Page 2187 - Week 06 - Thursday, 6 June 2019
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I cannot disagree more with the comments made by Ms Cody. With respect to the clear message that came to me through this process, we got it in a nutshell from the Chief Minister when he gave evidence. He said, “The Nancy Reagan approach of ‘just say no’ has failed; therefore we should do something else. This is something, and therefore we should do this.”
The Chief Minister was perfectly clear and quite candid that this was the least optimal option that you could possibly think of. The complexities that arose in our deliberations about, “If we do this, how does that work? How does this interact here? What are the implications there?” made it very clear that this is a suboptimal piece of legislation.
My view is that it is so bad—this is not a reflection on the proponent, and I understand why the proponent wants to do this; he really does believe that this is something worth doing—that it is not worth doing in this space. It would have been much more difficult to critique this legislation if there had been a better form of legislation before us. I will go to some of the reasons why I am opposed to this legislation and why I recommend that the Assembly not proceed with this legislation.
The proponent himself, Mr Pettersson, said that he was doing this because there was a global trend—his words—in this way, that it would reduce the burden on our criminal justice system and that it would bring us—this, I think, is very important—a step closer to a cannabis market. What we have at the outset is the member saying, “What we would really like to have is a cannabis market,” but he did not have the courage, the wherewithal, the wit or whatever to put forward a piece of legislation about a cannabis market.
Let us be frank, and I do make these comments in the dissenting report: there is no global trend. There are a handful of countries and a handful of states in the United States who have legislated in some form or other for the legalisation of cannabis. But that is not a global trend. And the way in which they have legislated is so diverse as to not create a global trend.
It was, however, interesting; during the time that the committee was deliberating, I spent some time in Canada, so I did take an interest in what was happening in Canada, because they had recently created a national cannabis market, and it is also rolled out for sale at a state level. There was a particular occasion when I was almost accosted in a hotel dining room by a Canadian lady who had discovered that I was a legislator from Australia. She immediately said, “I’m very strongly in favour of the legislation that is currently passed in Canada. I have been an advocate for this for all of my life. What are you doing in Australia?” I said, “That’s a very interesting thing. This is what we’re doing in my legislature at the moment.” I described the legislation being put forward by Mr Pettersson. This person, who was quite active in the area and quite knowledgeable on the area, although we did disagree on a lot of things, said, “No, you can’t do that. That is the worst possible thing that you could do.” This was the expression used by a reformer from Canada who had just been part of the process of changing the laws in Canada.
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