Misuse of Drugs (Classification and Presumption of Supply) Order 2025 — Approval

on behalf of the Minister of Health: I move, That, pursuant to section 4A of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, this House approve the Misuse of Drugs (Classification and Presumption of Supply) Order 2025 made under section 4 of that Act.

The Misuse of Drugs Act addresses the prevention of illicit possession, production, and import of drugs. The changes resulting from this order will impose stricter controls on 23 substances, increase the ability of Police and Customs to take preventative action, and allow harsher penalties for those caught making or supplying these drugs.

The planned changes have been approved by Cabinet, drafted as an Order in Council, tabled in Parliament, and considered by the Health Committee. On behalf of the Minister, I note the Health Committee has examined the Misuse of Drugs (Classification and Presumption of Supply) Order 2025 and recommends that it be approved.

The order will reclassify certain controlled drugs to higher-risk classes and introduce a classification for previously uncontrolled drugs. The amendments proposed in this order follow the recommendations of the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs established under the Act. The expert advisory committee is made up of experts who specialise in areas such as pharmacology, toxicology, psychology, public health, and border control. On behalf of the Minister, I’d like to use this opportunity to thank expert advisory committee members for their hard work and expertise. I also thank members of the Health Committee for their diligence around this important issue.

Peddlers of illicit drugs are a scourge on society and cause devastating harm to families and communities across the country. Increasing penalties supports law enforcement agencies to crack down on them to maintain law and order. The substances at the heart of this order are harmful, and it is time to act. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid considered to be far more potent than heroin and many times stronger than morphine, and analogues can often be even stronger still. Currently, some manufactured alterations of fentanyl are classified as class B and C controlled drugs. Their higher potency also makes them attractive to traffickers and users. While New Zealand has relatively low use of illicit opioids, their availability can cause significant public harm. The order seeks to reclassify three of these fentanyl-related substances as class A controlled drugs. The order will result in increased controls on a number of other substances, including synthetic cathinones, synthetic cannabinoids, amphetamine precursors, and novel benzodiazepines.

Peddlers of illicit drugs cause significant harm in our communities and inflict misery on our streets. We know how important it is to reduce drug-related harm, and ensuring there are stronger controls in place for these harmful substances is a step towards this goal. Providing Police and Customs with the search and seizure powers they need to disrupt the supply of harmful substances is an important part of a health response to reduce drug-related harm.

There has been an increase in the prevalence and misuse of most of these substances in New Zealand; none has any therapeutic use here. New Zealand is party to drug-related United Nations conventions. Classifying these substances will help us meet our international obligations. Māori and Pacific people are known to have higher rates of recreational drug use and are at a higher risk of drug-related harm. By imposing controls on these substances, access is restricted, reducing drug-related harm to these most vulnerable populations. The changes resulting from this order will ensure authorities have more tools in their tool belt to crack down on these harmful substances. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Labour supports this notice of motion because what we are doing today, really, is quite a procedural matter, yet it is an important matter to make sure that we are stifling, if you like, the supply of these harmful substances, which we know can do so much damage in our community.

It’s important that this is brought to the House today because of the fundamentals around access to justice and presumption of innocence. What this, effectively, does is change the assumptions around how much somebody is holding of these illicit substances in a strict liability way, which means it reverses a burden of proof, and that’s why it’s really important that this comes before the House and is not simply rubber-stamped. But, equally, it is also important that the law is nimble enough to be able to respond really quickly to the tweaks to the substances that the Minister has just referred to.

I’m particularly concerned about fentanyl. Anyone who has seen any documentaries about the damage that has done in the United States, and the tragic consequences for families, would agree that any type of fentanyl-type tweaked illicit substance should certainly be in the class A categorisation. That does mirror the views of the expert panel, and, therefore, there was no hesitation from the Health Committee to support that recommendation.

I do note that, recently, the Environmental Science and Research Ltd has reported that New Zealand is dealing with about 120 new synthetic drugs, and that the UN has reported around one new drug coming into existence per week between the years of 2009 and 2016. We are seeing the involvement of the dark web and technology as a way of proliferating these substances very quickly through societies, and we need our legal response to be equally as nimble, to counteract that.

