use and provides clarity for front-line officers as to how to apply the public interest test so that this intent is met.

The Government has a number of measures in place to implement the health-based approach and reduce drug harm to users and the wider community. The Police Commissioner will issue tailored guidance to front-line officers on how to apply discretion. The guidance will help officers assess where the public interest lies and whether a health approach would be more beneficial to the public interest than proceeding with a criminal justice response. If a decision is made not to prosecute, the guidance will indicate other options available—for example, these could be a verbal or pre-charge warning or connection to health services for assessment, triage, and referral. If police make the decision to connect a person to a health service and the individual gives permission, police will refer them to a health service for screening via an app. A health professional will contact each person to assess, triage, and refer the person as appropriate.

The Government is committed to taking a health approach to drug use, and it was on the back of this plan that it provided additional funding of over $10 million at the end of 2018 to strengthen the capability and capacity of alcohol and other drug services to respond to increasing need. A drug early warning system is being developed, which will help respond to these emerging substances. The system facilitates information sharing on drug supply networks, enabling agencies to identify supply networks faster and plan enforcement responses. Temporary drug classification orders can then be used to classify substances faster.

I just conclude by drawing the House’s attention to a programme that I visited recently in Whangarei. Many members of the House will know it. It’s the programme set up by the police in conjunction with the local district health board (DHB) up there to deal with the methamphetamine problem up there. It was a classic health-based approach to what is a very insidious but actually very serious problem in that region of New Zealand, and the police, using their judgment and their front-line street knowledge as well as the resources of the DHB, backed by funding from the Government, have made major inroads into communities and families and whānau who are suffering the effects of addiction to that insidious drug. That is a health-based approach. That’s what we need to see more of, and I am confident that the measures outlined in this bill and the changes that it enacts will make a huge difference to the approach we take to dealing with those who are prone to using illicit substances, those who are addicted to them, but most importantly to the communities and families who are afflicted by them. I commend this bill to the House.

The National caucus is quite sad that we can’t be supporting this bill at its third reading, because it does much good. It certainly makes unlawful and classifies as a class A drug, with the consequent punishments that go along with supply of that—in fact, it’s ironic that the Minister of Justice should be moving this motion on behalf of the Minister of Health, because it was the Minister of Justice who railed so strongly against my colleague Simeon Brown’s attempts to do so through a member’s bill to increase the punishments to, I think, eight years, and then, perhaps in committee, it went to 14. We now have punishments of up to 20 years in jail for offences for supply of these synthetic drugs that have caused a scourge, particularly in vulnerable communities, and death on, I think, about 80 occasions in the last couple of years. So we support that; we think that is a very good initiative.

The temporary drug orders also we will support, and as is well understood now, it is clause 6 that has become the high hurdle over which we could not jump and then go into supporting this bill—for very good reasons, and I think they’ve been traversed. But I just want to touch on them again because just about everybody but the Minister of Health believes this constitutes the de facto decriminalisation of all drugs. The Police Association certainly did. The New Zealand Drug Foundation certainly did. The New Zealand Law Society certainly did. Chlöe Swarbrick certainly did; she said it was the biggest reform in 40 years. And yet the Minister still maintains that this is nothing more than the codification of existing police discretion. We don’t agree, and we don’t agree for very good reasons, because the words in clause 6 are very clear.

For the first time, this legislature is about to, in my view, breach a very strong constitutional convention of the separation of powers between the legislature and the executive, as represented through New Zealand Police. That is that this legislature is going to say that, despite something being an offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act, police should not prosecute. It doesn’t matter what goes on after that. It now says there is discretion to prosecute—as if the fact that it was in the law wasn’t an obvious enough indicator of that! And, in other parts of law, we have codified this discretion by saying it’s the police’s discretion not to prosecute, which, of course, is very consistent with the prosecution guidelines laid down by the Solicitor-General. So I have a significant concern that we are actually breaching a fairly strong convention over a long period of time about the non-interference of this place in the manner in which police do their job.

Then it got really confusing last night when a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) was brought in the Minister’s name to insert the words “to the public interest” into clause 6, and that’s now been put into the bill for consideration at third reading. That was completely new to anybody who had been involved in this bill. In every other document up until that point—the departmental disclosure statement, the regulatory impact statement, the Cabinet paper, and indeed New Zealand Police’s own submission to the select committee—this was about a therapeutic or health benefit to an individual. As late as the deliberation, the select committee’s deliberation, the police came back to us to tell us how police instructions would be issued. I want to quote from that document. It said, “The instructions will direct police to consider if offering a health or therapeutic approach to an individual would be more beneficial.”—not to the public interest but to an individual. Now, I think that actually materially changes the purpose of the bill. I’m not quite sure how, because it still constitutes de facto decriminalisation. But the fact that the Minister was bringing that sort of change at such a late stage is actually very concerning, in my view.

💬 Darroch Ball: What does it change it to?

Well, it changes the whole test, Mr Ball.

💬 Darroch Ball: To what?

It changes the test to: it doesn’t matter whether the individual would benefit; it matters whether the public would benefit.

💬 Darroch Ball: The public’s benefit to what—for what?

Oh, read the bill.

💬 Darroch Ball: You can’t explain it, can you?

Well, that’s right. I can’t explain it. That’s the very point. That is actually the point. This is the most confusing change at the eleventh hour to a bill that I have certainly been involved in, and the justification for it, in at least the explanatory notes, was: “The SOP adds some clarifying words.” Well, the Minister tried to explain why those clarifying words were necessary. I don’t believe that explanation was satisfactory.

So if this is all we’re doing, if we’re only codifying existing police discretion to prosecute, why do we need clause 6? Of course, the Hon Paula Bennett brought a Supplementary Order Paper, which was unsuccessful, and now we are here where we are.

Let there be no doubt, for those listening and watching developments, that the thousand prosecutions for possession only that were taken in the last year before this bill was passed will not be taken. They just will not be taken. There were a lot of submissions about whether or not the unconscious bias that police have acknowledged exists manifests in drug possession charges. I have no such concern, because, actually, nobody’s going to get prosecuted—nobody. And I wager that we’ll be back here next year, and people can remind me of this speech and say there were this many prosecutions, and I’m quite sure I’ll be able to count them on one hand, because we are here to take the possession of illicit substances out of prosecution. That’s not just cannabis; it’s not just synthetics. It’s P, it’s cocaine, it’s Ecstasy, it’s heroin—all of which will not be prosecuted, because we are here telling the police they should not.

I don’t believe that is what the public understand we’re doing. I don’t believe it’s what we should be doing. If the Government wanted to do it, it should have had a much more open conversation with the New Zealand public, and it’s for that reason and that reason alone that we oppose this bill. We cannot be here in substance decriminalising all drug possessions. We oppose this bill.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. It’s my pleasure to take a call in this, the third reading of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. This debate is about summing up what happened before the committee. So as the Health Committee chair, obviously it’s my prerogative to initially congratulate the Minister of Health on yet another bill and also to thank the officials from the Ministry of Health and police who worked so diligently to produce this piece of legislation. I’d also like to thank the 95 submitters who were interested in this piece of legislation and also acknowledge that we heard from 24 submitters who presented to us as a select committee.

I guess the premise of this piece of legislation was twofold. Firstly, it was acknowledging that some synthetic cannabinoids, these products that had previously been deemed to be almost legal substances, weren’t causing harm in New Zealand—I mean, the whole reason we went through the psychoactive substances process was because we believed that there were some psychoactive substances that the public could procure. But, essentially, since June 2017, through the coroner’s reports, we were made aware that we have had 55 deaths linked to two dangerous synthetic drugs: 5F-ADB and AMB-FUBINACA. Through this piece of legislation, those two synthetic cannabinoids are now deemed to be class A drugs. The definition of a class A drug is that they’re very high-risk illicit drugs.

