Volume 698 Week 71 - Tuesday 6 May 2014Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeVolume 698 Week 71 - Tuesday 6 May 2014[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17475. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Tuesday 6 May 2014Mr Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.Prayers.Tabling of DocumentsDrugs Control—Animal Testing of Psychoactive SubstancesHon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): In order to record the position of New Zealanders opposed to making animals suffer to bring recreational drugs to the market I seek leave to table a petition showing the names of more than 43000 New Zealanders opposed to animal testing of so-called synthetic highs.Mr SPEAKER: It is an unusual way of doing things but leave has been sought to table that particular petition. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be so tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Amended Answers to Oral QuestionsQuestion No. 3 to Minister 17 AprilHon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): I seek leave to make a personal explanation under Standing Order 354 to correct an answer to question No. 3 on 17 April this year.Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that personal explanation. Is there any objection? There appears to be none.Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): In making my answer to question No. 3 on 17 April I said that after the dinner in Beijing on 20 October 2013 I went to bed. When Mr Robertson then asked me whether I had had discussions with the ambassador after the dinner I said I could not recall any discussions. I now realise that although Mr Robertson’s question referenced the time after the dinner he could have meant at any time after the dinner not just on the evening of the dinner. For the avoidance of doubt I want to clarify to the House that on the day following the dinner I told the ambassador that the dinner was very nice but very short. I also told him that nothing had occurred that was untoward or that he needed to know about. I am drawing this to the notice of the House at the earliest opportunity available to me.Questions to MinistersEconomic Programme—Budget 2014 and Environmental Policy1.CLAUDETTE HAUITI (National) to theMinister of Finance: How will the Budget next week help to lock in the benefits of sustainable economic growth to support more jobs and higher incomes for New Zealanders?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): The Budget next week will set out the next steps in the Government’s programme which will build on the good economic momentum that New Zealanders have seen over the past year or so. It will show growing fiscal surpluses through to 2018 starting with a small surplus in 2014-15 and show debt beginning to decline as a percentage of the economy. Together with households and businesses the Government will continue its programme of policy that supports the delivery of more jobs and higher incomes. We are seeing positive results. Employment is rising across the board. Wages on average are increasing ahead of the cost of living. Interest rates are near 50-year lows. The current account deficit is less than half what it was 6 years ago. Consumer and business confidence is high. Also lastweek we heard that exports in March passed $5 billion for the first time and annual exports exceeded $50 billion for the first time.Claudette Hauiti: How is the higher growth outlook for the economy translating into higher wages for New Zealanders?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Everyone’s situation is different and there are New Zealand families who are finding the economy challenging. But the benefits of a sustainably growing economy are tangible. Over the past 2 years the average full-time wage—that is by the measure used to adjust national superannuation every year—has increased from $51700 to $54700 an increase of $3000. Treasury’s preliminary Budget forecasts show that the average wage will rise further to almost $62300 by 2018 another increase of $7600 over the next 4 years. The forecasts also show that around 170000 more people will be working by 2018 at the same time as the average wage will be running $7600 higher than today.Claudette Hauiti: What other steps will the Government take in the Budget to help support sustainable economic growth more jobs and higher incomes over the next few years?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Two of the risks to the sustained economic recovery would be a blowout in Government spending and a runaway housing market. The Government is committed to thoughtful targeted spending not a large-scale spend-up which would put pressure on interest rates for households and businesses. We will also continue to work to increase the supply of land and new housing to the housing market so that it can meet the unprecedented demand particularly from the sharp turn-round in migration figures.Claudette Hauiti: What measures would erode the good progress made in helping wages to increase faster than the cost of living over recent years?Hon BILL ENGLISH: There are a number of possible measures but I have seen one recently that involves cutting take-home pay by 15 percent forcing New Zealanders into a compulsory savings scheme with contributions up to 15 percent. I heard a radio report yesterday where one person said: “I probably have more mortgage debt than I’ve got long-term savings to be honest so part of the way we save is to pay down our mortgage.” That person was David Cunliffe but he wants to take that choice away from all other Kiwis.Hon David Parker: Given that Treasury is forecasting that New Zealand’s current account deficit under his economic settings will worsen in the coming years is he concerned that his Government is simply repeating the same mistakes of the last four decades with a worsening external deficit and whistling in the wind as more and more money flows into the housing market rather than the productive sector?Hon BILL ENGLISH: We are certainly keen to avoid the mistakes of the last Labour Government on whose watch the current account deficit doubled from 4 percent to 8 percent. In fact Treasury does regularly forecast the current account deficit to get worse but it keeps getting better and I am sure the member will be keen to see that laid out for him on Budget day.Dr Russel Norman: Does the Minister understand that the ongoing damage being done to the New Zealand environment under the policies of his Government will undermine New Zealand’s economic performance in the long term?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No because the statement is incorrect. Under this Government we have introduced regulation of the exclusive economic zone which did not exist before. There was no environmental regulation in our larger economic zone in the ocean—one of the largest in the world. It is now comprehensively regulated. Secondly through a collaborative process which a lot of the supporters of the member’s party have participated in through the Land and Water Forum we areintroducing comprehensive regulation of the quality of our fresh water. That has never been done before. It is designed to ensure we get the right balance between the use of our natural resources our environmental quality and our economic opportunities.Dr Russel Norman: Does the Minister understand that under the water regulations promulgated by his Government New Zealand rivers can have 4½ times as much nitrogen as the Yangtze River in China and how does he think that will affect New Zealand’s brand being clean and green?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No I do not agree with that. There has just been an extensive consultation with the public and prior to that with all the interest groups that wanted to participate about exactly what the standards of freshwater quality should be. Certainly there are some challenges but there is general agreement on what those bottom lines ought to be and what exceptions there could be to them. We hope that the member will have the opportunity to support this Government in legislating and regulating for the first time ever for a comprehensive framework for the quality of fresh water in every water body in New Zealand.Dr Russel Norman: Does the Minister understand that the water regulations his Government is proposing would make water so toxic that it would not be safe to swim in and it would be safe only to wade in because it is a wading standard rather than a swimming standard and how well does he think that will go down in our export markets for our “100% Pure New Zealand” “clean green” brand?Hon BILL ENGLISH: I think the member is trying to dramatise this issue for his own political benefit. The fact is that we are setting up a process that will allow New Zealanders community by community to grapple with the hard issues of what the quality of their local freshwater supply ought to be. The member’s description of the existing or proposed quality is simply wrong. There has been plenty of public debate about this. There will be plenty more. In the end it will be decided community by community consistent with some national bottom lines.Ministers—Confidence2.Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) to thePrime Minister: Does he have confidence in all his Ministers?Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): Yes I do.Dr Russel Norman: Does he have confidence that all of his Ministers agree with his approach to Maurice Williamson—in that Maurice Williamson “crossed a line” by calling the police on behalf ofDonghua Liu—given that the Minister of Justice Judith Collins on the weekend blamed Mr Williamson’s fall not on the actions of Mr Williamson but on the media?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: In answer to the first part of the question yes I do. In answer to the second part of the question I think the member has got that incorrect.Dr Russel Norman: Why did the Minister of Justice attack the media and blame the media for Mr Williamson’s downfall when clearly Mr Williamson intervened in a live police investigation regarding domestic violence issues in order to try to assist MrDonghua Liu and help him avoid prosecution?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I think as the Minister herself has said due to a series of allegations made that she believes are false she overreached. In that regard she has apologised because she made a mistake. But mind you that member made a mistake when he went grovelling up to the Dotcom mansion.Mr SPEAKER: Order!Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! This is a point of order. It will be heard in silence.Rt Hon Winston Peters: Are you going to allow the last part of that prime ministerial answer to stand? Can he just keep on doing it at the end of every answer today?Mr SPEAKER: It was an unhelpful remark from the Prime Minister. The problem is that it was at the end of his answer. I could have thought about asking him to withdraw it. I did not think that was necessary—this is after all a debating chamber. But such quips from any Minister giving answers do not help the order of the House.Dr Russel Norman: Do all his Ministers understand that New Zealand democracy is not for sale given the repeated pattern by his Ministers in acting—[Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member has a right to ask his question provided it is within the Standing Orders. The member can start his question again.Dr Russel Norman: Do all his Ministers understand that New Zealand democracy is not for sale in light of the repeated examples of his Ministers intervening on behalf of donors to the National Party?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Yes we do and I would make the point that the National Party records all of its donations and it makes sure that they are in the public domain unlike say the Leader of the Opposition who has got a secret trust that we do not know about.Justice Minister—Performance3.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Leader of the Opposition) to thePrime Minister: Has Hon Judith Collins failed to meet the “high standards” he expects from Ministers; if so how?Rt Hon JOHN KEY (Prime Minister): No. Over the almost 6 years Judith Collins has been a Minister she has made a significant contribution to the Government and the people of New Zealand and the portfolios that she has held. The House will be aware that in her recent actions in respect of Oravida she put herself in a situation where a perception of a conflict of interest has arisen. The Minister accepts this and she has apologised.Hon David Cunliffe: Does the Prime Minister remember giving Judith Collins a final warning about misleading by omission; if so on what basis did he give that final warning?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: It was in relation to the Oravida situation. I said there was other particular information. I have not seen any particular information come out although I am waiting for the secret donors of David Cunliffe to come out.Hon David Cunliffe: Does the Prime Minister consider that Judith Collins misled the media with her comments about Television One journalist Katie Bradford; if so why is she still a Minister?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: If the member is trying to relate that to the other issue as I said that was in relation to Oravida. In relation to the comments that the Minister made about Katie Bradford she has apologised for that. She herself has admitted that she overreached.Hon David Cunliffe: Was the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office aware of all the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade advice and briefings relating to Judith Collins and Oravida when it provided him with advice on her conflict of interest?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I am confident that the office is aware of all the pertinent information on the advice that it relayed to me.Hon David Cunliffe: When therefore did he first become aware of the official Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade briefings which said that Judith Collins appeared at Oravida in China “To increase the profile of a successful importer and distributor ofNew Zealand products into China.”—i.e. an official function and not a private function?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Firstly I do not have those details with me but I am happy if the member wants to ask me in writing for that. But what is actually quite interesting about the documents that the member is reading from is in fact that laced all the way through them—and not only in relation to the very busy schedule that the Minister had in relation to the justice portfolio—it was quite clear that this was a private dinner and that was all the way through the emails long before this issue ever came into the public domain. The one thing I do know is that lifting the profile of companies is very important. And Shane Jones believes in that; the Labour Party does not. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order!Hon David Cunliffe: Why is the Prime Minister holding this Minister the Minister of Justice and a trained lawyer to a lower standard than he has held the Hon Maurice Williamson when that Minister amongst other things has publicly countermanded his decision about Mr Williamson?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: I am not. I think it will be quite clear to everyone. In the case of Mr Williamson he breached paragraph 4.14 of theCabinet Manual. As I said in relation to Ms Collins she had a particular issue where the accumulation of events could have led to a perception of conflict of interest. But let us be honest about this: if your making a mistake means you are gone that leader should have been gone a hell—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] When I rise to my feet the Prime Minister should resume his seat. [Interruption] Order! It would be a shame if some Ministers had to leave the House so early in this new session.Hon David Cunliffe: Why then was the Prime Minister willing to sack Maurice Williamson Phil Heatley Peter Dunne and John Banks but not Judith Collins? What is it about the Minister of Justice that he will not touch—is it her fund-raising ability or is it her influence in the caucus?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: One thing that the member might want to learn if he wants to be an efficient leader is that actually every case is considered on a case by case basis. This Government has set high standards and yes where Ministers have not met the standards they have gone. But then again when he does not meet the standards people go as well. It is called Shane Jones. He has gone from Labour—Mr SPEAKER: Order!Hon David Cunliffe: In light of that answer can the Prime Minister tell the House why he has said that the rules of theCabinet Manualhave now become guidelines?Rt Hon JOHN KEY: Well actually to be honest I was paraphrasing Helen Clark.Export Sector—Performance and Business Growth Agenda4.JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth) to theMinister for Economic Development: What recent reports has he received on New Zealand’s export performance?Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister for Economic Development): I have seen the recent Statistics New Zealand overseas merchandise trade report for the first quarter of this year. I am pleased to announce to the House that March 2014 was a banner month for New Zealand exports. Exports rose by 15 percent compared with March 2013 exceeding $5 billion in value for the first time. There was a trade surplus of $920 million the highest ever for a March month. Indeed in the March quarter there was a trade surplus of $1.1 billion—the highest surplus for the series—and it was equating to a trade surplus in the last 6 months of almost $2.5 billion. Our current account deficit is now down to 3.4 percent of GDP. In 2008 it averaged over 8 percent. So the recentlyrumoured export crisis seems to be about as big a problem as the much talked about manufacturing crisis.Jonathan Young: What is the Government doing to grow new and existing markets for New Zealand exporters?