I would just make a couple of cautionary comments, I guess. One of them is that it’s great to see we have an expert advisory committee truly made up of the experts. I think we need, as parliamentarians, to ensure that when we are enacting committees like this to be formed that we give due respect to their expertise and we do not allow those committees to become politicised. It is something that Labour is watching vigilantly, particularly in the health space. Secondly, I think it’s really important that we not only look at the issue of substance abuse from the supply side but, equally, the demand side and have the wrap-around support services available.

There are bigger questions, I think, around some of the provisions of the Misuse of Drugs Act, which will be for a much longer, probably cross-party discussion at some point, to see what we can do to keep people as safe as possible and reduce the harms around drugs. The law as it currently stands, debatably, does that in some respects and doesn’t in other respects. But when it comes to an Order in Council like this one, which is really procedural—it is simply adding to the list of substances and also reclassifying substances appropriately so that it sends the right message to those who would be peddling them; that it has the right penalties involved for those who are enabling them to cause a lot of harm in society. We have no hesitation in supporting that.

We’re really pleased that it’s gone through the select committee process as well. The right checks and balances have been there so that when we are looking at something like changing offences and assumptions in a strict liability way, we are very satisfied that has been done. We are also heartened by the involvement of an advisory committee that is truly made up of the experts. Therefore, we do commend this to the House.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I just want to preface this by noting that the Greens will not be supporting this today, and I would like to step through the logic for that.

As we heard from the Minister of State for Trade and Investment just before, about—I believe she was alluding to the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. I was actually there, in 2019, in Vienna, having a really fascinating experience where we had world leader after world leader—the equivalent of the Minister of Health, overseas—get up at the podium and say, “We have more drugs, more harm from those drugs, more families torn apart, more people who are locked up in prisons. We have to keep doing more of what we’ve always done but do it harder.” Mr Speaker, I don’t know about you, but the way that I was raised taught me that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

I just want to pick up on, particularly, the points that both the Minister and the Labour spokesperson Ingrid Leary just alluded to with regards to the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs. The expert advisory committee was an amendment made to the Misuse of Drugs Act to allow for the classification to be recommended by the expert advisory committee in, I believe, the early 2000s. The really important thing to understand about the way that the expert advisory committee operates—and their mandate—is that they can only recommend where a substance should be classified in relation to where other substances are currently classified within the Misuse of Drugs Act. In layman’s terms, that basically means that all the expert advisory committee can look at is the harm of substances that are currently classified and recommend the classification relative to those other classified substances. That is, the expert advisory committee is not empowered to make recommendations with regard to other health-based, evidence-based interventions to actually reduce drug harm. It is therefore self-referential.

This is underscored by successive reports that successive Governments have commissioned and then ignored because it is politically inconvenient, stretching all the way back to the Law Commission’s review back in 2011, which said that we need to bin the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 and create a health-based framework to actually reduce drug harm and target the causes not the symptoms. Then, of course, the former Government commissioned He Ara Oranga, which was the mental health and addiction inquiry, which said—wait for it—exactly the same thing. Then Turuki! Turuki!, the Safe and Effective Justice review, chaired by the late great Chester Borrows, who was, of course, a former policeman, a former National Party Minister of Police, who came around to the view, based on all of his experiences including with the failure of placing these issues within the framework of the criminal justice system. He recommended, again, that we need a health-based intervention.

We cannot in good conscience support this today, noting, as well, the inconsistencies that operate within the Misuse of Drugs Act. Again, just for those who may be following along at home, in the Misuse of Drugs Act, there are two levers by which you can introduce a substance for classification or for upwards classification and that you are then required to, inconsistently—with regard to down-classifying a substance or declassifying a substance. If you want to create new penalties associated to a substance, all you need is an Order in Council motion akin to what we have in the House today. That is something that can pass through this House in the blink of an eye without the requisite scrutiny. I know, of course, there’s a few more belts and braces with this specific instance here, but none the less, there are not the same democratic safeguards when it comes to introducing new massive penalties.

Here, we’re talking about reversing the burden of proof where somebody has to, effectively, prove their innocence as opposed to the Crown proving their guilt. That is a massive erosion of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act or the rights of New Zealanders. If you are instead to, for example, take a health-based intervention or an evidence-based intervention to try and declassify or down-classify a substance that is known to have, for example, proven therapeutic benefits the likes of, I don’t know, psilocybin or other trials that are currently existing out there in our communities undertaken by healthcare professionals, you need a whole Amendment Paper, which, as we know, takes months and months and months and comes up against massive political barriers.