I want to note that this House has been debating those particular products, and I acknowledge Simeon Brown who’s here in the House, who had a bill that was looking to highlight, I guess, how terrible these synthetic cannabinoids were. To some degree we have acted swiftly as a Government to address that particular issue. So because of the lives that had been lost, we’ve created a clear delineation in this legislation between the people who died, who technically we would say were addicts—these were people who, for what whatever reason, decided to procure, to possess, and to consume these products.

An alternative to those people dying, from our perspective, was actually providing an intervention earlier in the process. My colleague Michael Woodhouse tried to highlight that, from their perspective, this is decriminalisation by stealth, but in fact it’s not. What this piece of legislation now does quite explicitly in clause 6, which inserts new section 7(5) and (6) in the primary legislation, is to reinforce that if you procure these substances, if you possess these substances, or if you consume these substances—historically we would have treated you as somebody who should go through our criminal justice system. The police would have prosecuted. This legislation makes it crystal clear that that group of people, who are in fact the 55 people who have died—they are people who have addictions.

Our response now as a Government is not to prosecute you and have you go through the criminal justice system and wait until you get into prison before we support you with therapeutic interventions. The response now is one that will be facilitated by a relationship between the police and the Ministry of Health to determine guidelines that actually say that the best place, and in the public interest and for the public good—we now deem that you should be assisted and provided with those addiction and other services so that, actually, your life doesn’t end up being one where you are recycled through the criminal justice system.

What we do have to highlight is that in doing so, we will address some of the inequities in terms of possession and prosecution. Because, as we heard, there has been an overrepresentation of Māori in the criminal justice system, and possession of drugs has been one of the pathways into prison for some of our most vulnerable community members. So in enacting this piece of legislation, we are really clear as a Government that that is not in the public interest; it is not a public good consequence of legislation that we support. So we’re incredibly clear that the intention of this piece of legislation—as is the National Party, the rationale for why they won’t support it, which I find a bit sad, to be quite frank, because the discussion and debate within the select committee traversed all these issues.

I also want to put on the table that the issue about to prosecute or not to prosecute—we actually sought advice from Una Jagose, who is our Solicitor-General. Actually, from her perspective it didn’t make any difference. It was an irrelevant framing of whether or not the police had the discretion to prosecute or not to prosecute. So we’re really clear that, obviously, our position is we don’t support prosecution if you fit that definition contained within section 7(1)(a) of the Act, which is about procuring, possessing, or consuming these very harmful substances.

The only other thing I really want to highlight is the other aspect of this bill, which for us means that we now provide the police and customs with the tools that they need. They will have greater search and seizure powers to disrupt the supply of these synthetic cannabinoids. Why are we doing that? Because we need to reduce availability. In reducing availability and supply, we hope to minimise harm, and we will specifically punish the importers, the manufacturers, and the distributors of these synthetic cannabinoids. They’re the ones who should go to jail. They’re the ones who should pay the price; not addicts. So when I think about the balance contained within this legislation, we’ve been incredibly deliberate. Unless we have a deliberate strategy about addressing who is providing these products, and then unless we have a deliberate strategy about ensuring the people that consume these products—a lot of them vulnerable.

We haven’t really talked a lot about people who are homeless, people who are used—you know, they’re the ones that this legislation will protect. I think the consequences of this piece of legislation actually are going to reap a lot of rewards for Governments in the future. Because what we know from our prison statistics is that, unfortunately, for some of our whānau who end up in prison, that ends up being their life for the rest of their lives, because of the rates of recidivism we have. So I think if we can fundamentally address the addiction and health issues before people get into the criminal justice system, we can help them be rehabilitated in the community with their whānau.

Actually, I am hoping that what will happen is a compound effect, because there will be some communities where there’s more than one individual who will be undergoing some form of therapy, some form of health and remedial engagement. There will end up being collectives and collections of individuals and whānau who are going through the same process. They will be able to talk about that process and they will be able to, I believe, as a community—or as whānau first, but then as communities—address some of these underlying issues about why so many people are addicted and what role drugs and alcohol, to another degree, play in their lives.

I think that the ongoing consequences of this piece of legislation we will be able to assess in the future. I think the biggest challenge, actually, is going to be: can we provide sufficient quality services to meet the demand that will be generated by this piece of legislation? That’s probably the one thing that I’ll concede. We did hear from the Ministry of Health that based on the demand for these services, they may not exist in all communities and to the degree that they’re needed. But at least this provides a basis for directing resources where we think they’re best needed to meet the needs of those people who have addiction issues in our community, and fundamentally that will keep them out of the prison system. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to take a call on this, the third reading of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill, and I seek to reiterate and talk to some of the points that we are supportive of and some that we are struggling with.

First of all, the reclassification of synthetic drugs in this bill has support across the House, as it should, and I think the points were well made by the member Louisa Wall, who’s just resumed her seat. We would add, and we would contend, that we believe the member’s bill from Simeon Brown did a better job than what this bill does. We’ve debated that. We’ve discussed that it’s not to be in this bill, but I want it to be on record that that’s a very good piece of work and I believe this bill could have been made better by further inclusion of that work.

We’ve expressed our concerns with clause 6, and the decision tree that gives police discretion. For us, it really is that it seems like that discretion is that if there’s likely to be a health benefit, then discretion will be exercised, and we were told, and we believe and we understand, that there will always be a health benefit, therefore discretion is likely to be always applied. That’s sort of, fundamentally, the issue that we’re struggling with in how we, quite reasonably, join the dots with this being default decriminalisation.

I think it’s also interesting, as one of the members just spoke about, how the connection between someone who is not prosecuted under this discretion and the services they may need—because I’m interested in those logistics—will be via an app, or could be via an app. That’s kind of interesting, because if we look at things like a did not attend at an outpatient clinic and those who have tried to use apps to improve compliance and facilitate compliance, that hasn’t gone so well. Secondly, I just question the logic. Is it really expected that an offender will load an app and/or give a cell phone number when they would have concerns around tracking by giving that information? I think there are some logistics here that need a bit of thinking that I’m only sort of getting to here now.

I think the third point I want to talk to is the very good regional programme that is working in Northland, that amalgamation with police and Northland DHB—Te Ara Oranga is indeed an excellent programme, started under our Government and further supported by this Government. I think part of the magic of Te Ara Oranga is that co-design—police with health workers. I think, at its atomic level, it’s actually the pouwhenua, who are the lived-experience people out in the community, that are safe, who people can actually reach and say, “Hey, look, I have a problem. Can I be a part of this programme?” So the pouwhenua components to Te Ara Oranga, I think, are part of the magic of the programme. It is a matrix-like programme, for those who are familiar with the matrix programme. With more funding they might well be able to do even better. That’s something we can all collectively think about.

I think the one other concern and the word of warning that I would have with this bill is the exercise of discretion for Māori. We know that discretion through the criminal justice system has not served, and does not favour Māori, well. That’s a reality that we’re all trying to work with at the moment; it is a matter of fact. This exercise of discretion in a very important area needs to be closely monitored and closely reported on. We need to know that the use of discretion evenly favours Māori under this bill. So we’ll be watching very closely in the short period of time after this bill is enacted to make sure that Māori are fairly dealt with, with the very broad and very generous discretions that I believe, and we believe, are being given in this bill.

So I’d like to thank the select committee. It’s been a pleasure to work with them on this bill. We, clearly, have some difference as to where this will sit, and the points that we’ll be watching. There are some good parts to it; we support it. The other parts, we’ll be watchful. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Before I get into having to repeat myself on what I said last night, because, clearly, the National Party weren’t listening, and pointing out the fact that they haven’t done their homework and they don’t actually understand what they’re voting for, because the Hon Michael Woodhouse said that there was a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that they had voted against but they didn’t understand what changes it made—before I do get into that, I just want to touch on what Michael Woodhouse said again today, and just what the previous member, Dr Shane Reti, was talking about. He said that he was concerned that certain groups in our society, and Māori in particular, were going to be affected by the discretion that was being used under this bill by police. How can that be if we’re taking all the discretion away from the police—according to National—and decriminalising the possession of drugs? Because there would be no discretion being used if it was all decriminalised. So which one is it, Dr Reti? Is there a concern with the discretion that they already use, or is it going to be decriminalisation of all the drugs and that no police would have to use discretion? [Interruption] See, you’ve got to think about it. You’ve got to think before you stand up and give a speech.