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: As part of the Government’s comprehensive Business Growth Agenda we have set an ambitious target of increasing the ratio of exports to GDP from 30 percent to 40 percent by 2025. A big part of achieving that target is developing new and existing international markets for our goods and services. For example trade between New Zealand and China has grown dramatically over the last 5 years. The Minister of Trade Tim Groser has made excellent progress signing the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement overseeing the development of trade between New Zealand and Chinese Taipei and advancing negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the comprehensive regional partnership and free-trade agreements within the India Korea and the Gulf Cooperation Council. When you are developing exports there is no substitute for hard work—and it is certainly not fiddling around with KiwiSaver when you do not know what you are doing.Jonathan Young: What other reports has he seen on New Zealand’s export performance?Hon STEVEN JOYCE: I saw a report as recently as last evening from a commentator who suggested that New Zealand’s positive export performance was down to just two industries: logs and dairy. I am pleased to advise that commentator that he is quite wrong. For example the value of our high-tech manufacturing exports has grown from just $100 million in 1990 to $1.4 billion in 2012 exports of IT services have increased by 11 percent per year since 2002 exports of computer and information services have increased by 85 percent since 2006 and wine exports have increased from $300 million a year 10 years ago to over $1.3 billion in the year to March. These are amazing achievements from these new and growing industries and can I suggest to that commentator that he go and see some of them rather than get his information from that noted economic soothsayer David Parker.Justice Minister—Visit to China5.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central) to theMinister of Justice: Does she stand by all her statements regarding her relationships and interactions with Oravida Ltd?Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): Yes.Grant Robertson: Does she stand by her statement in this House on 19 March in reference to her visit toOravida’s headquarters in Shanghai: “The only other choice was either to go to the airport or to go to Oravida and then to the airport.”?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I think it would be correct to say that I could have gone back to the hotel for a small dinner and then gone to the airport as well or any other combination of that.Grant Robertson: I seek leave of the House to table a document from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade from 9 October that is a timetable for the Minister of Justice’s visit to Shanghai which includes at the time she ended up going to Oravida a business and law round table—Mr SPEAKER: The document has been well described. Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Grant Robertson: How can she say that the only option was to go straight to the airport or to Oravida when the programme for her visit actually had a business and legal round table in the timeslot that was used for her visit to Oravida?Hon Trevor Mallard: Half a million dollars for the family.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I take exception to that comment. I would like to have it withdrawn please.Mr SPEAKER: The member has taken offence to the interjection that came from the Hon Trevor Mallard. Would he stand and withdraw that comment.Hon Trevor Mallard: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Order! We will deal with that afterwards. I have asked the member—Hon Trevor Mallard: No I am not going to withdraw Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: That puts us in a very difficult position where I have no choice but to then ask—Hon Trevor Mallard: It was not an unparliamentary comment.Mr SPEAKER: Order! No the member alluded to a substantial amount of money being the benefit to the family. The Minister has taken objection to that I think with justification. I will ask the member once more to stand and withdraw that comment. If not—Hon Trevor Mallard: I will not withdraw the truth. Her—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The Hon Trevor Mallard will leave the Chamber.Hon Trevor Mallard withdrew from the Chamber.Mr SPEAKER: Did we get the supplementary question?Grant Robertson: Given that she was in China as Minister of Justice why was a business and legal round table removed from her programme and replaced at her request with a visit to Oravida?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: The member is wrong in that question. The document that he refers to is one of a draft of itineraries prepared—I think it was on 9 October he said—by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. That meeting—or that dinner—did not go ahead and that was not actually at my request.Grant Robertson: I seek leave of the House to table a document from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade that shows that the request for the visit to Oravida came directly from the Minister’s office.Hon Gerry Brownlee: It’s a different thing.Mr SPEAKER: It may well be a different thing but leave has been sought to table that particular Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade document. I am going to put the leave. The House can decide. Leave is sought to table that particular document. Is there any objection? There is none.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Why does he not just save us a bit of time and table the whole Official Information Act papers—Mr SPEAKER: Order! That is not a legitimate point of order and the Minister knows it.Grant Robertson: How is it consistent with her responsibilities as a Cabinet Minister for her to remove a justice-related visit from her programme and to replace it with a visit to “raise the profile” of a company that her husband is a director of?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I utterly and totally reject the allegations made in that question.Grant Robertson: Did her programme provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade include a business and legal round table which was replaced by a visit to Oravida at her request?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Of course no. The draft itinerary at one—[Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! The Minister has been asked a question. She must be given the opportunity to answer.Hon JUDITH COLLINS: No. It was very clear that this was one of a range of items that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had suggested in a draft itinerary weeks before I attended in China. The fact is that I at no stage required it to be removed and that member is quite incorrect in his statement.Grant Robertson: Why was it necessary for her to tell the New Zealand ambassador that “nothing untoward” occurred at a private dinner?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: It was of course not necessary for me to do so but I did.Grant Robertson: What was it that led her to believe that it was necessary for her to tell the New Zealand ambassador that nothing untoward occurred? Was it the presence of someone at that dinner whom the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was so concerned about that it still provided her with briefing notes about that person?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: That member has again stated some matters as fact which are not fact. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade did not give me a briefing about the friend of Mr Shi who was at the dinner and the member is quite wrong to say so. It did not give me a briefing on it.Grant Robertson: I seek leave of the House to table an email exchange between the director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s North Asia division and the New Zealand ambassador providing notes for a person who was to be at the dinner—Mr SPEAKER: Order!Grant Robertson: The notes were provided on Friday 18 October.Mr SPEAKER: That document and email trail has now been well described to the House. Leave is sought now to table it. Is there any objection?Hon Gerry Brownlee: Well as long it’s what it actually says—Mr SPEAKER: Order! It has been well described by the member. I am putting the leave. The House can decide.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Not accurately.Mr SPEAKER: Well if the member ismisdescribing something he is seeking to table that would be a serious offence that would be subsequently dealt with. Leave is sought to table that email trail. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Financial Services—Budgeting Services and Community Finance InitiativeALFRED NGARO (National): To the Minister for Social Development: what recent announcements has she made about the Government’s—[Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! I apologise to the member. We have got a bit of excitement down here on my right. I am calling Alfred Ngaro.6.ALFRED NGARO (National) to theMinister for Social Development: What recent announcements has she made about the Government’s support for budgeting services?Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development): Yesterday the Prime Minister and I announced $22 million in new funding for budgeting services over the next 4 years. Budgeting services provide critical help to thousands of Kiwis who are able to make a real difference to their own lives by developing good money management skills. As a Government we are committed to helping people to helpthemselves and it is far better for people to learn and develop budgeting skills by the great work of these many non-governmental organisations. This injection of funds represents a 61 percent increase in funding for the sector by 2015-16.Alfred Ngaro: What other announcements has she made about assisting people on low incomes?Hon PAULA BENNETT: Yesterday I also announced a partnership between the Government the Bank of New Zealand Good Shepherd and the Salvation Army to provide low-income people with no or low-interest loans. Too often people who can least afford it are tempted into high-interest loans that they cannot pay back and as a result get themselves in real trouble. The BNZ is putting $10 million into the programme which provides a real alternative to those dodgy lenders. Low-income people will be able to get loans to pay for things like cars which are a particular area where they need the loans. [Interruption] The Labour Party members do not like it do they? They could not do it. They could not actually help people who do need assistance who are on low incomes. They just sit there and snipe snipe snipe.Sue Moroney: We came up with it first.Hon PAULA BENNETT: Well I will tell you what. This Government is making a difference for those very low-income people.Alfred Ngaro: Why are these two initiatives important for people on low incomes?Hon PAULA BENNETT: Both of these initiatives have the ability to make a real difference in those people’s lives. There is no denying that it can be hard to survive on a low income. But instead of the victimising and sympathy we get from the Labour Party this side of the House is making a real difference to those people and in their lives.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. This was a question from the Government benches to the Minister and twice the Minister used it as an occasion to attack the Labour Party. The Minister has no responsibility for that and it is particularly egregious because it—Mr SPEAKER: Order! I have some sympathy for the point the member is raising. The difficulty was that in actual fact the Minister through her answer was then responding to quite a level of interjection coming from the Labour Party. If members start interjecting they are likely to get a political response back.Family/Whānau and Sexual Violence—Support for Victims7.JAN LOGIE (Green) to theMinister of Justice: Does she stand by her statement “we need to encourage these women and children to be comfortable coming forward to report domestic and sexual violence”; if so what has she done to encourage women to report domestic violence?Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): Yes; the Government has already achieved significant progress with improving the support for victims of domestic and sexual violence. As a result of the $50 offender levy $12.6 million has been collected since July 2010. There are 15 new grants and services available to victims including discretionary grants to support victims of sexual violence and funding for the nationalSexual Violence Survivor Advocate as well as specialist victim advisers to provide assistance for parents or caregivers who attend court to support child witnesses. As Minister of Justice I have initiated a major work stream which is nearing completion and which will include a range of further initiatives to provide better support and access to justice for victims of domestic and sexual violence.Jan Logie: Will women feel encouraged to report domestic violence when they see her the Minister of Justice defending Maurice Williamson’s interference—Mr SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! That question now has no connection with the primary question. I do not want to take supplementary questions away from the member. I invite her to ask a question that is in relation to the primary question.Hon Members: Point of order.Mr SPEAKER: Well I cannot take three at once. I will not take any; they have all sat down.Jan Logie: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. My initial question was relating to encouraging women to report. My second question was whether women will feel encouraged to report based on the leadership provided by that Minister. It was directly relevant.Mr SPEAKER: If the member simply asks that question it will be in order but when it is a reference to a resignation that has occurred etc. that is not in order. So if the member wants to stand and ask the question that she has just raised in the point of order it may well be acceptable.Jan Logie: Will women feel encouraged to report domestic violence when they see her the Minister of Justice providing leadership in domestic violence supporting a Minister’s interference in a police case?Mr SPEAKER: Order! I gave the member one more chance. She was on the right track until the last part. I will give her only one—[Interruption] Order! I will give her one more opportunity. Otherwise we will move to the next question.Grant Robertson: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I would ask you to reflect on that ruling you have just made. The question from Jan Logie was a broad statement around domestic and sexual violence. She has asked a question of the Minister. I cannot understand why her referencing a matter that is in the public arena rules the question out of order.Mr SPEAKER: Well the member might not understand it but I invite the member to look very carefully at the Standing Orders—Grant Robertson: Which one?Mr SPEAKER: Well 384 if the member needs it and I invite him to read it if he wants to. Supplementary questions are at the discretion of the Speaker. I have been very patient with the member. I will give the member her last opportunity. Otherwise we are moving to the next question.Jan Logie: Will women feel encouraged to report domestic violence when they see her the Minister of Justice providing public defence in relation to a high-profile case of domestic violence?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Of course I have not done that. What I have done is to say that the Prime Minister was quite right to receive the resignation of my colleague Mr Williamson in the circumstances. I have also at the same time—Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker.Mr SPEAKER: Order! I apologise to the Minister.Rt Hon Winston Peters: On three occasions you found that the original question was erroneous or outside the Standing Orders because of a reference to a certain case. Now you find that the Minister of Justice is quite within the borders of the Standing Orders having referred to the case that you ruled out from being referred to in the first place. Can we have some consistency here please.Mr SPEAKER: I would have thought the Minister’s answer was helpful to the House but if the member is objecting to the answer then I will curtail the answer and we will move on. Are there further supplementary questions?Jan Logie: If tackling domestic violence is a priority why has the Ministry of Justice funding for family and domestic violence services dropped under her Government from$8.7 million in 2010 to $7.3 million in 2013 despite an increase in family violence arrests last year?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: These days we take much more of a cross-Government approach to the funding of domestic violence and sexual violence. In fact I can tell the member that the Ministry of Social Development is also contributing to the funding. Also in addition to that another portfolio accident compensation has spent—I think it is from memory—around $40 million a year on sensitive claims resulting from sexual violence.Jan Logie: I seek leave to table a report compiled by the library showing a decrease in funding from the Government from the Ministry of Social Development as well as the Ministry of Justice as well as the It’s Not OK campaign—Mr SPEAKER: Order! It has been well described. On the basis that it is not freely available to members I will put the leave. Leave is sought to table this library report on a funding trend. Is there any objection to it being tabled? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Jan Logie: How can women feel comfortable reporting domestic violence when Ministers have slashed funding for family violence and used their power to help a man charged with abuse simply—Mr SPEAKER: Order! Again we are right back in the same position we were earlier. I will invite the member—[Interruption] Order! I will invite the member to re-ask her question. I suggest that if she just keeps it to the first part it will be in order.Dr Russel Norman: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. The Minister of Justice herself introduced the Mr Williamson case. That is what the Minister did. It is now on the record. We now have a right to respond—Mr SPEAKER: Order! A member sitting not too far from the member took objection to the Minister raising that. On that basis I curtailed the answer. [Interruption] Order! We can move on very quickly. I have been exceedingly patient with the member. I will ask her if she wants to ask further supplementary questions that she does it according to the Standing Orders.Jan Logie: How can women feel comfortable reporting domestic violence when Ministers have slashed funding for support prevention and treatment services and lost their way in terms of providing political leadership on the importance of a consistent response to domestic violence?