Page 462 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 2019
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Is that a good thing? Maybe Mr Pettersson thinks that is a good thing. That is what the law allows. If you were a criminal cartel, you would be looking at this as an opportunity. You would say, “Right, in the ACT, this is something we can do. If we try to do this in New South Wales or elsewhere, there will be some people knocking on our door. But in the ACT we will just move five people in. Rent the house. Grow it hydroponically, as long as Mr Rattenbury gets his way. And we have got all these big plants full of THC, and we can bag it and tag it and send it over the road and sell it. And there’s nothing the police will be able to do while those plants are growing.”
Those are just a couple of examples of where these laws have not been thought through. I question why we will not send these laws to committee. We send many laws to committee in this place. We hear often from the Greens how important it is that we use the committee process. I think there are legal complexities here that need to be addressed, raised by the Law Society, by the Australian Federal Police Association and, it would seem, by the government. There are certain medical issues that need to be considered, as have been raised by the AMA and related in academic research.
Disturbingly, when I asked Mr Pettersson for a copy of the submissions he had received on his bill, he refused to give them to me. Where are the submissions that Mr Pettersson got for the bill? The only one we have seen is the one the AMA released that said, “We don’t support this” and raised all of the issues. If this is open government and Mr Pettersson has nothing to hide, why are we not seeing that? There might be individuals who do not want to incriminate themselves. I am not interested in that. We can redact the details of any individuals. But why would Mr Pettersson, in tabling this bill, not say, “These are the submissions; this is where the evidence is”? Why does he not want that released?
Why do we not have that before a committee to look at the evidence so that we can make sure that if this is going to be legalised, as is the desire of the government and the Greens, we do so in a way that causes the minimum amount of harm and acknowledges the effect on young people and the effects of psychosis, that does not endorse things like, “Let’s join the party”, that refutes the idea that smoking dope, particularly for young people, is a big party—it is not; there is a fivefold increase in psychosis rates—and that examines issues like grow houses being imminently legal under this and people with criminal convictions for drug trafficking being able to grow multiple plants, potentially hydroponically, if Mr Rattenbury gets his way.
A good strategy for dealing with drugs has to involve three elements. You have to control supply and demand and acknowledge harm minimisation. I believe, as do my colleagues, that the current laws strike that balance well. What these laws will do is encourage young people, particularly, to consume cannabis. It will become a legal product. There will be no consequences in terms of actions against them. But the consequences will be dire for people down the track. What we will see is that, as more people use cannabis, more people will be affected by it; more people will develop psychosis. That is a tragedy.
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