The Hon Michael Woodhouse said a few things that I’d like to address as well. It’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and hasn’t done his homework. He said—before I get into the SOP—words to the effect of: “I guarantee in this House, one year from now, I’ll be asking how many prosecutions have been made in regards to possession of drugs and there’ll be a handful; you could count them on one hand”. What he doesn’t understand, if you look at the previous 2017/2018 year, the statistics that I did bring to this House a couple of days ago, with taking away methamphetamine, which is, obviously, the worst drug—if you talk about all of the other class A drugs, how many people went to prison for the possession of class A drugs other than meth? In the 2017/2018 year there was zero. What about for all of the class B drugs? There were four. All the class C drugs? There were seven. So what Mr Woodhouse is saying is going to be the cause or the outcome of this terrible bill that’s going through the House is that there’s going to be the exact same number of people going to prison than there were in half the year that the National Party were still in Government—2017/2018. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about and doesn’t know the facts behind his speeches.

The other thing which was quite strange that he’s talking about—he said it was about the SOP that the Government put in, that New Zealand First supported and the Government supported, around adding a very specific set of words, which was—let me get it right—it inserted “to the public interest”. Where that was placed was after “more beneficial”. So what that did in clause 6 was ensure that the police, when they were considering using their discretion, the path that they took—whether it would be prosecution or the health-based approach that was more beneficial to the public interest. It’s very important to understand what those words mean. A couple of things—one, it just reaffirms what the police already do. The whole point of the decision-making process of a police officer in any situation, right now, before this bill goes in, is to ensure that what they are doing is in the public interest. Understand that—

💬 Brett Hudson: So the member says it’s unnecessary?

I see we’ve got the new police spokesperson from the National Party who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, quite clearly. The whole premise of a police officer using their discretion in any situation, right now, outside, is to ensure that whatever decision they make is in the public interest.

What this does is it inserts and it clarifies, because throughout the stages of this bill—and this goes back to what Mr Woodhouse was saying—going through this House, the National Party were waxing lyrical about the fact this was decriminalisation. It’s in their minority report, too, about how can an individual’s health-based approach—if that was the preference for a police officer, how could that be defended in court if they were prosecuted? They couldn’t get prosecuted; therefore, it must be a decriminalisation by stealth. But what the SOP that was added—and it clarifies and it changed. This is what changed between the first, second, and moving into the committee of the whole House readings for the National Party, which they did not understand. Michael Woodhouse said they didn’t understand. This clarifies and changes what their argument was, which was that it was a health-based approach for the individual. How can you possibly prosecute an individual, because a health-based approach for the individual is always beneficial? This is in the public interest, and both the police and the Police Association have said that that is what already occurs. I quoted it in the previous stage of this House and I’ll do it again—this is the submission from the police themselves: “Clause 6 affirms the existing approach to police prosecutorial discretion, it emphasises that consideration of a health-centred or therapeutic approach is a relevant part of the public interest test under the Solicitor-General’s prosecution guidelines”. The police already do it. On section 6 the Police Association says that the Police Association supports that “which reconfirms the public interest test and adds as a relevant matter, consideration as to whether a health-centred … approach would be more beneficial than a prosecution for the individual concerned.” This is the point, that the National Party used those words: “more beneficial” to who; the individual or the public? What that SOP does and accomplishes, and what the bill does now, is it ensures that the police continue to use their discretion that ensures it’s in the public interest. The National Party have got no argument against that; they’ve gotten zero argument against that.

Just quickly, in my final moments, I want to address the issue around one of the most important aspects of this bill, also, which is the inclusion of those psychoactive drugs—those two classes that have killed so many people, and we’ve brought them into the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. No matter what the National Party says and what they want the public to believe, Simeon Brown’s member’s bill was not going to achieve a thing. It was not going to achieve a thing. But to be fair, New Zealand First supported that through a couple of the stages because, at that point, that was the only piece of legislation that was on the table of the House that made any movement towards what New Zealand First and what this country needed: the addressing of the issue of psychoactive substances—and we’ve said that multiple times in this House.

But what it didn’t do was what this bill does. First of all, it takes a better, multilayered approach to the problem of psychoactive substances. We’re not just changing one number from two years to eight years; that would not do a thing in regards to the long-term entrenched problem that this country has with psychoactive substances. Most importantly, what this bill does is it allows the creation of a new class—class C1—which any new psychoactive substances that they could create goes straight in. What the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill does, most importantly, is it gives the police more powers for search and surveillance at the end where they need it the most, which is for the dealers, the peddlers, and the manufacturers of the stuff, so that they can stop it from getting into the hands of vulnerable people in the first place.

So we’ve got the fence at the top of the cliff, and not the ambulance at the bottom. It’s a vitally important difference—a vitally important difference—that this legislation accomplishes. It amazes me that the National Party are not supporting it—that the National Party are not supporting it—and every single argument, they stand up—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Makes no sense.

—and try and give—makes no sense, and doesn’t hold any water whatsoever. Doesn’t hold any water. It never used to, but especially now that they’ve got the amendment from the Supplementary Order Paper that was brought in, they have got no argument against supporting this bill.

We’re happy to support this bill. We’re glad that this Government is moving in the right direction in regards to psychoactive drugs and drugs in general. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. I just want to make a couple of quick comments around what the member Darroch Ball was just saying—that the arguments being put forward by this side of the House make absolutely no sense. I thought I’d take this opportunity to remind this House of what Chlöe Swarbrick said, and which is the direct opposite of what she will be doing tonight, when she said, regarding classifying class A drugs, “David Clark’s call to reclassify two of the synthetic compounds as class A drugs puts our country on the wrong path.” Those were the words that she said in October last year. Tonight, the Green Party will be voting for exactly what she said was what she didn’t want done, back in October last year.

The National Party supports parts of this piece of legislation but does not support other parts. But, firstly, I would like to talk about one of the parts of this piece of legislation which is incredibly important, and that’s the classification of two of the most dangerous synthetic drug compounds as class A drugs—AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB. It is with a heavy heart that we discuss this subject, because we know that there have been around 80 deaths from those two killer substances over the past 18 months. It is good that, finally, Parliament will be passing into law and actually doing something about giving those substances the classification that they need, and ensuring that the suppliers, the manufacturers, and the distributors of those substances are targeted by the police, and they face the full consequences of the law for their actions. That was why I brought legislation to this Parliament, to address it through the Psychoactive Substances Act, to ensure that those who are supplying these dangerous drugs do face a hefty, hefty penalty—the suppliers and manufacturers and distributors of drugs which kill, of drugs which cause enormous harm, should face long sentences and heavy penalties.

I remind this House and acknowledge Lewis Jones and his son Calum, who died from synthetic drugs. He was targeted by a dealer over 100 times in the 24 hours prior to his death. He was given a free sample, and that free sample claimed that young man and that young father’s life. We are talking about real people and real consequences. So it is good that this Parliament is finally taking action regarding classifying those two drugs.

But I would make the point that this is far too late. It’s over a year since the Rt Hon Winston Peters said, as Acting Prime Minister, that this issue would be dealt with with “unction and urgency”, on 31 July last year, and that the Government would take serious action. It is now 7 August 2019, and Parliament is only just getting around to classifying those substances as class A drugs. That is something which has taken far too long; however, it is the right thing to be doing, to be classifying those two substances.

I would like to remind the House of the fact that what I was trying to do through the Psychoactive Substances Act was something which was opposed consistently by the same people who are now standing up and saying that this is something which should be done. So I do applaud the Government for finally actually taking action. I would also like to put on the record that the Government could have taken action much faster if they had actually used the Misuse of Drugs Act to classify AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB by using an Order in Council, which the Minister of Health has under that piece of legislation but failed to do, and instead chose to legislate and take even more time in doing so.