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I reject the allegation in the second part of that member’s question. I can say to that member that this Government is deeply committed to bringing an end to domestic and sexual violence. In fact that member well knows and many people in this House will well know that there are people in this House whose close family members have been killed as a result of domestic violence.Justice Minister—Visit to China8.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) to theMinister of Justice: Why does she stand by all her statements regarding Oravida Ltd?Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Justice): Because to the best of my knowledge and recollection my statements are true.Rt Hon Winston Peters: If that is the case why did she say that her trip to the Oravida office in Shanghai was just a “cup of tea on the way to the airport” when official documents revealed demonstrably that her comments are false?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I reject the allegations made by that member.Rt Hon Winston Peters: When her office emailed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade on 2 October last year to ensure that a certain named person would be at the pre-arranged Beijing dinner with Stone Shi Julia Xu and her who was that person?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: Actually that member is wrong. That was not a named person at a dinner; that was actually at a drinks matter. The member has completely confused himself around those two issues.Rt Hon Winston Peters: I seek leave to table the 2 October email that came from her office to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought to table that particular email. Is there any objection? There is none. It can be tabled.Document by leave laid on the Table of the House.Rt Hon Winston Peters: When the pre-organising of her engagements with Oravida in China shows 22 emails between her office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and when internally within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade there were countless emails around her engagement with Oravida—all at the taxpayers’ expense—why did she not just tell the truth when answering the questions of the media?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: I have told the truth.Rt Hon Winston Peters: When this matter first arose and she had as a result discussions with the Cabinet Office and later the Prime Minister did she lay all of the facts before them; if not why not?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: As I have said on numerous occasions I did not have discussions with the Cabinet Office; the Prime Minister did.Rt Hon Winston Peters: Can the Minister tell us why she will not be here on Thursday this week and Tuesday and Wednesday next week to do her job—as she is paid to do by the taxpayer—and to be held accountable to Parliament? What makes her so special that she can take a walk?Hon JUDITH COLLINS: That member seems to know more about my diary than I do. [Interruption]Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am now trying to get a bit of order so I can hear a point of order.Rt Hon Winston Peters: I wish to table 100 media outlets’ reports saying that that Minister is going to be away.Mr SPEAKER: No. Media documents are freely available already to all members.Freshwater Management—Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes9.LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō) to theMinister for the Environment: What recent announcements has the Government made regarding the restoration of the Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes?Hon AMY ADAMS (Minister for the Environment): Last week I was pleased to announce the reallocation of $24 million to new projects which will reduce nitrogen inflows into Lake Rotorua through initiatives such as a nitrogen trading scheme and buybacks gorse removal and trials of low nitrogen land uses. The funding is part of a $72 million commitment by the Government to the Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes programme to clean up lakes Rotorua RotoitiŌkareka and Rotoehu with a total project cost of $144 million. Water quality in the Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes region has improved markedly since 2010 and of the priority lakes LakeRotoiti’s water quality target has been met for the first time and is now the best since monitoring began in 1991. Although this is encouraging further work is required.Louise Upston: Why was the funding change made?Hon AMY ADAMS: The Rotorua community had asked the Government to shift existing funding commitments to a land use management and change project as part of the Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes water quality improvements project. The new project will ultimately reduce the amount of nitrogen leaching into the lake by half which will enable community-agreed water quality targets to be met. I am particularly pleased to see that this project has the backing of the primary sector and of iwi as part of collaborative efforts to clean up water quality in these iconic lakes. The lakes’ stakeholder advisory group with the help of local MP Todd McClay has devised the scheme to enable water quality to be improved while ensuring that the pastoral sector remains sustainable which is a win-win for both the economy and the environment.Economy Rebalancing—Progress and Alternative Policies10.Hon DAVID PARKER (Deputy Leader—Labour) to theMinister of Finance: Does he stand by his statement that “we’ve done a lot of work to rebalance our economy towards exports savings and investment in a bid to lift sustainable economic growth”; if so what is the current level of household savings in New Zealand?Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance): Yes I do stand by that statement and I will tell the member why. We are seeing a range of positive indicators in the economy: 66000 more jobs in the last year; wages on average up 2.8 percent which is well ahead of inflation; economic growth of 3.1 percent which is up 0.9 percent on the December 2013 quarter; an increase in manufacturing a sector that added 14300 jobs in 2013; and investment in plant and machinery which Statistics New Zealand reports is now at its highest level ever. Alongside that exports are reaching $50 billion which is a figure quoted by my colleague Minister Joyce. On the household savings rate the most recent data shows it at minus 0.7 percent of household income. That compares with an average of minus 4.5 percent in the 5 years from 2003 to 2008 when all that member’s theories were tried out.Hon David Parker: Does he agree with the Prime Minister that “a lower exchange rate will enable us to promote economic growth faster.” And that “the most likely way to achieve a more realistic exchange rate is one where we see an example of good monetary policy where interest rates are lower and that is why taking pressure off that is important.”?Hon BILL ENGLISH: Yes I do agree with the Prime Minister. We are on track to have significantly lower interest rates through this cycle than the last—Iain Lees-Galloway: No the interest rates are going up.Hon BILL ENGLISH: Well the member talks as if interest rates today are a huge problem. In fact they are just above the lowest interest rates we have had since Keith Holyoake started out being Prime Minister back in the 1960s. That is how low they have been. We will certainly avoid reaching almost 11 percent first mortgage rates which is the level that they reached under the previous Labour Government which tried out all the theories that this member is now proposing to try out again. Doing the same thing over and over again with the same results particularly when they are negative is a form of insanity.Hon David Parker: Speaking of Mr Muldoon I seek leave—Mr SPEAKER: Order! Is this a point of order?Hon David Parker: It is. I seek leave to table a press release from the time showing that actually Mr Muldoon killed universal savings—Mr SPEAKER: Order! The member is now trifling with the point of order process. I will ask him to deliver his supplementary question.Hon David Parker: Does he accept that Treasury’s forecasts for the current account deficit to head north of 5 percent within 2 years on his current economic settings show that he has not successfully rebalanced the economy towards exports savings and investment?Hon BILL ENGLISH: No and I will tell the member why. For each of the last 3 years Treasury has forecast that the current account deficit will go back to about 6 percent. Today it is just over 3 percent so Treasury has been consistently wrong in its forecasts. I know the member would prefer it to be right but it has been wrong. It forecast the current account deficit to be 6 percent today—in fact it is closer to 3 percent. Some economists say it will go under 3 percent to 2.5 percent. That will be very disappointing to the Labour Party particularly when it left it with an average of minus 8 percent for the last 3 years it was in Government. Labour tried all the member’s theories as recently as 2005-08. They did not work then and we will certainly avoid trying to implement them now.Tim Macindoe: What reports has the Minister received on proposals that would do very little if anything to rebalance the economy towards exports savings and investment?Mr SPEAKER: In so far as there is ministerial responsibility I call the Hon Bill English.Hon BILL ENGLISH: I have received reports about a proposal that concerns me as the Minister of Finance because it would force hard-working Kiwis who are struggling to pay their mortgage to give up 15 percent of their take-home pay in order to put it into KiwiSaver. I can report though that the proposal is confusing. Asked about how much the compulsory KiwiSaver rate would have to rise for the proposal to have any impact on interest rates one senior source told Radio New Zealand National this morning: “I’m not in a position to give you a particular number on that point.” Asked again he then said: “I don’t have that number on me.” as if he had left it back in the locker somewhere. He then added unusually and exceptionally: “I’m not going to make up a number.” But that was David Cunliffe.Mr SPEAKER: Order! That answer is quite long enough.Hon David Parker: Does he agree with the 2007 version of Bill English who said that rural communities like Southland are “paying the price” of a high exchange rate; the 2012 version of Bill English who said that the exchange rate is a “headwind for exporters”; the 2013 version of Bill English who said that “The exchange rate is still too high.”; or the current version of Bill English who now says that a lower exchange rate would be toxic?Hon BILL ENGLISH: All of them because I am pleased to tell the member I have improved with age.Student Achievement—Support for Māori Students11.TE URUROA FLAVELL (Co-Leader—Māori Party) to theMinister of Education: Ka tukupūrongo TeTariArotakeMātaurangamōōnahiahiaingā kaiakomō ārātou tauira āmēnāāē he ahangā huarahi kei arātou ki tewhakautuitāHana Turnerkōrero emeaane “very negative opinions about their Māori students”?[Does the Education Review Office report on teacher expectations of students; if so what mechanisms do they have in place to address whatHana Turner has described as teachers having “very negative opinions about their Māori students”?]Hon HEKIA PARATA (Minister of Education):Tēnā koe Mr Speaker.Āe [Yes]; from March 2010 the Education Review Office has made it clear that schools can achieve a high-performance standard only when their Māori students’ progress in achievement is in line with other students in the school. Since then the EducationReview Office has published guidelines on self-review to help schools ensure that they are working towards that outcome for every one of their students.Te Ururoa Flavell: Will she ask the Education Review Office to actively encourage schools to implementTātaiako: Cultural Competencies for Teachers of Māori Learners; if not why not?Hon HEKIA PARATA: As that member will be awareTātaiako is a cultural competency framework that was developed and introduced by his colleague and mine the Associate Minister of Education the Hon Dr Sharples to help all educators think about what it takes to successfully secure educational success in Māori students. All of the Education Review Office reviewers are trained inTātaiako. They conduct their reviews in the context ofTātaiako. The New Zealand Teachers Council is influenced and assesses its initial teacher education programme through the lens ofTātaiako. The Ministry of Education has incorporatedTātaiako into its Māori education strategy KaHikitia. New professional learning and development contracts from this year will be required to demonstrate responsiveness underTātaiako and the new providers of our Building on Success programme which is targeted to 100 schools this year are required not only to incorporateTātaiako but also to be able to report against it.Te Ururoa Flavell: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I appreciate the Minister and the explanation she gave but the question was really around the Education Review Office. I accept all those other departments do play their part but the key in the question was a link back to the original question around the Education Review Office.Mr SPEAKER: I think the Minister on this occasion addressed that question but I will allow the member an additional supplementary question.Te Ururoa Flavell: Kei te pai. Thank you. Does the Minister agree thatHana Turner’s research into teacher expectations ethnicity and the achievement gap mirrors similar research 30 years ago such as Dr Alton-Lee’sTake your brown hand off my book and when will she take urgent action to address the systemic factors of institutional racism and teacher bias?Hon HEKIA PARATA: I have not read either of those pieces of research but what I can say is that under this coalition Government Māori participation and achievement has increased and we will continue our relentless focus on raising achievement for all students Māori included. Can I repeat that in answer to the first supplementary question I started my answer by saying that all Education Review Office officers are trained inTātaiako and they use it in their reviews.Te Ururoa Flavell: Can the Minister advise the House as to when theTātaiako programme will be compulsory for all schools?Hon HEKIA PARATA: I have no intention of making that compulsory. We have self-managing schools. What we focus on instead is raising the expectation of student achievement out of each and every school and providing the tools and support that will assist those schools to be successful andTātaiako is a key tool in that support.Police Minister—Briefings on Hon Maurice Williamson’s Actions12.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour) to theMinister of Police: Is she satisfied with the role she has played as Minister of Police in the events that led up to Hon Maurice Williamson’s resignation last week?Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Police): Yes. I had no role to play in the investigation or in the events that led up to the resignation of the Hon Maurice Williamson.Jacinda Ardern: When was she first informed that Maurice Williamson had placed a phone call to senior police officers regarding an active criminal investigation and whom was she informed by?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The police commissioner verbally briefed me on the afternoon of 28 April 2014.Jacinda Ardern: If she has a no-surprises policy with the police why did it take from 23 January when Maurice Williamson made the call to the police until 28 April for her to be informed?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: The police decide if and when an issue should be brought to my attention and how much information they should give me. I back the police to make that decision.Jacinda Ardern: At the time she was briefed about the Official Information Act request relating to Maurice Williamson’s contact with the police what date did the police discuss releasing this information to theNew Zealand Herald?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: From memory the police commissioner indicated to me that they had informed the reporter that they were going to hold the Official Information Act request until after the appearance in court in the following week.Jacinda Ardern: Did she believe that it was acceptable to sit on information relating to her ministerial colleague’s interference in an active criminal case until June which is when theNew Zealand Heraldreporter was told by the police on Tuesday that the information would be released to him?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: I am sorry. I could not understand from the question—Mr SPEAKER: The easiest way forward is to ask the member to repeat the question.Jacinda Ardern: I am happy to repeat the question.Mr SPEAKER: Yes please.Jacinda Ardern: Why did she believe it was acceptable to sit on information relating to her ministerial colleague’s interference in an active criminal case until June which is the date theNew Zealand Heraldreporter was given by the police for the release of the Official Information Act information—the day after she was briefed?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: Well first of all I did not sit on any information. I had no knowledge that there was an Official Information Act request in. I had no knowledge of Maurice Williamson’s phone call until 28 April Monday when the police commissioner briefed me. If the member is asking about the appropriateness of the police then that is an operational issue and I trust the police to deal with that in the manner in which they have operational independence.Jacinda Ardern: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I believe that the member may have misinterpreted my question. My question related to the date that the police gave her that they would be releasing the information to theNew Zealand Heraldwhich was 2 months after she was briefed about the Official Information Act request.Mr SPEAKER: No the question as you have explained it was the way I understood it as well. The Minister said she certainly did not sit on any information and then she went on to say that if the police have indicated another date that was an operational matter. The Minister has addressed that question.Jacinda Ardern: Was the Minister informed by the police that they would not release the information about Maurice Williamson’s emails until June which is what theNew Zealand Heraldreporter was told?Hon ANNE TOLLEY: In an earlier answer to that member I told her that the police commissioner informed me they had informed the reporter that because the man was due to appear in court in the following week they did not intend to release the emails prior to that court appearance. That is entirely up to the police to decide that.Urgent DebatesHon Maurice Williamson—Ministerial ResignationMr SPEAKER: I have received letters from Dr Russel Norman the Hon David Cunliffe and the Rt Hon Winston Peters seeking to debate under Standing Order 386 the resignation of the Hon Maurice Williamson. The letters relate to a particular case of recent occurrence involving the administrative responsibility of the Government. Not every ministerial resignation will lead to an urgent debate being accepted. However the case in question is not related to a policy matter that might be debated in the House on some other occasion; it relates to the administrative responsibility of the Government. Furthermore Mr Williamson has not resigned in respect of just a portfolio responsibility; he has resigned as a Minister altogether. After weighing up the circumstances very carefully and the public interest in ministerial probity I have decided to err on the side of allowing a debate today. Dr Norman’s letter was received first and I therefore call on him to move that the House takes note of an urgent matter of public importance.Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green): I moveThat the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. This cuts to the heart of our democracy—this issue around Maurice Williamson—and this cuts to the issue of whether our democracy is for sale under this Government. But I think that we should start in this case from the point of view of the victim of domestic violence because I think that under our system everybody is deserving of the protection of the law. Regardless of how rich a person is regardless of what connections a person may have and regardless of the wealth of a person’s abuser everybody deserves the protection of the law in this country. In this case we had a Minister intervening to protect the abuser not to protect the victim and I think that is what is truly deeply appalling above everything else in this case. Here was a victim of domestic violence—the perpetrator in this case has pleaded guilty to domestic violence—and here we had a Minister of the Crown intervening in a police investigation to put pressure on the police not to go ahead with a prosecution for a domestic violence incident.Put yourself in the shoes of all the domestic violence victims across New Zealand. It is a hard thing to complain in a domestic violence situation. It is always difficult it is always traumatic and how much harder is it when you have Maurice Williamson intervening on the side of your abuser in a domestic violence situation? How much harder is it for a victim of domestic violence trying to get justice in this country under this Government when we have a Minister of the Crown intervening to try to prevent the police from going ahead with the prosecution of a domestic violence perpetrator? That is the actual situation we have just experienced in our country. We have gone through the experience of a National Party Minister ringing up the police in a case of domestic violence and leaning on the police not to go ahead with the prosecution. So from the point of view of the victim which I think should be at the heart of this whole debate everybody deserves equal protection from the law but the National Party does not seem to believe that any more. It seems to think that some people—if you are a domestic violence abuser who has a lot of money—should get special treatment. That is what happened in this case.I think it is important to read from the police email about National Minister Maurice Williamson’s conversation with the police about this case of domestic violence. Maurice Williamson’s mate was a domestic violence abuser in this case. According to the police email Mr Williamson rang up a senior police member and said that somebody should review the matter to ensure the police were on solid ground as Mr Liu is investing a lot of money in New Zealand. Think about that for a second. Thinkabout what Mr Williamson—a very senior National Party member a member of the National Party for decades a member of this Parliament for decades—was saying. Think about what it means. He was saying that this person Mr Liu had to get special treatment because he was wealthy. Because he was planning to invest money in New Zealand National thinks that he should get special treatment in the criminal justice system.This very senior National Party member of Parliament and Minister was intervening in a police investigation to put pressure on the police not to go ahead with the prosecution of a domestic violence abuser because that abuser was investing money in New Zealand because he was wealthy. Think about what that means for our justice system. Think about what that means for all the victims of domestic violence in New Zealand. Think about what it is like to complain about domestic violence and how difficult it is to go to the police in a case like this. Then when you are involved in a police case like this you have a Minister of the Crown intervening on the side of your abuser to try to stop the police proceeding with the prosecution. That is how low National has now got.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Rubbish!Dr RUSSEL NORMAN: It is that low. Mr Gerry Brownlee says “Rubbish!”. I am sorry Mr Brownlee but we have the evidence from the police in front of us right here. The police email says that Mr Maurice Williamson a senior National Minister rang them up and said that he wanted to make sure somebody reviewed this matter—a domestic violence case. Mr Williamson was intervening to say to them that he wanted them to review the matter to ensure the police were on solid ground as Mr Liu is investing a lot of money in New Zealand. What he is saying is that the law is not equal. We are not all equal before the law because if some of us are wealthy then they get special treatment according to National. That is what senior National Minister Maurice Williamson has just done in our country in the 21st century this year. Think about that.So where did the rot begin that we end up at the point where a senior National Minister thinks that someone should get special treatment in a domestic violence case because they are wealthy? How did we end up in this situation with this Government in 2014? I would argue that the problem is this. National has adopted the culture of the world of business where everything is for sale—and that is fine and how it is meant to be; the world of business is all about money—and has applied it to the world of Government and the world of justice. What it has said is that in the justice system you can buy your way out. If you are accused of being a domestic violence abuser and you have got contacts with the National Party and you are planning to invest a lot of money in New Zealand then you can buy your way out of it. Maybe another donation to the National Party would fix it for you. You can have a National Minister ring up senior police on your behalf if you are a domestic violence abuser. You can have a senior Minister in the National Government ring up the police and lean on them to not proceed with the investigation.So what National is saying is that there is the culture of the world of business and there is nothing wrong with the culture of the world of business—we need to make money in the world of business and that is fine. But when National brings that over to the world of justice and says that the richer you are the more justice you will get that is wrong. And what National has done is wrong. What Maurice Williamson did was wrong. Think about it from the point of view of the victim of domestic violence. For once National should look at its heart and think about it from the point of view of the person who has had violence done against them by their partner.I would also say that National is applying this idea that money rules all else to the world of politics. In the world of politics it is supposed to be one person one vote. Weare all supposed to be treated equally by the Government of the day. That is regardless of how wealthy you are regardless of how much money you may give to a political party. We are all supposed to be treated equally in the world of politics and democracy. That is the idea of democracy. The whole idea what our forefathers and foremothers fought for over centuries was that we could all have one person one vote and be treated equally by the law and by the Government. The whole idea was that we would not get special treatment just because we were rich and we would not get special treatment just because we donated to a political party. This is where National has lost its way.Maurice Williamson and the attitude of Maurice Williamson I think have come to represent everything that is wrong in this current Government. The amazing thing is listening to him even after he was sacked as a Minister. He was defending the position that you should get special treatment if you are planning to invest lots of money in New Zealand. This reminds me very much of the Skycity debate. Where did the rot set in? Let me suggest to you one place where this may have begun and that was the Skycity debate. The idea of the Skycity debate was that this Parliament changed the gambling laws of New Zealand in order to facilitate Skycity. You could argue that it bought the law—that might be a bit strong. But you could certainly argue that National’s position was that if Skycity was willing to invest a lot of money it could get the law changed for it. That is very similar to the position of Maurice Williamson which is that if you are investing a lot of money in New Zealand you should get special treatment from the justice system even if you are a domestic violence abuser.Hon Gerry Brownlee: That is wrong.Dr RUSSEL NORMAN: Mr Brownlee says this is wrong. So he is defending Maurice Williamson. Let us be clear about what Maurice Williamson did. He did not say that everybody—a domestic violence abuser or a victim—should get treated equally by the law. Maurice Williamson said no. If you are planning to invest heavily in New Zealand you will get special treatment. He said that their case must be on solid ground so presumably everyone else’s case does not need to be on solid ground. But if you are planning to invest lots of money in New Zealand the police’s case against you should be on solid ground.The Green Party does not believe what Maurice Williamson and the National Party believe. We believe that all people are equal before the law. We believe that all people are equal under our democracy and we will defend that position. Every time that the Green Party has proposed more transparency around donations to political parties the National Party has rejected them—every time. It has rejected every attempt to clean up the system. Simon Power to give him his due did have some respect for the idea that we need more transparency around the system and some of the changes that he made around electoral finance were very very good. But what we are seeing now is that this Government opposes every attempt to clean up the political system and the reason it opposes every attempt to clean up the political system is that it is defending the indefensible.Maurice Williamson has become I think the most rotten piece of this whole ideology that the National Party has adopted which is that the more money you have the more say you should have in Parliament and in the Government and in our democracy and if you have enough money you should get special treatment under the criminal justice system. That is exactly what Maurice Williamson was saying in his intervention in this case.So this is a pretty simple case. I do not think it is a complicated issue actually. I think that it is quite straightforward. I think that it is good that Maurice Williamson has been sacked and good on the Prime Minister for doing it but the Prime Minister needsto look in the mirror and see where the rot has set in. Where has this culture arisen that says that the more money you have the more influence you have in politics and the more say you have in the criminal justice system? That is wrong and I think that most New Zealanders will reject what the Government has been doing in this respect. We need to clean up politics in New Zealand and we need to remember that the law is here to protect all New Zealanders even if they happen to be the partner of a domestic violence abuser who gave a lot of money to the National Party. Even those victims Mr Brownlee deserve our defence as a Parliament because the law is here to protect all of us.Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Prime Minister): The member Dr Russel Norman is usually moderate if sometimes assertive in his criticisms but some of those criticisms particularly in respect of domestic violence were simply objectionable. It is disgraceful to allege in this Parliament that any political party sponsors a justice system where somehow people can buy their way out of justice. It is simply wrong.He could have made a more reasonable point about the judgment of the Minister in picking up the phone but he did not. He chose instead to slur to smear and to moralise from the position of someone who says: “Everyone should be treated equally but I went off to see Dotcom.” who could be a critical part of forming a Government that he wants to be part of. Why did he go off to see Dotcom? He was not visiting my neighbour in Dipton who might expect the same treatment from a Labour-Green Government as Kim Dotcom got. I challenge the member to get up and say that Phillip Mills’ Green growth agenda will not be adopted in any form by a future Labour-Green Government—that there will be no subsidy schemes no incentives and no support—because if it is it will look like Phillip Mills has bought the Green Party with his $65000 donation. So I just suggest to the member that he get off his high horse—take just a couple of steps back down off the saddle—before he wades into this kind of fantastical moralising.Actually I am going to indicate support for Maurice Williamson as a Minister. As a Minister Maurice Williamson was a good Minister. I worked with him on a whole range of issues. Maurice Williamson was the Minister who put together the package for dealing with leaky homes showing in the process of that a great deal of understanding of the human pressures that go with having a leaky home the technical issues that were involved and the patience needed in trying to square the circle and find some kind of workable solution.Maurice’s enthusiasm for technology is I think well-known but it has had a real impact for New Zealanders. The SmartGate process at the border is largely a product of his enthusiasm. The roll-out of ultra-fast broadband is in no small part due to his strong advocacy for it when the National Party was back in Opposition. He has also done a lot of work over recent years on one of the more difficult aspects of Government and that is getting Government agencies to work together. In this case it was the border agencies the Ministry for Primary Industries the Customs Service and the Immigration Service. They have had to learn how to work together and to also have a wide-ranging technology upgrade to ensure that New Zealand stays suitably connected to the rest of the world. In fact Maurice has even been able to make the portfolio of statistics look exciting through his enthusiasm for the integrated data infrastructure which is going to make a real difference to many New Zealanders as the Government becomes more effective in delivering results through its public services.But Mr Williamson knows now what we all need to keep in mind—that is in return for the privilege and opportunity of being a Minister we are fully accountable for all the judgments we make as a Minister. Although day to day those judgments can fall short of the ideal and they sometimes do—they sometimes do—there are some judgments we make that as the Prime Minister said go over the line. One of those judgments is topick up the phone to take a point of view on the work of the police in their prosecutions. There has been some discussion about the extent of interaction of politicians and the police around investigations but none of those excuse that particular judgment. It was a poor judgment and he has been held to account.But of course if the Leader of the Opposition was held to account he would not have his job either. It is interesting to see today that the Greens are a better organised Opposition than the Labour Party is once again. Once more we saw a small sign of why the Greens are a sharper better dominating operation. They got their letter in first for a snap debate a snap debate that has been known about for what—5 days? 6 days? And in that time the Labour Party was too busy messing up its variable savings ratio policy to be bothered or to have the time to be able to get the letter in for the snap debate. [Interruption] Well there is accountability in the National Party and in the National Government. The Minister goes over the line; the Prime Minister takes action. How many mistakes can David Cunliffe make before he is held accountable by the Labour caucus? Well we know the answer: he can make an endless number of mistakes because by changing the rules he made sure the caucus could not hold him to account.Let us just look at today’s little episode. We have asked the Labour Party one question about its compulsory KiwiSaver policy: how much will contributions have to go up to make a difference to interest rates? That matters because putting up contribution rates cuts the incomes of hundreds of thousands of low-income New Zealanders. I thought the Labour Party would give us a number but David Cunliffe decided one answer was not enough. He tried three. So he said first “I haven’t got that number on me.” Then he said: “The research has been done. I’ll bring it next time.” And then he said: “There is no number.” So we go into an election campaign—I will say “helpfully” from our point of view but probably not so helpfully for accountability within the Labour Party—where under its signature policy the leader of the Labour Party cannot tell New Zealanders by how much their pay will be cut if they vote for him.We have seen the sharp contrasts in accountability. David Cunliffe keeps his secret trust donors secret. Here is a question for the Labour front bench: who donated to DavidCunliffe’s secret trust? To use the words of the Deputy Prime Minister of a proposed Labour-Green Government who bought David Cunliffe and is he accountable to his own front bench and his caucus for those donations? Maurice Williamson has been accountable—he has paid a price; he lost his job—for an action he took on behalf of someone he knew. Will David Cunliffe be held accountable in the same way? I am waiting for Labour members to get up and explain to us whether David Cunliffe will be held accountable in the same way that Maurice Williamson has been held accountable. No? Well it is all about accountability. How can the Labour caucus hold David Cunliffe accountable if they do not know who his donors are? We look forward to hearing about it.