I think it’s really important that we’re honest with ourselves in this House about how legislation like this, when empowered to push things through as quickly as is occurring here, actually creates perverse outcomes. All of this is to say that drugs, of course, can and do cause massive harm in our communities. The question for us as lawmakers—and, hopefully, as responsible lawmakers—should be: what should the public policy response that we want to actually meaningfully reduce that harm be? The evidence is clear: approaches like this only compound that harm and we can do so much better.

Just for the awareness of the House, the Business Committee has determined that each party is able to take a call, or not. If the parties are all done, I’ll move on.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Sorry, I thought we were up at number six, but our call. Tēnā tātou e te Whare. If only this Misuse of Drugs (Classification and Presumption of Supply) Order 2025 was as helpful as it suggests. I say that based on having worked in this sector, so I understand the harm. When you hear me, I’m not saying this stuff because I’m making it up; I say it because I’ve worked amongst it.

We do not—Te Pāti Māori, kore e whakaae ki tēnei whakaaro [do not agree with this idea]. We do not, and I’m just going to express why.

As many of us know, the Misuse of Drugs Act can be amended not just through legislation but also through Orders in Council. What this means in practice is that the Government does not need to introduce a bill and go through the usual parliamentary processes to update the Act; instead, with Cabinet’s approval, changes can be made quickly under the advice of the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs.

E te whānau, mēnā e mātakitaki mai ana, e rongo ana ki wāku kōrero, me āta whakatata mai.

[To the family, should they be watching and hearing my statements, come closer.]

To our whānau watching at home today, that is what is happening right now, in this moment. We, Te Pāti Māori, oppose the recommended amendments. The amendments will update the Act from Schedules 1 through to 5 by adding a number of new substances. Actually, I’m going to skip that bit, because it gets a little bit boring and technical, in my view.

Without context, these changes seem positive, and I imagine are well informed by the advisory group. Yet we oppose it, and we oppose it on—well, two things: we oppose it on principle, but we oppose it also on the fact that I know what the stakes are in this space. We oppose the amendments because drug use and the misuse of these substances is a health issue. Just to tautoko the previous speaker’s whakaaro: it’s a health issue, not a criminal one.

Te Pāti Māori justice policy states that we will overhaul the Misuse of Drugs Act so that drug use is treated as a health issue. A report back in 2022 laid it out in black and white: the Government’s current approach to drugs is leading to grossly inequitable outcomes for Māori. OK—leading to grossly inequitable outcomes for Māori. These are outcomes that are not just statistics but lived realities.

Here’s some numbers. Māori make up just 20 percent of the population, but account for nearly half of all convictions for drug possession—that’s 48 percent. Even more concerning, Māori make up over 61 percent of those sentenced to prison for these offences. This is a systemic failure, and it is not a new one.

Criminalising addiction does not reduce harm. Tātou mā, me āta whakarongo ki tēnei.

[Everyone, you should listen carefully to this.]

It does not reduce harm and if you think it does, you know nothing and you do not understand the reality of these things, as much as you might want to or you think your intentions are good. What it does do is make it harder for people—and Māori people, in particular—to access the services they need for help, support, and treatment. Criminalising what is, essentially, addiction incites intergenerational harm.

What are we actually trying to achieve with these amendments right now? We’re only further embedding the mass criminalisation of what is absolutely a health issue. Governments must build a system that acknowledges and treats what we’re discussing today as health and a social issue, not a crime.

Te Pāti Māori, we’ve got some great ideas; we’ve got some great policy. Our justice policy will do that. We really need to address this particular issue in a much more proactive but much more real-life understanding way, and I’m offering that, I guess. But Te Pāti Māori will not support this. We’d like to, but the intentions are off-track—or possibly on the fast track, which, of course, is off-track. But they failed to understand the lived reality for people—and particularly for Māori people—so we cannot support or commend.

I call on Government order of the day No. 1.

Catherine Wedd: Madam Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Just one moment. Is this for the Chair or the committee? I’m about to declare the House in committee. I declare the House in committee for further consideration of the Appropriation (2025/26 Estimates) Bill.