The second point that I’d like to touch on is in regards to the additional clause, clause 5, which includes temporary class drug orders. This is a good step. Again, it’s something which, I think, my bill was trying to do, which was to ensure that we’re not seeing the Parliament and the Minister having to continually respond to new substances being created by synthetic drug dealers. The reality is that these drugs can be created very quickly, overnight, by synthetic drug dealers, and the Psychoactive Substances Act has, essentially, a ban on all of these substances. What the new temporary class C1 orders will mean is that the Minister will be able to quickly issue these. The concern that I have is around the speed and the harm which can be done in the interim. But at least it’s something which allows the Minister to be able to take action when new substances are brought in, and allows the Minister to take action against the dealers and suppliers and their new ways that they try to make money from people’s misery.

Finally, I would like to touch on clause 7 of this bill, which Darroch Ball says just reaffirms what police already do. The question has to be asked: if all it does is reaffirm what police already do, why is it in the piece of legislation? Why is it here? I would like to remind MP Darroch Ball of what Chris Cahill said when this policy was announced late last year: “It has an air of drug reform on the fly, rather than a more considered debate and informed legislation. I am worried that by codifying police discretion, the Government is potentially asking officers to be the spearhead of decriminalisation. If decriminalisation is what Parliament wants, then that’s what the law should say.” That’s, essentially, the position that the National Party has taken, and we are saying if that’s what this Government wants, that’s what the Government should be saying. But instead, they are doing it by de facto, and we have de facto decriminalisation in this piece of legislation by, essentially, legislating that the police should not prosecute—should not prosecute. That’s exactly what it says.

Of course, we have an interesting situation here, where the Green Party claim that this is full-on decriminalisation; whereas New Zealand First says this is not decriminalisation. But the reality is, when you look at the legislation, and you look at what it says, it says, “prosecution should not be brought”.

I’d like to remind the House that this is not just about decriminalisation of cannabis; this is about all substances—class A, class B, and class C. That is cocaine, heroin, meth, opium, MDMA. These are harmful substances, and the Government is sending a message that the police should not prosecute for personal use and possession of all of those drugs.

Now, the police currently do have discretion. They have to take into account a range of factors when deciding whether to prosecute. That is the right thing to do. Parliament should not be dictating to the police who they should be prosecuting and what they should be prosecuting them for. That is the police’s job. That is their job to make those decisions, to use their discretion. But here we have legislation which says the police should not prosecute, and that is something which National cannot support. The police should not be put in that position. We cannot support this piece of legislation because it goes far too far on these on this particular clause. I cannot commend this bill to the House.

E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. It is an absolute pleasure to stand in the House tonight right now on that being the third reading of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill, which does herald a paradigm shift—the most transformational change to our drug law in this country in over 30 years, because this bill will save lives. However, I won’t sit here and be lectured on ethics and morals by National Party members like Simeon Brown, who only a few months ago went on the record at a debate with myself and Labour Party member Dr Deborah Russell speaking about how he believes people like me and my partner, a same-sex couple, should not be allowed to get married, be afforded the same rights as him and his wife. Mr Simeon Brown, you are welcome to hold your opinions, but I think that it’s important that you and your National Party colleagues recognise that when you are here in this House, the positions that you hold—

💬 Simeon Brown: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I’m just not sure exactly what any of that has to do with this piece of legislation. And also, she continues to bring you into the debate.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): Thanks for your helpful advice, Mr Brown. If you could return to the bill, it would be really helpful.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Absolutely, Madam Speaker. The point that I was trying to make is that when Mr Simeon Brown stands here in this House and grandstands his opinions, his political rhetoric, it doesn’t just impact him; it impacts the real lives of everyday New Zealanders who are out there on the streets, including those who deal with synthetics addiction problems—primarily, actually, as far as this goes, the homeless, jobless young men who are pushed further into the shadows who have been the victims of this drug.

Former Green Party health spokesperson Kevin Hague warned with the passage of the 2014 amendment of the Psychoactive Substances Act, which ripped synthetics out of the regulated supply and placed them into the unregulated black market—he said, and I quote, “[there will be an] increased supply of currently illicit drugs. We are going to see a significant increase in harm.” And, unfortunately, Kevin Hague was right.

I want to take a moment to address all of the hot air being blown by the Opposition in this debate, because they are saying on the one hand that the police already use this discretion, and on the other hand that it presents no change. However, they are also saying that this is simultaneously a stealthy and transformational law. I’ll help them to reconcile that. What this law does is codify police discretion that officers already use. The problem is that different people use different drugs for different reasons, and different police prosecute different people differently in different regions. Because it is currently an ad hoc unarticulated power, it is impromptu. There is barely a rule of thumb. It is unspoken, there is no transparency—

💬 Brett Hudson: Misleading.

CHLÖE SWARBRICK: —and there is therefore, Mr Brett Hudson, no accountability. The police themselves say this. They recognise that they have this power currently, but it’s uncertain because it doesn’t currently have to be reported, and it’s applied without the need to rationalise, or, more importantly, it is often not applied where it, in the first place, should be.

So to help my National Party colleagues along, that’s where the transformational part comes in, because clause 6 of this bill amends section 7 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, which outlines the offence of possession and use—of all drugs. The change we’re voting through tonight codifies police discretion, explicitly highlighting that—and I’ll quote from the bill itself to help the National Party. In clause 6, new section 7(5) states—and I quote—“prosecution should not be brought unless it is required in the public interest.” In clause 6, new section 7(6) states—and I quote—“consideration should be given to whether a health-centred or therapeutic approach would be more beneficial”.

The police discretion, which is presently applied on a casual basis, will now be explicitly available universally to all police officers in this country. The police will enforce standards. We will collect data, and if there is bias and prejudice, as some who submitted to the select committee noted is often the case in prosecution, we will be able to pinpoint it through bald-faced evidence and information, and we will be able to fix it.

A year and a half ago since this issue was first brought to Parliament, I hope that the Opposition is finally starting to get a grasp on it, because there is nothing so upfront and straightforward—something that’s been so critiqued and so scrutinised through the marathon and under the microscope that is the select committee and parliamentary process, because almost always the debate around drug law reform gets personal. Last night, the Hon Michael Woodhouse patronised me for giving him a lecture when I addressed misinformation being circulated by the Opposition on the expert advisory panel. In the second reading, he told me to go back to “constitutional” school—not quite sure what that is. The Hon Paula Bennett has regularly mischaracterised me as pro-drugs, preferring to skirt around debate on the evidence and dive straight into ad hominem attacks.

So let’s get personal, really personal, because I know first-hand the harm that substances can cause. But more importantly than that, I know that our responses that we create here in Parliament can either increase or decrease that harm. When we introduced this bill to the House, I spoke about Tyrone Smith and how the net of stigma and punishment we weave stitches up the lives of those who abuse drugs and can see them leave us all too soon.

But tonight, I want to talk about a flatmate of mine that I lived with several years ago. I will not name him. This young man had moved to Auckland from regional New Zealand looking for work. Without forging strong community connections, he spent a lot of time on the internet. We found out later that on chatrooms he started asking about where to find tinny houses. He found one but he didn’t find cannabis. Where cannabis wasn’t available, he found that synthetics were. They were cheaper and didn’t come up in drug tests. He further withdrew and isolated himself. He turned to more synthetics because they were reliable comfort and they helped him not to feel anything at all. A few weeks later, his dad came to take him because we were all worried about him. We were notified a few weeks later that he took his life that next week.

We didn’t know anything about the drugs until his dad called us and we learnt about his passing. There wasn’t a meaningful opportunity to intervene in this young man’s drug abuse. He didn’t tell anyone because he was ashamed of it, and because he was ashamed of it, he withdrew further, he isolated himself, and he continued turning to harder drug use. The dealer only cared about making as much money as possible. My flatmate’s quality of life meant absolutely nothing. The dealer had no duty of care. In a society that thrives on ostracising and alienating oddballs, drug dealers have plenty of prey for comfort. Tonight is for my flatmate. Tonight is for Tyrone Smith. Tonight is for all of these men’s families, for all of the victims of the war on drugs to whom the State owes a well-overdue apology, and for those who suffer from mental health and addiction issues who will no longer be swept under the carpet out of sight and out of mind.