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Leader of the Opposition): It seems the Minister of Finance did not want his full allocation of time. That is hardly surprising because he did not really defend the Minister who has lost his job the Hon Maurice Williamson at all. In fact National’s response to this very serious breach of ministerial standards has been to throw mud at the Green Party to ignore the substance of the allegations and to fail to excuse justify or defend even once the shocking lapse of ministerial standards that is now endemic in that National Cabinet. Maurice Williamson is just the latest Minister to be added to National’s roll of dishonour. There is still room for more to come and no doubt there will be more. But last week he joined the ranks of Pansy Wong Phil Heatley Nick Smith Peter Dunne and John Banks. It is a long list—long and growing.Mr Williamson’s resignation and the issues that led to it are very serious matters that question the independence of the New Zealand Police and its ability to conduct investigations without political interference. New Zealanders must have an assurance that Ministers in any Government will not cannot and must not use their positions either to favour some members of the community or to apply pressure to independent organisations like the Police. New Zealanders are stunned New Zealanders are shocked and New Zealanders are saddened that that could have occurred at all.The fact that it did occur tells us a lot about the culture within National and the disarray that this Government is coming into. It is the Prime Minister Mr Key who is directly and ultimately responsible for the growing culture of cronyism—cronyism and arrogance—on the part of this National Government. These are the lowest ministerial standards in a generation. It is a culture that says that the normal rules of conduct no longer need apply and that the rules of theCabinet Manual have become mere guidelines.It is now allowable for example for Ministers and their families to financially benefit from companies that Ministers have assisted in their ministerial capacity without a proper declaration of conflict of interest to either the Prime Minister or the public. Why is Judith Collins still a Minister? Those companies like the one represented by the donor to Mr Williamson have donated thousands—tens of thousands—of dollars to the National Party and that is now business as usual. For this National Government politics is no longer any kind of calling. It is simply a business—cash in cash out. Standards are down and Ministers are hanging on and the public is becoming disillusioned that this Government represents any more their hopes and dreams for a better future.The Prime Minister has led this culture of cronyism and entitlement not just by omission but by deliberate act himself like taking $55000 from the chairman of Oravida and then telling the public it was a donation to a charity. The National Party was the charity. He reinstated Peter Dunne to his ministerial role despite the almost certain truth that he leaked a classified Government Communications Security Bureau report. He relies upon the vote of John Banks who is currently on trial for taking large amounts of money and then covering it up. He excused the Minister of Justice after she overruled the Prime Minister for condoning the actions of Minister Williamson interfering in a police operational inquiry not to mention the fact that it was a domestic violence inquiry and that he was a wealthy foreign donor. In any intervention you would expect the Minister of Justice to be the first to apply the rule of law and the conventions of theCabinet Manual but she did not. She sought to overrule the Prime Minister. Why is she still in office?That same Minister of Justice is a trained lawyer. She is a lawyer who is trained to manage and identify conflicts of interest but she could not manage her own and she has most recently taken out her frustration through low personal attacks on individual members of the press gallery. These are the standards in John Key’s National Cabinet. These are the reasons New Zealanders are losing hope and losing faith that this Government can represent any more their aspirations for a better life for themselves and their children in this beautiful country of ours.It is proper for us to briefly recall the incidents that led to Mr Williamson’s resignation. He rang the Counties Manukau district commander in January regarding the investigation of MrDonghua Liu after his arrest in December 2013 on assault charges relating to a domestic incident. Mr Williamson told them to “ensure we are on solid ground as Mr Liu is investing a lot of money in New Zealand.” He did not say Mr Liu was investing a lot of money in the National Party but he was doing that as well. And since when in this great country of ours has the amount of money in someone’s bankaccount been able to determine their treatment under the law? That is not the New Zealand that our people want to see. That is not the country we want to build.Mr Williamson then said that it was not improper because he was not a friend of Liu. You might say they were just beach bach buddies. That contrasts with Ms Collins who was having dinner with friends whom she could not talk to but saying that they were friends after all. Mr Williamson however had helped Mr Liu get citizenship after it was initially declined. He held his citizenship ceremony in his electorate office the next day. He encouraged him to buy the holiday home next door. He saw the plans for it and he worked on it. How close is that to foreign money? It is way too close for New Zealanders. To take that and then interfere in a police investigation to try to get the man off a domestic violence charge—a plague that affects one-sixth of all women in New Zealand—it is no wonder that members of the National Party across the way are hanging their heads low.Denis O’Rourke: Disgraceful.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: It is disgraceful. It is not the New Zealand that New Zealanders want to build.Very very sadly this is not the first occasion. First there was Richard Worth. He resigned in 2009 after being caught out travelling to India and talking up aviation training in New Zealand all the while operating as the director of New Zealand Aviation Ltd and holding shares and directorships of an Indian trade group—yet more undisclosed conflicts of interest yet more cosy relationships with foreign money. It took a while but he eventually left. Then Pansy Wong got it wrong in 2010 on yet another taxpayer-funded trip to China. This time as a private individual she witnessed her husband’s business deals signed a contract using her ministerial title and promoted—Hon Gerry Brownlee: She was proved right.Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE: —here is one for Mr Brownlee—her husband’s hovercraft business and the interests of a local Chinese website. She was too close to foreign money. A culture of cronyism setting in. It all sounds very familiar does it not given Ms Collins’ current troubles?In March 2010 Phil Heatley was sacked for much less. He lost his position when it was revealed he had charged Ministerial Services for expenses he was not entitled to. Or there is Nick Smith sitting there who went—only to return—for writing a letter of support for his friend and National Party campaigner Bronwyn Pullar while he was a Minister on his ministerial letterhead. The Prime Minister described that as a lapse of judgment but in the light of Ms Collins one could feel sorry for that Minister because he was treated harshly by comparison.This goes to the culture within National. It is a culture of cronyism a culture of arrogance a culture of entitlement a culture that the rules that apply to all other New Zealanders no longer apply to the Government. There is an old rule in politics that when that rot sets in a Government goes out.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I call the Rt Hon Winston Peters.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First): Thank God for that. Oh what a tangled web she did weave when first she did practise to deceive. Maurice Williamson’s action in contacting the police was a breach of ministerial rules. There was no grey area in his actions; it was a blatant breach of how Ministers must behave. Maurice has done the appropriate thing and resigned. His Prime Minister has lauded him for doing so and has lauded himself as Prime Minister for taking that action.But what about Judith Collins? Where is the accountability here for cronyism for sleazy favouritism and for corruption? The Minister of Justice was asked you mayrecall some simple questions about a company connected to her family and her engagement with the company’s business whilst on a ministerial visit to China. What is relevant is that connection because it determines whether there was a serious conflict of interest in her actions whether there was a breach of the Cabinet rules and whether an allegation of corruption can possibly be made. The Minister’s response was to do everything and anything but tell the truth. She explained one of her three engagements with Oravida in China as being a casual meeting on the way to the airport.Hon Gerry Brownlee: What’s the debate about?Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: The debate is about ministerial standards and whether someone—Hon Gerry Brownlee: No it’s not. Read the letter.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: I know that the last person to understand ministerial standards is one Gerry Brownlee because as you recall there was a new casino to be set up in Christchurch and the new directors were going to be Gerry Brownlee and the head of the National Party. He got found out for that. So the last person to be able to speak here on a matter of convention would be Gerry Brownlee. Judith Collins said she was on the way to the airport.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Tell us about the brown paper bag at the fisheries do.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: He is excited now. I have struck a nerve. We have struck a nerve. Turn the cameras on to him. I want to see how upset he gets when he hears the truth. Every action she took was to both withhold the truth and divert focus from the truth. All these actions were bound to fail. And do you know what? She began to regard herself as being above the rules above the law and above convention. She believes she is beyond reproach and beyond accountability. She blames her staff and she blames the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Williamson crossed the line it is true. Collins crossed the line countless times and she must go.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order! The member will use the member’s full name.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Certainly I will. The Hon Judith Collins crossed the line countless times and now she thinks that when all else has failed she can take leave hide from further scrutiny and have this scandal blow over. What is the taxpayer to make of that? You have got Maurice Williamson taking the cop saying that he made a mistake and resigning but not this one. It seems that when a Minister comes under pressure she stops work takes a rest and takes a holiday.Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. When the Speaker decides to require Parliament to set aside time for a debate on a matter that is of public interest and significance it needs to be on a topic that is very clearly stated in the letter to the Speaker. There were four letters today I understand and in each case it was sought to debate the circumstances around the resignation of the Hon Maurice Williamson. What we have at the moment is a speaker who is using this opportunity to make accusatory statements in a way that is completely unacceptable and unparliamentary. I would ask you to call him to speak within the bounds of the debate that is in front of us. Otherwise we are unreasonably using up time on a day that belongs to another event and ultimately the time of members tomorrow.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: You would have heard the speech given by the Hon Bill English. You will also know what the complaint was that came to the Speaker with regard to ministerial rules. That is what the whole issue is about. What we have got is a very embarrassed person trying to constrain the debate.Hon Gerry Brownlee: I am going to speak in this debate very shortly but I would ask you to perhaps read to the House the letter that was supplied to the Speaker which led to the debate.Grant Robertson: This debate is one around a number of topics to do with accountability and to do with the ministerial resignation. The Hon Bill English delivered a speech of around 8½ minutes approximately 6½ minutes of which were about the Labour Party about David Cunliffe and about issues related to that. This is a robust debate but Mr English’s contribution has raised a number of issues. Mr Peters has been speaking for a few minutes now on topics closely related to ministerial behaviour—far more closely related than most of Bill English’s speech. I would ask for consistency. Bill English was allowed to complete his speech; Mr Peters should be allowed to complete his.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Can I just say to members that in addressing this issue—[Interruption] We have a point of order on the floor. Can I just say to members that when addressing this issue members when they respond to a speaker are generally given 1 or 2 minutes to respond to what the other speaker has said. This is a debate about the resignation of the Hon Maurice Williamson from his ministerial portfolios. Members may refer to other members in passing but we need to remember that the reason for this debate is the resignation of a Minister from his portfolio. So I just ask the members to recognise that when we come to debate this issue and recognise also that all members are honourable members.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Maurice Williamson did not engage in a cover-up but what we are seeing now is one. The real issue is who caused all this pressure. Of course the answer is when a certain Minister set out to deceive. Maurice did not deny it. He said: “I made the phone call.” His explanation fell short and he went. This is how democracy is destroyed—when instead of setting standards and principles of acceptable ministerial behaviour the Minister and her Prime Minister so demonstrably fail the rules. They seem to be in another world—a different realm from that of Maurice Williamson. It is a world where standards of ministerial conduct do not apply to them. Why has Maurice gone?The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Williamson.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Why has the Hon Maurice Williamson gone? If I was him I would be feeling a bit upset because it seems that there are nakedly different standards. Why is Judith Collins still a Minister if there is a consistent set of Cabinet rules? Is it the National Government’s contempt or disdain for the public? Is it arrogance of the type you saw in that point of order by Gerry Brownlee? He thought as Rumpole from down in Christchurch that he could offer something by way of a moot point that we should all take seriously. There is no possible justification Mr Brownlee for your colleague to remain a Minister. It is simply an outrage an insult to the New Zealand public. It is an affront to democracy. What is the taxpayer out there to think? When they are under the stress and pressure of work do they get a chance to walk off home not be accountable and face no more questions as to how they are going? No they do not. They stick it out because that is part of the job and a ministerial post paid for by the taxpayer demands the same standards.Who thinks that it is a mere coincidence first that following the dinner—this is what happened. This is new. It is not known by the members over there because they are so indolent and lazy. You had the Ministry for Primary Industries recall of 3 August. You had the 6 August letter from Julia Xu complaining about what has happened to the company Oravida. Then you had the 20 and 23 October engagements before and after by one Judith Collins. Then you had the sanitary certificate secured by her connections in China for the company. And then guess what happened. Its sales which had hit rock bottom took off like a rocket. They soared to millions and millions of dollars and Mr Brownlee thinks he can get up and excuse that. It is a disgrace. We know that the National Party is cracking behind the scenes. We know that the reason MauriceWilliamson and Judith Collins should be thanked by us is that they have finally unveiled the real character and sordid nature of the modern National Party—cronyism sleaze corruption all sorts of secret funding.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order! Can I just say to the member—Jami-Lee Ross: Point of order.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I know what the member is going to say and I have been thinking about it myself. I would just like to refer members to Speaker’s ruling 26/5 in relation to corruption and disloyalty. I want to read it to the House because I think it is important when we are looking at this debate. “It is not only the right but the duty of a member who can show that there has been anything in the nature of bribery or corruption on the part of other members to bring that matter before the House in the proper constitutional way but a member must not make veiled suggestions during the course of debate.” That was Speaker Statham in 1934 so it goes back some considerable way. I just want to again advise members that all members are honourable and that is it. Refer to each other as honourable despite what we might think as otherwise. All of us here are aspirational and we call a member what we would want for them and us all to become. I caution the House that we tend to see things in the world as we are not as it is and when we point one finger at someone else we point three at ourselves. So I just caution the member. If he can be careful please in the way in which he is addressing the House.