This law is a triumph for evidence-based policy. It is a triumph for compassion and it is a triumph for common sense. Sixteen years ago, former Green Party MP Nandor Tanczos contributed to the debate on increasing penalties for methamphetamine. The Greens were the only party in Parliament to oppose merely increasing penalties because—in Nandor’s words, and I quote—“it will do nothing. In fact, it will be worse than doing nothing. It will distract from the real issue of how we will really deal with these problems. There are a lot of things that we can do if we want to address the methamphetamine issue. We could put more money into drug education … And we have to put more money into treatment.” Nandor Tanczos was right. Sixteen years ago, we increased penalties alone, politicians rested on their laurels, and more harm occurred. More lives were ruined and more people died. Tonight, we end that ridiculous political precedent. We do something that actually matters.

In my final minutes, I want to extend a massive mihi and thankyou to our Green Party of Aotearoa political advisers, particularly Holly Donald, the Prime Minister of my heart; to Ralph Hall; and to my executive assistant, Tim Onnes. And I can’t help but shout-out to the one, the only, Rob Beaglehole. I want to thank all of the Green MPs who came before this caucus to carry this kaupapa. I want to thank all of the patients, the police, the addicts, the mental health and addiction workers, the NGOs, and whānau who spoke out. The arc of moral history is long, but today it finally bends towards justice. Kia ora.

Kia ora. Just before I call the member, can I just acknowledge the respect that members in the House showed to Chlöe Swarbrick. Despite a heated debate, I think the respect that was shown is really appreciated.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise with some regret in not supporting this Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill in its third reading. There are elements of the bill that are very good. The work on synthetics—particularly, the penalties for suppliers of such drugs—are good things. But I’m just going to take my contribution to talk about clause 6 and the misnomer of the arguments that we have had to endure throughout this bill’s passage and, again, this afternoon.

To start off with the comments from both Mr Ball and Ms Swarbrick that all clause 6 does in amending section 7 is to codify a discretion police already have, given that every statement around this is an acknowledgment of an authority that the police already have in a public interest discretion, if that were truly the case, then the words in the bill would be completely and utterly unnecessary. They would be unnecessary because, by their own admission, the discretion already exists.

I’ll take up the point that Ms Swarbrick made about consistency across the force and being able to gather data. Well, that’s simply not going to work, for two reasons. One is that there is no requirement in this amendment for police or anyone else to track and report on the discretion as exercised. They don’t need to record they did it; they merely have to exercise it. They don’t have to write it down. They don’t have to write it down and they don’t have to report it. That, therefore, also impacts on the consistency argument. Because they don’t have to do any of that, then each officer can apply their discretion in their own way for their specific reasons. So Ms Swarbrick’s claim that this will somehow lead to consistency across police members across New Zealand is simply not borne out by the legislation. I do hope it is borne out in operations, but it certainly is not created in the legislation.

Along the way—and Ms Swarbrick admitted in the committee of the whole House stage—as it was written at the time, before the final Supplementary Order Paper, clause 6 would mean that, in effect, possession of all drugs was decriminalised, because the argument would be that a medical treatment or a medical approach would always be in the better interests, certainly, of the offender in every case, and in no case, therefore, would a prosecution be able to proceed. She agreed that that is exactly the case in the way it was written.

Now, along comes someone—and it may have been Mr Ball; I don’t know—who thinks that with the simple addition of “in the public interest” at the end of that clause, somehow that creates a change. Somehow it creates a change. Well, here’s why it actually doesn’t. Here’s why it actually doesn’t: shifting away from a discretion in practice and codifying it now means that they have created a potential legal challenge to that discretion, because if a prosecutor, and it most likely would be a police officer, but it could also be someone from Crown Law, depending on the circumstances, but let’s just say it’s an officer, were to determine that “Actually, I am going to decide that in this instance”—and it might be the sixth time they’ve apprehended an individual for possessing meth, for instance. If a prosecutor were to determine that “This time, I’m going to say ‘No, it hasn’t worked. Therefore, in the public interest, it’s not a better option to do a medical treatment. Instead, we’re going to prosecute.’ ”, as soon as it goes to court, the lawyer—even if it’s a court-appointed lawyer—is immediately going to challenge that because they’ve got an objective-based test they can apply.

They can argue in the court that it has to be proven—it has to be proven—that a health-based approach would not have been better in the public interest in that case, and that has not existed in the discretionary powers that officers have exercised before New Zealand First, going soft, decided to agree to codifying this in law. It is an absolute mistake. It actually ties police officers’ hands. In one respect, it’s tying the hands. It says “You can never prosecute.”, but then, when you really, really want to, you’ve opened it up to a challenge in court, and that’s the problem when you get bush lawyers trying to amend what is supposed to be decent and important legislation. They make a complete hash of it.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The main proponents behind this bill were the Greens. They have always had the objective of the decriminalisation of drugs, and in realty, for 99 percent of the time, I would suggest that they are going to have achieved that with this bill as written. New Zealand First, who have had a history of being quite tough on this area, have acquiesced on one level, thinking they’ve created a protection which is a protection in theory but not a protection in practice. So, quite frankly, the Greens come out of this the winner and New Zealand comes out of this the losers, along with New Zealand First. We do not support this bill.

This is a split call. I call Greg O’Connor—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As I sit listening to this debate, it sort of reminds me of a journey that I’ve been on to this place. I wasn’t on the committee that considered this—it’s the Health Committee; I’m on the Justice Committee—but as I sit here, I think how absolutely appropriate it is to be in front of the Health Committee.

Mr Speaker, if you’ll just indulge me. As a younger man, I was an undercover police officer and I spent a lot of time living with those on the peripheral, living with drug users and dealers, gang members, and they all had one thing in common. It was that they were all heavy drug users, even the dealers. They had one thing that went through everything. Whatever crime was committed, it was based on drugs. Someone asked me the other day, “When you stand up and say something like this in the House, aren’t you worried that you talk, even now, about some of the people who you busted?”, and do you know what? I’m not, because they’re all dead. I’m not, because those who lived that life, they’re well gone, mostly from overdoses or just bad life choices.

So that just really caused me to reflect on how appropriate it is that issues like this are dealt with by the Health Committee.

Even as I was sitting waiting to speak today, my mind drifted back to a woman called Sally Anne Enoka, one of the first heroin addicts I ever dealt with in the 1970s. Sally Anne—I actually arrested her and chatted with her, and I saw her around town. She was a prostitute. She was in and out of prison, in and out for different offences, but she had come to the city, she had got into heroin—a little bit of a similar story to what Chlöe Swarbrick talked about—she became a hopeless heroin addict, and, eventually, I attended her death, when she died of a tragic overdose. This was one of those things that has just really struck me, all my life.

Through my career I’ve arrested many people. I’ve put people in prison and seen them at different stages, but nothing we’ve ever done—when I look back on it—has really solved the issue. Nothing, I have to say, that I’ve done has really made a difference. The amount of methamphetamine has just increased in this country. The amount of methamphetamine—we saw that massive seizure up in the North, of a half a tonne, and it made no difference to the amount or availability and price of methamphetamine in New Zealand.

We’ve talked about increasing sentences. I mentioned in the second reading the attempts to control heroin in New Zealand in the 1970s, where it became life imprisonment. It actually made no difference by itself.

So all I’d ask members opposite—it’s so easy to stand up and talk tough. It’s so easy to stand up and try and grab that right hand of the vote, but just please, before you do so, think about what you’re doing. We do have an opportunity now. You could stand up here and, look, we could get polarised over this on political grounds, but it’s not a thing to do. Actually, it’s going to be your kids, your grandkids, those related to you, those in your electorates—they are the ones that are going to continue to suffer if we don’t get this right. Now, look, nothing is certain in life. We don’t know for certain that this is going to work, and anyone that stands up here and says that it will—we can’t be sure. But, by heck, it’s time we tried something a little bit different.