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: There is more to come. The reason Judith Collins is not telling the truth to this House is that the moment she does she will not just cease to be a Minister; she will cease to be a member of Parliament. For somebody who used to be on the Law Society—a serious administering body up there in Auckland the biggest group of lawyers in the country and perhaps the most talented—I say that Judith Collins is withholding the truth and so are her colleagues because they know the consequence. The trouble is that there is Mr Brownlee more to come.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery): Well I would have to say that the catchcry of Winston Peters’ political career has always been: “There is more to come.”Rt Hon Winston Peters: And there was.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: And there was—Hon Dr Nick Smith: What about those Russian subs?Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: —but for one of those moments when the propeller hit the bottom of the Cook Strait the Russian subs came in the surveillance device was on theMikhail Lermontov there was not cash in the brown paper bag at the Kermadec restaurant and when he said no he did not know what he was saying. But there was always more to come.I want to begin my comments today by complimenting the work that the Hon Maurice Williamson has done as a Minister to express my regret that he has had to make the choice to resign and to further compliment him for recognising that he had put a foot over the line and that it was the only consequence that could occur as a result of that. These things are very hard for people’s families and so I want to acknowledge his family his wife and children who of course will be suffering with him as he is trying to come to terms with understanding just how he could have had that lapse of judgment that got him into this position. He is a good man. He has contributed a lot to New Zealand—his family should know that—and I am sure that he will continue to do so for some years to come.This debate is essentially Parliament setting aside time to discuss the circumstances under which Mr Williamson was forced to—well not forced to but decided to resign.Those circumstances have been well canvassed through all the outlets in the media that this country has. The member himself has made it very clear that he considers that he made a mistake. He said that he has had a lapse of judgment and that he was in a position where he could not continue as a Minister. The suggestion that Mr Williamson was at any time motivated by the particular wealth of an individual is completely fatuous. It is as fatuous as me saying that there is a Christchurch multimillionaire who funds New Zealand First for example. Everybody knows that that is the case but no one actually says it because it is not appropriate to do so.Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Mr Brownlee said that there are certain things you cannot say. That is a demonstrable lie that he just engaged in. He knows full well that a party with the highest return rate for the lowest expenditure is not the beneficiary of one of his filthy mates.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Can I just say to members—that is not actually a point of order—that this is a robust place.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: Let us consider for just a moment some of the contributions to this debate today starting with Russel Norman. Russel Norman seems to think that somehow the decision by Maurice Williamson to resign was an indication that standards were falling inside the ministerial arrangements we have in this country. Far from it—it was confirmation that those arrangements are and continue to be upheld. The gentleman concerned went on further to suggest that there was almost an attitude that if you have got a lot of money you can get favours out of the Government. Well that is complete and utter nonsense. The National Party discloses all its donations—more so I would suggest than most other political parties because we have nothing particular to hide.Sue Moroney: What about the trusts?Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: For example the member over there is talking about trusts. Well let us talk about DavidCunliffe’s trust. Let us talk about DavidCunliffe’s trust and ask why he cannot tell us who paid into his account. As the Hon Bill English said someone has bought David Cunliffe. There is no question about that. What about the arrangements between the Green Party and Phillip Mills? Phillip Mills is openly saying he wants a Green agenda for New Zealand. He wants his own type of Green growth agenda for New Zealand. He rejects what other mainstream parties are doing so he is off to put his money into the Green Party. That is policy for cash—nothing short. Russel Norman—the great and virtuous Russel Norman—walks up to the Dotcom mansion and tries to do a deal over Dotcom’s extradition for cash for the Green Party but apparently that is not any sort of misleading or inappropriate behaviour.What about the Electoral Finance Act that the Labour Party rorted upon the people of New Zealand supported by the Green Party? And if you want to start listing off Ministers who resign there were 11 of them under the previous Government. One of them interestingly was the Rt Hon Winston Peters. Maurice Williamson has done the right thing. He is an honourable man. He does have a political future and he has contributed an enormous amount to New Zealand at this point. He should be commended for recognising where the line is and for him to have made that choice is I think commendable.JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): Many of the facts of the Maurice Williamson resignation are extraordinarily clear. On 23 January the Hon Maurice Williamson made a very clear error of judgment not just by having a conversation with the police about an open criminal case; by just picking up the phone he clearly breached theCabinet Manual. Many here would probably argue that he breached a convention that applies to all members of Parliament but what is absolutely clear is that he did breach theCabinet Manual. In doing so he undermined two very important principles that guide us asmembers of Parliament but also the justice system: firstly the independence of the police and the importance of constabulary independence; and secondly the very fine line we walk in between advocating for constituents but never abusing our position of power by being seen to influence the justice system.The Minister of Police also plays a very important role in defending the independence of the police. You will see that from time to time the Minister states that she cannot intervene in something because it is considered to be operational. But let us look at the role that the Minister of Police played in this particular case. The call as I have said was made on 23 January. On 4 April a media outlet put in a request for information that the police may have had regarding Maurice Williamson’s intervention in a case involving Mr Liu and before the courts. On 14 April the police flagged with the Minister’s office in a list of Official Information Act requests that this request had been made. The Minister has since released the text of that description in the briefing and it does state simply the name of Mr Liu and does not include the name of Mr Williamson. The Minister’s office of course you would have thought may have asked questions about the nature of the release given how highly politicised that particular National Party donor had been in the past but accepting the office’s word that no questions were raised we move to the next part of the time line.On 28 April 2 weeks after the police provided that small description of the Official Information Act request as the Minister has confirmed in the House today she was verbally told by the Commissioner of Police Mike Bush that a request from a media outlet had been made and it involved Maurice Williamson. Today in the House we asked some follow-up and I believe important questions about that briefing. When the Minister of Police was briefed by the commissioner was she told when the public would know this vital information about her colleague’s interference in a police case? Did she know at what time and at what date the public would be told? And had the journalist been informed of this? She told the House that the information would be released—if my recollection is right—the following week or thereabouts when the court case was due to come up. The court case is on 10 June.She also claimed in the House today that she was told that the journalist has been informed that the information would be released to them the next week. The journalist has not been told. The journalist was not told until after she was briefed and the date given to that journalist was 10 June. My point is this: the Minister of Police either misled the House today or the police misled her. She knew there would be several weeks before the public would know about this case. And what did she do with that information? Absolutely nothing. She did not tell the Prime Minister. She did not even ask for the emails relating to Maurice Williamson’s case. In fact Mr Williamson and the Prime Minister received the email evidence before she did which was on the Wednesday. The fact of the matter is this Minister of Police did nothing to protect her police force. She asked no questions. She heard no evil and saw no evil. Thereby in doing so she failed them and failed to protect their constabulary independence in favour of protecting her own colleague.Hon Dr NICK SMITH (Minister of Conservation): The only people in this place who have not made mistakes are those who have actually not done anything. In this instance Maurice Williamson made a mistake he took responsibility and he resigned as a Minister. The person whom he inappropriately phoned on behalf of was prosecuted and convicted by the courts. On both instances justice has been done.The member who has just spoken Jacinda Ardern has wanted to talk time lines and her leader has wanted to talk about standards. I am happy to engage in that. From the time the Prime Minister knew of Mr Williamson’s conduct it was 36 hours later that Mr Williamson resigned. I challenge the member to compare that with the record of theprevious Government in a far more serious offending. Members will recall Taito Phillip Field. He did not just break the rules of theCabinet Manual; he committed a corrupt criminal offence for which he went to prison. What was the time line on Mr Taito Phillip Field I ask Ms Ardern. She is now hanging her head and so she should because it was not 36 hours. It was not 36 days. It was actually a whole lot longer than 36 weeks. So I say to members opposite that before they get on their high horse and before they start throwing stones in this glass house they should reflect on their own record of vigorously defending Taito Phillip Field under indefensible circumstances for many many different months and contrast that with the way in which the Hon Maurice Williamson acknowledged that he was at fault took responsibility and resigned.It was with an element of sadness. I think Maurice Williamson is a talented person who has given this Parliament and this country great service whether it is in information technology—and I have a particular interest and I have big boots to fill in the role that he has been playing around the regulation of buildings for earthquakes—and I think we would all acknowledge that his infamous rainbow speech was a positive contribution to this Parliament. So it is with sadness.But equally though I say that anybody who questions the high standards that the Prime Minister John Key sets for this administration overlooks the record and overlooks the facts. There was nothing more ironic Annette King than hearing Mr Cunliffe lecture us on standards at the same time as he continues to refuse to divulge who the major donors to his secret trust were. He lectures us on transparency at the same time.Hon Annette King: Who had the dinners at the restaurant Nick?Hon Dr NICK SMITH: Well my point to Ms King is this. We would not know whether Mr Cunliffe has dined at a dinner with his major donors because he will not disclose who the donors are. That is a very clear contrast.We have heard this afternoon in this debate members speak as though it was an invitation for an orgy of mud-slinging. I just simply say to members of this House and particularly members opposite that I know why they do not want to debate the Budget. I know why they do not want to debate the state of the economy—the strong job growth and the increasing economic confidence. I know why they do not want to debate with Judith Collins crime being at its lowest level in 30 years. I know why they do not want to debate with Tony Ryall the state of the health service. I know why they do not want to debate the improving education standards. It is because the truth is that when this Parliament focuses on debating the issues that matter there is only one choice for New Zealand on 20 September. Members opposite want to engage in an orgy of mud-slinging because that is their only hope. That is their only hope—that they might be able to drag down this Parliament and drag down politics in New Zealand in the hope that some of the mud might stick and they might be able to crawl their way back to the Treasury benches. I simply say to this House to get a grip. Maurice has acknowledged responsibility. He has resigned. Let us get on with the issues that matter.JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany): I have learnt in 3 very short years here that this is an extremely rough-and-tumble place. It is actually quite a sad thing when a Minister resigns. Maurice Williamson likes the saying that in this place one day you are a rooster and the next day you are a feather duster. Sadly our friend Mr Williamson has experienced the rough and tumble of this place. I want to say some very kind things about an individual who I actually think has served this country and this Parliament very well for many many years. I grew up living in the Pakuranga electorate. The first time I joined a political party it was in Maurice Williamson’s electorate. When I went and worked for a member of Parliament it was in Maurice Williamson’s electorate office. If there is a model of someone as a local electorate MP who goes above andbeyond every single time for his constituents to battle on their behalf it is Maurice Williamson the member of Parliament for Pakuranga. Sadly Maurice’s desire to be helpful Maurice Williamson’s desire to go above and beyond for individuals has led him to go a bit too far in this case and he is paying a very high price for that mistake.I just want to reiterate to this House that Ministers and members of this Parliament serve extremely hard and serve very well on behalf of their constituents and the people they serve. We are all humans though and from time to time we make mistakes. When we make those mistakes it is important that we bear the consequences and that is exactly what has happened with Maurice. The Prime Minister has acted appropriately as a Prime Minister should do in accepting the resignation of Maurice Williamson and Maurice Williamson did the honourable thing in resigning for the mistake he made. He is an honourable member.Some of the things that we have heard today from members opposite are absolutely unbelievable. To be lectured by Winston Peters about corruption is like being lectured by a lady of the night about abstinence. It is so hard to believe. I can think of only one person who had been referred to the Serious Fraud Office for donation issues and that is Winston Peters. To have Russel Norman stand up in this House and talk about democracy being for sale knowing that he went to Kim Dotcom’s mansion and talked about intervening in the extradition process should he ever get into Government is simply unbelievable. To have him turn up here now and talk about democracy being for sale and to have David Cunliffe stand up and talk about donations and talk about rich—Richard Prosser: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I listened to the member opposite making references to Winston Peters being corrupt and I seek your guidance Mr Speaker as to whether they were appropriate in light of the statements that have been made about references to members being honourable given that certainly to my knowledge the Rt Hon Winston Peters has never faced let alone been convicted of any—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! I hear the member and I think it is probably pertinent to just reflect on what has been said. I have been listening very carefully and the member who was on his feet said I think that the member whom you are referring to made some accusations of corruption. I was listening and I think that probably is correct and it was pulled up at that stage. I do not think we should go back to where a point of order has been ruled on but the member speaking did not actually accuse the member whom Richard Prosser is defending. He said that that member actually made the accusation which I believe was correct but I think we just need to be a bit cautious about accusations. I think Assistant Speaker Robertson made a good call and cited the Speaker’s ruling that was appropriate. The debate has gone pretty well; let us just keep it on that level.JAMI-LEE ROSS: Thank you. No I did not say what Mr Prosser thought I was saying. Perhaps he might like to listen a bit better next time. I was referring to the fact that members opposite like to lecture us about issues when they themselves know that they very much have some issues and skeletons in the closet that they need to answer for. To hear David Cunliffe talk to us about donations not being declared when we all know very well he knows very well and those sitting behind him know very well that he received donations during a leadership election that he subsequently was not willing to declare—it is absolutely unbelievable for him to come here and lecture us.When we think about those who have donated to political parties and when we think about those people who in the past decade or so have been highlighted as those who have received favours from political parties there are no better examples than from the time when Labour was in office. Think of names like Bill Liu. Think of names like Taito Phillip Field who actually was convicted of a crime in this country. If LabourParty members really want to get into the subject of donations then I suggest they go back and look through all of their bank accounts in the time when they were in office because there were