When I look at this bill, what this does is it doesn’t actually really mean that anyone’s going soft on the causes. Customs are not going to stop trying to seize as much as they can. The drug squads are not going to stop tracking down drug dealers. They’re not going to try and stop getting the big seizures. Nothing is going to change at that level. No one’s going soft anywhere, and I challenge anyone in any drug squad to think that anything’s going to change. But what is going to change is that it just gives us the opportunity to maybe affect demand, because while there’s that massive demand out there, nothing will change. And I go back to people like Sally Anne Enoka. There wasn’t anything there that we could have done. She kept using heroin. There were no options to take. If we can bring in an option that someone like her can actually be put off into another system, then it might just save people like that, and this is an opportunity to do it.

So I would ask those speakers who are going to follow me from the other side of the House to just think what you’re saying. Just think: this might be one opportunity to really make a difference. There’s opportunity—we’ve seen evidence overseas that we can make a difference. Let’s at least try something, because what we’re doing now simply is not working. I recommend this bill to the House.

I call the Hon Paula Bennett—five minutes.

Mr Speaker, thank you for the opportunity to take a shorter call on this bill. I wish I could have been here sooner but I had other obligations that I couldn’t get out of, and I do want to go on record for the third reading of this bill. First of all, just to be really clear and get it on record, we certainly support that changing of classifications, particularly of the two drugs, around synthetics. We want to see that happen. We would have supported it going through quicker, quite frankly. I like that the Minister gets discretion. I think that that’s important as new drugs come on the market, or the way that they are creating particularly synthetics, and with the kind of products that they use, we certainly want to see us being able to move quickly, to reclassify as is needed to try and get those drugs off the streets, and to give police the kind of powers that they need. So the temporary drug class orders, we think, are really important—the different components that are coming out. So, really, that is, for us, vital that that’s on the record—that we feel like that.

Around the police prosecution—and I listened to the member before me quite earnestly, and I get with him on the politics of it all. With all respect, we can, kind of, all stand here and give a story about someone we know that has gone through drug or alcohol serious addiction, and we have got family and people that we love that have struggled in our lives, and we feel it personally. I think, you know, we are people that have all the normal experiences of every New Zealander in our own and in our extended. So, you know, I get that. And you know what? I get the addiction treatments that are needed and the increase in them. I’m someone that sat in the very early days of Te Ara Oranga in Northland, which I actually helped create as the then Minister of Police.

I believe in an all-of-Government, community, people approach. You can’t deal with someone’s addiction if they haven’t got somewhere to live. You can’t deal with their addictions if they’re living in fear of violence. You know, quite frankly, drugs are an escape from some hell that people live in that create another spiral of hell for them. So to be able to look at it from a health perspective, along with the assistance of police and everyone else—and, as I say, you know, the best programme I’ve ever seen, and it’s not a programme; it’s a way of getting alongside and supporting, whether it’s with Whānau Ora or whether it’s with all of those, particularly in somewhere like Māngere. To see them looking at the person with all of their needs and wrapping them around—bring it on, yeah?

We’ve tried different ways of creating a power base in our communities that identifies people for their individual whānau needs—not necessarily me as an individual, but each family is different, each person is different, and how we do it. Bring it on. You know, we’ve trialled stuff, and not all of it worked. Learn from those mistakes, because we knew that those would happen. As you say, not everything works, Mr O’Connor, first time, so we wanted to trial a whole lot of, you know, social sector trials, place-based initiatives—those were all ways, to me, of devolving power back into our communities so that we could work with the needs in our streets and in our homes.

So my cry for this is not against a health response, if that’s what you want to call it, because, quite frankly, it should be an all-of-Government, society, community response. You know, it’s not about being against it not being a criminalisation. It’s that we’re in the infancy and we’re almost setting—I worry about police, where they haven’t got the referrals to make, where instead they’re sitting there and they’re literally making the judgment of the person in front of them as to whether or not this is light recreational or whether or not this is full-blown addiction that needs to go through Housing First and needs something much more intensive. Then we’re treating them like social workers without giving them the resources—in our communities, by the way. You know, not just within police—within our Whānau Ora or within our iwi organisations, if that’s what works best for that family; within Housing First, if it’s that. We’re setting them up—police and those that are stuck in a cycle of despair—to expect a different response that, actually, most of our communities do not have the means, the funding, the professionals alongside of them to provide.

That’s my shout-out. You know, it is not coming from one of “We’ve got to be tougher on”—yeah, let’s get bloody tougher on gangs, let’s get tougher on those that are manufacturing and distributing. I get where you want to come from on helping people. This feels like it is political. You didn’t discuss it with us. If we really wanted to do something differently, it could have been handled differently, and with people as the focus.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is a Government that’s tackling the long-term issues facing our country, and one of them is the significant harm that synthetic drugs are having in our community. I think it’s actually appropriate as we come towards the end of the third reading of this bill and this bill’s about to pass into law that we think about why we’re actually here. The issue we’ve got is that since mid-2017, somewhere between 55 and 80 people have lost their lives as a result of these synthetic drugs. It wasn’t just the coroner that alerted us to what was happening to that sudden surge in drug-related deaths, but it was also those working on the ambulances who were picking up people that were being severely affected, and it was our emergency departments that were talking about the things that they were seeing as people were using these drugs, and the consequences they were having.

So this bill is a really important bill, and what it does is it strikes exactly the right balance, because it increases the search and seizure powers and the penalties for those that are supplying and manufacturing these drugs that are having this huge impact in our community. But it also acknowledges the addictive nature of these drugs and other drugs, and, basically, what it does is it says that we need to take a health-based approach to those that are using them.

So I just want to take you through those three things that this bill does, and the first thing it does is it classifies the two drugs that have caused the most harm in our community—the two synthetics—over the last couple of years. It classifies them as class A drugs, and what that means, basically, is these drugs are considered to be having a high risk of harm to either individuals or society. So once they are on Schedule 1 as class A drugs, what it does is it gives customs and the police much greater search and seizure powers, and it also increases the penalties for those that are supplying and manufacturing these drugs, and that can be up to life imprisonment, so that is very, very significant in terms of a deterrent and enforcement. So, basically, what that does is it makes it much tougher in terms of those bringing those drugs into our community.

But the problem is that as we add these drugs to the schedule, as they become class A drugs, what happens out there in the community is these drugs are always evolving, and the manufacturers will just tweak things a bit and then bring out something new. So what this legislation also does is it creates a new temporary drug classification, class C1. So what that means is if we start to be seeing the things that we were seeing back in 2017, we start to see that spike in hospital admissions, the ambulance officers telling us what they’re seeing, and we start to see the coroner talking about a new surge in deaths, what the Minister of Health can do is he can classify one of these drugs as a class C1 drug. What he needs to do, or she needs to do, is notify that in the Gazette, and, basically, what that means is that’s a temporary classification that can last up to one year. It gives greater search and seizure powers, etc., to that drug, and it means that we can start to address that much, much more quickly. But the understanding is that that is only a temporary class order, and so what the Minister then must do is go away and make further inquiries, organise for further research, so that then that drug can be classified, whether that turns then into a class A, class B, class C, or whether it is removed from the temporary class Schedule. Also, if they need a little bit more time to do that, they’re allowed one more renewal of that temporary class order. I think, not only do we need to be taking this incredibly seriously as different drugs get on to the schedule as class A, but we need to be incredibly responsive as things evolve in the community.

But the third thing this bill does—and this is the one that’s had most of the debate—is it reaffirms the police’s existing discretion in terms of whether they want to prosecute or not. Just looking at the actual wording, because there’s been a lot of debate about this even this afternoon, basically, all the wording says in new section 7(5) is: “To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that there is a discretion to prosecute for an offence against subsection (1)(a), and a prosecution should not be brought unless it is required in the public interest.” This is something that police already have the ability and the discretion to do, and that’s really outlined in prosecution guidelines.