certain Ministers in their Government who knew very well what was transacted and who knew very well about decisions that were taken. The Labour Party members should not come to this House and try to appear as holy as they wish to appear because they will come a cropper in the future I am sure.Ministerial standards in this Government are high. The Prime Minister has demonstrated that. Maurice Williamson has demonstrated that he is an honourable individual by bearing the consequences of his actions. I just want to put on record once again that he is a hard-working member of this Parliament. I have witnessed that firsthand as have the people of Pakuranga. His 27 years in this House will go down as 27 years of very hard work on behalf of New Zealanders and he should be congratulated on that.GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): Well that was extraordinary was it not?Jami-Lee Ross finished his speech by congratulating a Minister who rang the police to intervene in a case of an assault by a man upon a woman. That is whatJami-Lee Ross has just done. That is the standard of the National Party—to get up in this House and to defend a Minister of the Crown for going and intervening in a case about domestic violence. I think that the actions of Maurice Williamson were disgraceful. Maurice Williamson has been in this House for 27 years and he should have known better. What is interesting to me is that regarding the standards of behaviour of Ministers in this National Government John Key likes to crow and say “I’ve come down hard on this.” That is only when they are caught out. It is only when they are in a corner and he has to move. It is not a high standard; it is just when they have been caught out and then suddenly he says “Right let’s make sure this doesn’t happen. Let’s try to shut this issue down.” And consistently over the 6 years of this Government that is what has happened.They are not high ministerial standards. They are not the standards John Key told New Zealanders they would be getting under a National Government. What it describes is the kind of behaviour of a Government that thinks it is above the law and that the rules do not apply to it. The rules that apply to other New Zealanders do not apply to them. Maurice Williamson can pick up the phone and call the Counties Manukau superintendent—an interesting call to make I might add given that the Counties Manukau superintendent actually was not in charge of the case. So I am not quite sure why Maurice Williamson rang him. Perhaps it was because Maurice Williamson thought that that was somebody whom he could influence somebody he could use his ministerial power on to ask whether they were on solid ground because this person had given a lot of money to New Zealand.That is the second thing that marks this National Government out. It thinks it is above the rules and it is out to support the wealthy few. How unbelievable that someone would think that ringing the police to say this person had given a lot of money means anything at all. What it means is it speaks to the values of the National Party. It speaks to the values where money talks. This is all about the donations that the National Party receives from wealthy New Zealanders. Money talks. If you donate money you are in a different category and the rules do not apply to you. So the National Ministers think they are above the rules and they think that people who have money are above the rules. They will do anything to look after the wealthy few in this country and it is a disgrace.It is all about the donations that the National Party gets. Mr Liu donated $22000. In the case of Oravida with Judith Collins we now know that the National Party has received around $85000 from Oravida over the last few years. The relationshipsbetween the National Party and big business in this country are way too close. What New Zealanders want out of a Government I believe is that it will treat all citizens fairly—that it will give everybody a fair go and everybody an opportunity. But with the National Party be it an individual person or be it a business it is the money that matters; it is not the person who matters.Judith Collins is still a Minister; Maurice Williamson is not. How can that be? Yes Maurice Williamson crossed over a line and he deserved to go and he resigned. Judith Collins has consistently misled this Parliament misled New Zealanders and misled the Prime Minister about her activities in relation to Oravida. That is bad enough. Any other Minister would go. David Cunliffe mentioned today that Nick Smith went as a Minister over writing a letter of support on ministerial letterhead for someone he knew something he should not have done. Judith Collins on a taxpayer-funded trip to China orchestrated three events for her husband’s company Oravida. It was a trip about justice issues. She got rid of a justice event so she could go 30 kilometres away from the airport to visit the headquarters of that company for a photo opportunity—an opportunity that official documents show was to increase the profile of that company. That is a breach straight away of ministerial standards but in addition to that as we have rehearsed many times she also then orchestrated a dinner where the directors of Oravida and an unnamed Chinese border official were present.Let us be clear: that dinner was a meeting. It was a meeting that was pre-arranged 5 days before she left New Zealand. It was a meeting that worried and concerned the New Zealand Ambassador to China and the head of the North Asia division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade so much that even after Judith Collins changed it from being an official dinner to being a private dinner they still wanted to provide her with a briefing. Judith Collins gave it away in the House today did she not? She said that she told the New Zealand Ambassador the day after the dinner that nothing untoward occurred. Why would you need to tell the ambassador that nothing untoward occurred at a private dinner?Hon Phil Goff: Unless he was concerned.GRANT ROBERTSON: The ambassador was concerned that something untoward was going to occur. No doubt that is in the notes that he provided for her. She felt the need to say that nothing untoward had occurred. Ambassador Carl Worker in the information that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has released has actually quite clearly distanced himself from this dinner. So that is a Minister on a taxpayer-funded trip on justice issues who orchestrated three events—she also got the directors invited to another event in Beijing—while she should have been talking about justice issues. And she remains a Minister but Maurice Williamson has been sacked. That is double standards. It is not just low standards of ministerial behaviour with John Key; it is now double standards as well.This Government is accumulating the impression in the minds of many New Zealanders—and we have all heard it in the last week—that it is who you know that matters with the National Party it is how much money you have got that matters with the National Party and it is whether you have donated to the National Party that will get you influence that will get you inside the door. That is an affront to our democracy. That is against everything that New Zealanders believe about an egalitarian society where everybody gets a fair go. There is no fair go under this National Government. The way it has gone about its business be it with Skycity or be it with RioTinto or wherever it is indicates the kind of cronyism that it favours. But it is in these personal actions that we see the true colours of this National Government—the true colours of a Government that will always put money before people that will always favour thewealthy few and where the standards that John Key told us he would apply to his Ministers have dropped to an all time low.I want to refer briefly in that context to the actions of Judith Collins in relation to the press gallery because they fit very much within this. Maurice Williamson resigned. John Key said he should have resigned. Judith Collins was the person left defending Maurice Williamson the other day on Sunday. In doing so she drew into debate a member of the press gallery and that person’s family. That is one of the lowest things I have seen a Minister do among many low things in this term of Government. It is the kind of behaviour that again speaks to the fact that anything goes with the National Government if you are not one of its friends. It was petty it was vindictive and it was deliberate.The apology that Judith Collins has made was for a mistake. This was not a mistake. It was a deliberate act consistent with the way that the National Government is going about its business: “Let’s take out people who dissent from us. Let’s change the law so you can’t protest. Let’s change the law so that the Canterbury Regional Council isn’t elected. Let’s change the law so that students and staff aren’t on university councils. Let’s silence dissent.” It is bullying it is nasty it is vindictive and that is how this Government has ended up. It is a Government for the wealthy few that thinks it is above the rules and that has now no standards within its ministerial system. Maurice Williamson has resigned. That was the right thing to do. Judith Collins should follow. John Key should face up to the fact that his Government is now representative of the very wealthy few in this country and not all New Zealanders.LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): It is on a sad day today that I rise to speak in this debate. It is sad for a couple of reasons the first being of course that Maurice Williamson—who has to date given 27 years of service to the constituents in Pakuranga—has made a mistake. He has very clearly made a mistake he very quickly saw the error of his ways and he has paid the price for it—a very high price. I am proud as a member of his caucus and one of his parliamentary colleagues that he took swift action in acknowledging that.But what actually makes me more sad is what then happens in this House when a parliamentary colleague makes a mistake says so cops it on the chin and resigns from being a Minister. But then what do we descend into in this House? Led by the Opposition parties we then descend into the gutter. I actually want to reflect on comments that I will attribute to my colleague Chris Tremain. He basically said that if as a team you are unable to score points from your own success what do you resort to? You resort to all sorts of tactics where you play the person not the ball. That is why it is a sad day for me in the House today because I do not think that it is ever a good day for the New Zealand public to see this kind of display which is playing the person instead of playing the ball.I am quite surprised actually that it was led by the Greens. From a political perspective obviously they got in before Labour did. Labour was too busy sort of trying to work out its reshuffle and its realignment of players on its team with Shane Jones moving on to a better team. Then of course Trevor moves up to a better position but goes back literally within hours.I think the most appalling comment that came through today was the absolutely revolting and despicable comment from the speaker from the Green Party suggesting that anyone in this Parliament—anyone in this Parliament—would not do their utmost to protect the most vulnerable in our communities. That comment I think is an absolute disgrace. That more than anything has saddened me today. I think it is upsetting because instead this place descends into very personal attacks.I could stand here and I could list other Ministers in other Governments who have made mistakes wittingly or unwittingly and what has happened to them. But actually the New Zealand public are not interested in that. What they are interested in is the fact that we had a Minister who made a mistake he copped it on the chin and he has gone as a Minister. We have a Prime Minister who has very high standards for his Ministers. I think Nick Smith said that in 36 hours it was dealt with. But actually coming back to this whole point of the fact that Opposition members are not able to score points—they cannot score points in the real game and the real game is actually focusing on the things that matter to hard-working New Zealanders such as the things we are doing with the Budget next week the things that we are doing in terms of improving access to health care for hard-working New Zealanders and for raising achievement in our schools.But the most significant area in this debate today is in keeping our communities safer because the very Minister whom they are gloating about today is the Minister who got $26 million worth of P off the streets of New Zealand. I think the sort of thing that New Zealanders judge their Government on is the results. This side of the House this Government is delivering results.I will not take much more time but I do want to finish on the results that also matter to hard-working New Zealanders and they are in the area of the work that this side of the House has done on protecting very vulnerable victims. It is this side of the House that put police safety orders in place which immediately protect women and children who are under threat from domestic violence. So it is absolutely abhorrent to me to hear the sorts of comments that came from the Greens this afternoon in this House. I am enormously proud of the results that this side of the House has achieved in terms of lowering crime rates—the lowest rates in 30 years—and in particular the work we have done on protecting victims such as victims’ notification victims’ protection the victims’ offenders levy and we have put money into preventing sexual violence. We have done more than any Government previously has done in the space of domestic violence.It is a sad day in this House but sad for the reasons that we descend into the gutter with the Opposition speakers on a day like today instead of acknowledging the results and focusing on the results that this Government has achieved and will continue to achieve.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.UrgencyHon GERRY BROWNLEE (Leader of the House): I moveThat urgency be accorded the introduction and passing of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. The Government has determined after careful consideration that this bill be progressed through all stages under urgency to address an immediate public health concern. This piece of legislation will immediately remove all interim approved psychoactive products from the market.It is not so long ago that we passed the Psychoactive Substances Bill. It passed through the House with 119 votes supporting it and I think the general hope from MPs was that this scourge on our society would be better contained if we were to have the legislation that was proposed. Things move on and I think it is a tribute to the whole Parliament that in the last few days there has been a considerable amount of work and effort from all sides of the House to get a bill to the House today that can be once again broadly supported.I think the work that the Hon Tony Ryall has done on behalf of Peter Dunne in the last couple of days has got us to a point where we can be confident that once this bill ispassed we are as sure as we can be about removing all of this horrible product from the market. I am sure that there will be opportunities in the future for the House to continue considering this because there will always be people who want to put these sorts of substances in the road of those who believe they need them as part of their life. With those few comments I move the motion.A party vote was called for on the questionThat urgency be accorded.Ayes107New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 34; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; Mana 1; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.Noes14Green Party 14.Motion agreed to.The result corrected after originally being announced as Ayes 106 Noes 15.Psychoactive Substances Amendment BillFirst ReadingHon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health) on behalf of theAssociate Minister of Health: I moveThat the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be set down for second reading forthwith without being referred to a select committee. To begin I would like to thank all parties in the House for their help in bringing us to this point today. I have appreciated the great cooperation that all parties have provided in discussions around their positions and their considerations on this bill and I think that we bring an amendment bill to the House today that the great majority of the House has indicated its willingness to support.The bill does two things. It ends all interim product approvals and interim retail and wholesale licences and it prevents information derived from tests on animals being used to support a product approval application. The remainder of the primary legislation remains in place and it remains the most appropriate way of dealing with emerging psychoactive substances. The bill has a few other features to support those two main aims of removing all products from the market forthwith and restricting the use of animal testing. It provides that all products that have interim approval will be recalled and that those who have had retail or wholesale licences removed must comply with the recall. The recall order will require all licence holders including those whose licences are cancelled by this amendment to tell the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority what products they have and confirm how they have been disposed of.The bill clarifies that the Crown is not liable for any damages or to pay any compensation as a result of the amendments. We know that some businesses will lose money as a direct result of these amendments. Our judgment is that the public health objectives outweigh those losses and no compensation will be paid for that. It clarifies that the authority must not approve a product until regulations are in effect and unless it is satisfied that the product poses a low risk of harm. These regulations will be in place in the next few months.When Parliament enacted the Psychoactive Substances Act last year 19 votes to one the legislation contained transitional provisions that allowed some products to stay on the market. These were products for which no serious adverse reactions had been reported. If serious adverse effects emerged later the authority had the power to revoke approval immediately. It has used that power to remove 11 products from the marketmost recently on Thursday 1 May. Serious adverse reactions have been