But then, what it does is it also says in new section 7(6): “When considering whether a prosecution is required in the public interest, in addition to any other relevant matters, consideration should be given to whether a health-centred or therapeutic approach would be more beneficial”. This is where the Supplementary Order Paper yesterday added “[in] the public interest”. What this says is: considered “in addition to any other relevant matters”. So what it does is it brings that health-centred approach and consideration in relation to any other relevant matters. So what it’s actually reflecting is the fact that for many, a health-based approach, in the context of these incredibly addictive drugs, may well be in the public interest, because if we can get somebody off these drugs and into treatment, then the likelihood that they’re going to reuse and there’s going to be an ongoing issue is much less likely.

But what we were hearing about and people were talking about in select committee were some of the questions about “Well, how would police then all of a sudden manage this huge number of referrals?”, and also “How would police kind of weigh up whether a health-based approach was necessary?” What we were advised by the police and by the Ministry of Health was that they were working together to prepare a whole lot of things in relation to the implementation of the bill. One of them was developing instructions which provide operational guidance for police to assess where the public interest lay when considering people in terms of possession offences. Basically, these instructions would be in line with the Solicitor-General’s prosecution guidelines.

The other thing that they were working on jointly was a single, national point of referral for people that are being referred to a health-based approach. The idea there was that there was going to be an app developed and that would then send referrals through to the health sector. So then a health professional would be in touch with that person, and what they would do is assess, triage, and refer as appropriate. What that would mean would be there was a much more consistent approach nationally in terms of people being referred on for a health system approach.

But the other query was “Well, are the services there going to be there in the community? Do we have the services that we can refer people to?” This is where the Wellbeing Budget’s come in, because we’ve put a $1.9 billion investment into our mental health services, in addition to a whole lot of investment that’s going to be going into primary care, so people can go and access mental health workers and the support they need. There’s also a big emphasis on addiction services as well.

So there’s a range of investments in that space. One of them is going to be investing about $14 million over the next four years so that we get an estimated 5,000 people a year getting extra support and primary care for alcohol and drug issues. Then there was an extra $44 million over four years that was going to go into support existing addiction services. That was a focus on residential care, detoxification, and then ongoing support. It is estimated an extra 2,000 people would receive support through that.

So there’s a whole range of other services. I won’t go on, because, basically, there’s a whole range of them that I could talk about. But the whole emphasis is that this is a Government that cares about the long-term mental health and wellbeing of our community, and we’re putting in huge investments over the next four to five years to make sure that we’ve got people there and have the services that they need.

So basically, just summing up, this is a Government that is tackling the long-term issues facing our country, and one of them is the harm that these synthetic drugs are doing in our community. So what this bill does is it classifies those two drugs that have been responsible for the majority of those synthetic-related deaths as class A drugs, which means that police have greater search and seizure powers and there’s much greater penalties for those who supply them. But it also means we can have much quicker responses as those drugs out in the community start to evolve, so that we can put in temporary class orders, which means that police can respond much more quickly when we’re seeing those surges in hospital admissions or deaths.

Thirdly, it reaffirms the police discretion so that they can take a health-based approach for those that are using these drugs. So it’s a really good bill. It really sets the right balance and it’s a really important issue that we need to address. I therefore commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Chair. I’ll just pick up where that last speaker, Liz Craig, left around the investment of $1.9 billion into mental health. I notice the health Minister’s in the House today. So I’m looking forward—I don’t think he’s spoken on this bill yet, so hopefully he might take the last call and confirm for the House today that every person who’s referred to a drug treatment service at the discretion of the police will be seen in a timely fashion. It is interesting: they throw around the figure of $1.9 billion, but when you break that down, in fact, there’s only $44 million extra that went into drug and alcohol services in the last Budget. Ross Bell from the New Zealand Drug Foundation said drug services needed $150 million investment. That was before this bill.

So it would be interesting for the Minister to take a call and maybe tell us a bit about the modelling of how much increased demand for drug treatment services this bill will stimulate, where are those services, and, if Ross Bell from the New Zealand Drug Foundation is saying drug services need an extra $150 million before this bill went into law and they only got $44 million, is he going to commit to that extra funding? While he’s on his feet in the next call, he might be able to answer a question of how much increased access to mental health and addiction services that new investment will be providing. I’m very much looking forward to that contribution this afternoon.

I think, for this bill, for me, it swings the pendulum too far. I think there’s a real problem here that if you start to disentangle penalties, or a punitive, or a punishment from therapy, you start to think that they’re two separate things. In fact, they’re complementary. I’d like to give an example about that today. So when I did my clinical training, I did a placement out in Lower Hutt—it was an organisation called WellTrust. Many people might know the name Pauline Gardiner, who was a former member of Parliament in this Parliament. Her name is associated with the success of WellTrust.

Now, we were taking young schoolkids who had been caught smoking cannabis, who normally would have been kicked out of school, basically, and part of the programme was that if they wanted to stay in school, they had to go through a cannabis programme with us. Through drug testing, they had to show a declining level of cannabinoids. What that programme showed me—because I was a trainee—was that, in fact, for some people the penalties are what drives them for their therapeutic outcome. These kids wanted to stay in school. In fact, what was actually quite surprising to me, and actually a lesson I took through my mental health career was, in fact, sometimes penalties give some people an excuse not to use drugs. These kids would constantly report back that they felt it gave them an ability amongst their peers to actually say, “Hey, I can’t use cannabis because I’m getting drug tested.”, and they didn’t lose any face over it. In fact, it was quite cool.

I think it’s very clear that for some groups of people, if you take those penalties away, there is not going to be a driver for them. What was quite alarming during the submission process of the select committee is that there doesn’t seem to be much thinking at the back end of this law, because how many times is a person going to go through this referral approach and maybe not turn up to a drug treatment clinic, or actually not engage in it and not achieve the outcomes? Then they come cycling back around. As my colleague the Hon Paula Bennett alluded to, is this going to just result in people laughing at the police when they pull them up around personal use of drug? You can actually pass a law, but, you know, it’s a bit bigger than some academic equation.

What’s going to happen out there is—drug users aren’t stupid, and this bill is actually quite alarming for parents of teenagers out there, because, as we know, the teenage years are ones of pushing boundaries, and they experiment, and many young people in New Zealand will try drugs like cannabis—probably most—but, actually, most stop that and just carry on with their normal life. But what these drug users do, very subtly, is—the drug dealers are a similar age and they hang out in peripheral groups to where many New Zealand kids are going to be hanging out on a Friday and Saturday night. When they get pulled up by the police, they’ll only have a small amount on them, because they’re just introducing the drug to the young person, and under this law they won’t get prosecuted. They’ll just get sent to a therapeutic approach. They’ll have no interest in engaging in it, they won’t get anything out of it, and they’ll cycle back round. In fact, we weren’t even sure through the submission process whether there was going to be any joined-up data-sharing between the drug and alcohol services and the police.

So what we’ve just got to be very clear on out there is what signals we are sending out into the community. There’ll be plenty of parents who will be watching this tonight very concerned that, in fact, if their child starts hanging out with a group of people that are starting to use drugs and there’s one person pushing it through that group, the police are not going to have any way to stop that. That is concerning, because in reality that’s what’s going to happen, and those people are going to know that. They’re going to play to the referee and they’re going to play to the rules, and I think that is concerning for many parents out there who are generally worried about their teenagers as they go through that very difficult time of growing into a young adult.

When you look at the model, the Prochaska and DiClemente clearly states that when someone wants to change their behaviour, they move from a pre-contemplative stage where they say, “Actually, I’m not accepting the difficulties these drugs are causing in my life.”, then they might move to a contemplative stage where they start thinking, “Actually, this is going to affect me.” It’s not till they move to an action stage where they start thinking, “Actually, what differences do I need to make in my life?” Everyone in this House would’ve met people who said, “In fact, it wasn’t till the threat of a criminal conviction, it wasn’t till my engagement in the criminal justice system, it wasn’t till my engagement with police that I actually realised I had to make a change or something was going to happen that wasn’t good.”

That’s actually what we’re taking away here. It is complementary. A criminal justice approach and a therapeutic approach should be going hand in hand, and I believe with this bill it is swinging too far, the pendulum is. I agree with the direction, but I don’t think that back end of this policy is there yet. It’s not joined up, and the people who want to milk the system will. How hard is it going to be for our community police officers out on their beat—small-town, provincial New Zealand—to hold these troublemakers to account?

With the small time left, I just want to acknowledge my colleague Simeon Brown for all the work he’s done on synthetic cannabis. I mean, I think he led the way. I was disappointed that the support for his bill got pulled by some of the Government parties. I think he is someone who really came to this House with a conviction and was able to get it almost there, and in fact—

💬 Brett Hudson: Did he? How did he get in if he had a conviction?

No, no, he didn’t have his own conviction; it was conviction of his ideas. I just want to clear that up. Ha, ha! But he was scuttled out of politics, and I think that’s disappointing. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I do want to make a number of acknowledgements as I make my contribution, the last speech in this final reading of this important bill going through the House, but I have to observe at the outset that the folks sitting opposite, the National Party, seem to have more positions on this bill than the entire Kama Sutra. They say it goes too fast, they say it goes too slow, they say they support the therapeutic approach, they say they support the justice approach—and that is just Simeon Brown and Matt Doocey. Then we have, also, Paula Bennett supporting a health-based approach.

I do note that through all of the speeches, the only thing that has consistently united them is opposition. They want to say no—they want to say no. They say they support the approach—I heard just about all of them say they support the approach—but they couldn’t bring themselves to vote in support of this bill to support it through its final stage. I do plead with them, though—Brett Hudson said he came here with regrets. There is one way to undo those regrets, and that is to actually turn around and support this bill through its final reading. They’ve been tying themselves in knots just to be negative. The Kama Sutra is perhaps a more beautiful thing than these knots, and I do apologise to any proponents of that particular craft in the House for making that analogy. But they seem determined to chase every parking car, and it is a shame, because what we are doing tonight is an incredibly constructive and useful thing.

This is something that will make a real difference to the lives of New Zealanders, and it’s born out of a deep concern for the spate of deaths that occurred in 2017 and 2018. This Government committed to responding to that situation, to taking a constructive approach to putting together some law that would deal with the immediate drugs that had been linked to those deaths, that would ensure that in future we were able to respond more quickly to new drugs as they came on the market to keep Kiwis safe, and to make sure that we also went after those who are peddling these drugs, those who would profit from the misery of others, those who would manufacture these drugs. I want to acknowledge, therefore, the confidence and supply party, the Green Party, and our coalition partners in New Zealand First—Jenny Marcroft, Darroch Ball, and Chlöe Swarbrick; all of them—for the incredibly constructive way in which we have worked together as parties, and my Labour colleagues, to ensure we have a law that strikes the right balance, that makes sure we’re tackling the long-term issues that come with the web of addiction in our country, those long-term issues. We are determined to tackle the hard problems, to make sure we are making a difference in the lives of New Zealanders that have come together to put this solution together.

Under existing law, these synthetic drugs had continued to come in and kill people, and here we have a response which not only says we want to crack down on the suppliers and manufacturers by giving the police the search and seizure powers, by making sure they face the full force of the law, but also a law that says we want to take a health-based approach, because that’s an evidence-based approach, where it’s in the public interest, where it’s clear that somebody being supported in the web of addiction to break that addiction will make a difference to the community longer term. So we are tackling those harder issues and looking at how we achieve balance in doing that, because the existing approach just has not been working. It simply has not been working.

The discretion that the police have is one that they are using already. We know that—we know that. We are reinforcing that. We are giving them the support to continue along that road, to make sure that they are basing things upon evidence, basing things upon what works—because parts of the country are ahead of other parts of the country. There will be clear guidance issued, tailored guidance, to front-line officers on how to apply this discretion from the police commissioner. The police have helped and assisted in making sure these changes will work for them, and they are committed to tackling unconscious bias in the police force. I salute, I want to say, the leaders in the police who are leading that work, because it is incredibly important work that we do tackle that long-term challenge as well.

I want to just say briefly, about the temporary class drug orders, they will apply for 12 months at a time and they will give the health Minister, whoever that should be, the opportunity, very quickly, to put an order in place that gives police the search and seizure powers—all of the powers they have for a class C drug currently. It means that we can tackle the supply very quickly when a new alarming drug comes on board. Not only has the Government put money aside for early warning system development, to make sure we’ve got a swift health response, but we’re also giving the police extra powers for a swift police response. Both of these things are part of a health-based response: making sure we’re interrupting supply but making sure we’re helping those caught in the web of addiction.

We are making class A drugs of AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB—we are making them class A drugs. That is incredibly important. Some of the members opposite said, “Why are we doing it this way? Why aren’t we doing it through a straight Order in Council?” Those members may not have heard in the various stages of this debate, but it’s been spelt out clearly, that that is, of course, because an Order in Council itself takes time. It must go through a select committee process. Sometimes those processes take up to a year. We are giving this certainty through the passing of legislation. We also know, of course, that these particular variants don’t seem to be featuring as much. People are now much more aware of them, and we no doubt have other variants coming into the country. But we have now, as of today, when this law passes, the ability to issue temporary drug orders to tackle that issue.

We are serious on this side of the House not just about the rhetoric—and we have heard plenty of that in this debate. We are serious about making a difference for those people who are suffering, who are caught in the web of addiction, and who have, through unfortunate circumstances, come to depend upon things which are just not good for them or their families. Many of them, of course, have tried and failed to give up. But when they come to the attention of the police, they won’t be laughing at the police, as some of the National Party members suggested, because they will now have come to the attention of the police. The police will have a record of that interaction. They will then offer the health-based approach if that is what’s in the public interest, and then those people will be supported to help break that addiction. Of course, if that doesn’t happen—if that doesn’t come to pass—and those people go on to be troublesome and create a public interest in prosecuting them, well, of course, the police retain that power. So please do not listen to the scaremongers here. Please, those of you listening at home, know that we are tackling this on the basis of what works—what’s been shown to work internationally.

This is a pragmatic, focused Government wanting to make a real difference for New Zealanders, for those caught in the web of addiction, tackling the big, hard long-term challenges that have been left to us. We are putting resource into making sure we’re supporting. Mr Doocey asked: will there be timely support for addicts? That is one of the challenges we’ve inherited as a Government.

We know—we knew from Opposition—that there were huge waits for mental health and addiction counselling in this country. In this recent Budget, we have put in a large number of initiatives to support that, of course, starting with the increase in the ring-fence for mental health and addiction funding—$213 million in this Budget; $200 million in the previous Budget—the additional $200 million that we put aside for new mental health and addiction facilities this year alone, this year alone; the expansion of programmes for drug addiction support; $42 million to enhance the quality and capacity of specialist addiction support, alcohol and drug addiction support; $4 million to extend Te Ara Oranga specialist service in Northland; and $7 million to expand specialist pregnancy and parenting support for those people who have addiction issues. There are a large number of measures, but time will not permit me to go through them. But that’s part of the $1.9 billion package that we’ve put in place.

This Government is the first Government to take mental health seriously. We’re taking mental health seriously, and we are investing in this response. It will take time, of course, to build up the workforces needed to do everything we want to achieve. We don’t shy away from the fact it’s going to take more than one or two Budgets to put right nine years of neglect from the previous Government, that neglected our health services and that neglected our addiction services, and the inequities that were growing under them. But we’re determined to tackle it. We don’t shy away from it. We tackle that challenge, we own that challenge, and we are moving into the future with confidence because we’ve taken an approach that will make sure we’re getting tough on those who are supplying, peddling, and manufacturing these harmful drugs but being compassionate to those who would benefit from a health-based response to ensure that our communities are healed.

This is an incredibly important day for New Zealand. I’m very proud to stand here in this House and see this bill through its final reading. Thank you to everyone who has contributed so constructively across our confidence and supply partners and coalition partners and, of course, my Labour colleagues. Thank you, Mr Speaker.