increasingly reported to the authorities including vomiting seizures and psychotic episodes. The problem that has become apparent is that it is often not possible to attribute reactions to a particular product. People call the poison centres or the centre for adverse reactions monitoring and say they took synthetic cannabis or legal highs. If the authority does not know what products caused the adverse effect it cannot use its powers to intervene. So what we have are products that have not been tested and that are causing harm and the Government having limited ability to intervene.Last month Cabinet discussed this issue not for the first time and agreed that the Hon Peter Dunne would arrange for legislation to be drafted that would remove all products from the market immediately. It was always intended to allow only products that had passed rigorous testing and had been shown to pose only a low risk of harm. The interim period was intended to last only a few months while regulations were prepared. However we still have the products on the market that have not been through any testing and it is clearly no longer tenable for this situation to continue given that the serious adverse effects continue to be reported and that the authority is unable to respond quickly.On enactment this legislation will revoke all interim approvals for psychoactive products. All products currently on the market will become unapproved products with heavy penalties for manufacturing and supplying them. It will also become illegal to possess these products so anyone thinking of stocking up today should bear that in mind. This legislation will also cancel all interim retail and wholesale licences and begin a recall of all products that had interim approval. Let us be clear here: Parliament passes the legislation the Governor-General signs the legislation and then at 12.01 a.m. on Thursday it becomes illegal to sell supply or possess illegal highs and those products must be off the shelves. At 12.01 a.m. on Thursday it becomes illegal to sell supply or possess illegal highs. The products must be off the shelf.The other thing this legislation does is stop tests on animals being used to seek approval for psychoactive products. As the Prime Minister has said one of the reasons why we have had the delay in getting the regulations prepared is that the Government has been reluctant to sanction animal testing for these products. I am sure all members will be pleased that the bill under consideration will effectively not allow products to be tested on animals. The bill prevents the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority and the Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee from having regard to information from animal trials to support the approval of psychoactive products. They cannot use any information that has come from animal testing; therefore there is no reason to do the testing. The only exception is this: the authority may consider information undertaken from an overseas trial if that information indicates that the product may not be low risk. So the authority can consider information from an overseas trial to protect the health of individuals. It cannot consider an overseas trial to support the approval of a psychoactive substance. No one will be doing animal testing to support an application here because it will not be able to be used for consideration.The rest of the primary legislation remains in place. As we all know the large number of substances and the ability of makers to rapidly change the make-up of products mean that traditional approaches do not work. In the long term the Psychoactive Substances Act remains the best way of dealing with the problem of emerging psychoactive substances. I would like to thank all those parties in the House who have participated in this process and commend this bill to the House.Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Perhaps it would be helpful to the House’s procedure because the Minister of Health in his speech referred to the fact that at the appropriate time he would move a truncation of the process to say that the Leader of the Housemoved that urgency be accorded the introduction and passing of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill so the House is then tasked with every stage and any further motions to proceed with that truncation is not necessary.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Labour will support this Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. The two principal objectives of this bill are policies that Labour wholeheartedly endorses and supports. The first is to remove the transition provisions of the principal Act that have allowed for untested drugs to remain on the shelf and available for sale to the public. That is a position that like other parties in the House Labour came to in response to the overwhelming public outcry that untested drugs remained available and that their effects were unknown and that their effects became apparent only when young people and other people using those drugs experienced the harmful side-effects of those substances. That situation really flew in the face of the principles behind the original legislation which were that psychoactive substances would need to be tested first before they could go on the market for sale and that the onus of proof that they were of low or no risk would lie with the manufacturers not with the users in the community around them.The other objective of this legislation is to ban all animal testing for psychoactive substances. This is a policy that Labour has supported since the principal legislation was debated in the House and our party along with other parties supported the amendment in the name of Mojo Mathers to remove animal testing right back when we were debating the principal legislation. That amendment was blocked by National by United Future—actually I think it was Peter Dunne independent MP at the time—and through the abstention of the New Zealand First Party. So we could have dealt with this issue of animal testing long before today but we are very very happy that it has been included in this legislation—again because the Government has finally buckled to public pressure and the overwhelming pressure that has been placed upon it by Opposition parties.It is never a positive outcome when a piece of legislation has to be amended in such a short space of time after it was originally passed. The Psychoactive Substances Act was passed in July last year. It received its first reading in April last year—a little over 12 months ago. At the time after the first reading debate there was a debate in the House around the shortened select committee period that Parliament was being given to consider the legislation. At that time in that debate I said I was concerned that we were rushing this legislation that it was complex legislation that it was novel that no other country in the world had attempted this approach to regulating psychoactive substances and that it was absolutely inappropriate for Parliament to be rushing the legislation.I warned that mistakes would be made. In fact I went back and checked out exactly what it was I said and I said: “I don’t want us to be back here in 12 months’ time realising that we have made a mistake and having to fix those mistakes up.” Here we are—Mike Sabin: You said a lot of other stuff too.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —apologies if it is not the exact quote—12 months later admitting that we made a mistake.Dr Paul Hutchison: You supported the bill though—119 to 1.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Paul Hutchison makes a very important point: 119 MPs supported this bill. I supported this bill. I sat on the Health Committee and considered the issues. One of the issues was whether we should have a transition period. The select committee decided that we should. That decision was made at breakneck speed because we were given just 2 months at select committee to deal with these complex issues.We are the first country in the world dealing with this type of legislation and the Government gave us one-third of the time that it would normally give a selectcommittee to consider those issues. The Government will say quite rightly that we needed to have the legislation passed—Mike Sabin: What did the Labour Government do between 1999 and 2008?IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —Mike Sabin just be quiet and let me say what I have to say—by August last year but because the Government failed to prioritise the Psychoactive Substances Act the legislation was brought to the House only in February last year. If we had got started in February last year that would have given us a little bit of time.But what the Government did was sit on that legislation from February until April and it gave the select committee even less time to consider the legislation.Mike Sabin: What did the member’s party do until 2008?IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: What the member’s party did until 2008 was ask the Law Commission to do a complete review of the Misuse of Drugs Act because we understood that the Misuse of Drugs Act was no longer capable of dealing with the number and variety of drugs that were available for supply in the 21st century. That is what the Labour Government did. We asked the independent Law Commission to go away and figure out what the best way forward was. The Law Commission came back in April 2011 with a comprehensive report one chapter—just one chapter—of which is the precursor to the Psychoactive Substances Act. It took that Government 2 years to take the recommendations on psychoactive substances from the Law Commission—2 years to bring that legislation before the House—and then it said to Parliament: “I’m sorry but you’re going to have to rush this.” That is why mistakes were made—because that Government did not prioritise getting these drugs off the streets. That is why Parliament made a mistake.I am happy to say that I was one of the MPs who voted for that legislation and it was the right thing to do because had we not passed that legislation then all those drugs would still be out there—not 41 but about 300 different drugs would still be out there if we had not passed the legislation. But it was not perfect and one of the main reasons it was not perfect was that the select committee was not given time to consider it properly and the select committee did not have time because that Government did not make this a priority. That is a fact.The other reason we are back here today is that having implemented the legislation the Government then made an absolute dog’s breakfast of resourcing it giving the Ministry of Health the tools it needed and getting the regulations sorted out. One of the reasons we hear for why it has taken so long to get the regulations sorted out is that John Key was uncomfortable with animal testing. But it was National that blocked the amendments that would have stopped animal testing. So if we had gone back and got the legislation right in the first place if National had voted for MojoMather’s amendment then we would not have had to delay the regulation-making process because John Key would not have had to worry about animal testing.The other thing the Government has failed to do is use the provisions in the current legislation to get rid of unsafe drugs. It got rid of five at the beginning of the year—well done; not bad—but then after the announcement that the law was going to be changed it got rid of another six. That just smacks of an under-resourced Ministry of Health incapable of properly implementing the original legislation.This has been a shambles from the National Government from the very beginning—its failure to respond to the Law Commission’s report its slow response as to when one was finally coming the rushed select committee process that caused mistakes in the legislation and then the shambolic implementation of the legislation once it was finally passed. Make no mistake New Zealand the reason why we have got untested unsafe drugs still on our streets is that National has made a hash of this from day one. And thereason for that is that it never prioritised this issue. It was never important to National. It has always been a rush job. Here is another rush job and it is simply a reflection of the fact that making sure our young people are safe from drugs that have a high risk of causing harm was never a priority for this Government. That is why we are in the mess we are in today and that is why we are having to clean it up.Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua): Mr Iain Lees-Galloway tends to be a little shrill about a very complex matter of regulating drugs effectively which the Labour Government certainly failed to do in 9 long years. No matter how much Mr Iain Lees-Galloway rants and raves this is a complex area and countries around the world are wrestling with the best and most effective ways of minimising harm from psychoactive substances.I must say that when the Health Committee heard submissions on the Psychoactive Substances Bill last year New Zealanders up and down the country came to the select committee saying how they were deeply concerned for the children of New Zealand and the adolescents who were using psychoactive substances because of the serious adverse effects—none more so than the Mayor of Timaru who came up to Wellington and said that it was the No. 1 problem in her community of Timaru and that the parents and the whole community were begging her to do something about it. After all the aim of the original legislation was to minimise harm from psychoactive substances and protect the public health. It was regarded as highly innovative legislation and a huge amount of thought had been put into it but as I said before this is a very complex issue that no Government that I know of anywhere in the world has managed to get on top of.I agree and accept that politically there is a very strong call for banning psychoactive substances. The reality is that under the circumstances where there is a danger that they will be driven underground—and it is a very real danger—there is a concern that we must have the infrastructure and services available to look after those people who have withdrawal problems. And it is important to resource the police.There are several ironies relating to this legislation the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. As JohnRoughan pointed out in theNew Zealand Herald it is somewhat extraordinary that one would ban cannabis and yet cannabinoids synthetic cannabis which is often many times more potent than the natural weed was legal. So it is entirely appropriate that we are indeed addressing this issue.One of the major tenets of this bill was that manufacturers are required to demonstrate minimal risk to humans who use so-called party pills or legal highs and this legislation is about risk management. However to demonstrate minimal risk in 2014 does require the possibility of some animal testing. We had huge debate in this House regarding that. The Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee was absolutely clear that unfortunately despite the rhetoric of the Greens and the anti-vivisectionists in 2014 there are not substantive tests available that can demonstrate minimal risk. Professor Robson from the expert advisory committee ProfessorGluckman and the Ministry of Health all acknowledge that to be the case and that it may be several years before we have alternatives that are effective to demonstrate minimal harm. However in the meantime we are doing the appropriate thing in taking psychoactive substances off the shelves.I do want to mention that there are some wider safety scientific and economic issues at stake around the passing of this bill because there is no doubt in my mind that if New Zealand is to say that science is at the centre of Government and we are going to continue to have high standards around the medicines and drugs we use it is fundamental to insist that these medications undergo rigorous testing according to best-practice scientific methods which today as I have said does indeed require—to the best of our knowledge—animal testing. We hope that this can be replaced and thelegislation was very clear that it should be minimised if indeed it was needed. We hope that technology will advance rapidly and allow it not to be necessary.But the erosion of these principles in the pharmaceutical and biological engineering field can lead to the erosion of standards and opportunities in the health sector in the agricultural sector in the biosecurity sector and in the innovative sector. I remember well the debates around the Environmental Risk Management Authority and the hazardous substances and new organisms legislation some years ago where the Greens wanted to exercise the precautionary principle to the zenith degree with the result that New Zealand’s capability and capacity in the area of biotechnology have been reduced. This does mean a reduced capability in the agricultural and biosecurity area. It is also ironic that the Greens talk about this precautionary principle for offshore drilling and indeed as I say in the biological engineering area but when it comes to party pills they are not so worried about the standards that are used. These pills or substances are used on adolescents’ developing brains when they are at their most sensitive.There is no doubt that this amendment bill is a practical response to the fact that ordinary New Zealanders up and down the country do not want psychoactive substances to be available legally. I feel very strongly that the House is supporting this bill and it is an irony that the Greens are abstaining.Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): Labour will support the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill through all stages and we have also today supported the urgency motion for the passage of this bill. You cannot say that you want action in a hurry and then not support urgency for this bill but I think there needs to be a little bit of background about this bill before we get into the details of it. Last month a number of us—in fact I believe probably all the colleagues in the House—received a letter from the Hon Peter Dunne. It started off with “Dear Colleague”. The date of the letter was 15 April last month. He said he wanted to update us on the progress and the achievements of the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013. He went on to say that a blanket ban on yet-to-be-developed psychoactive substances would be very difficult to implement and to enforce particularly as it will relate to products or substances that do not yet exist etc. etc. He then went on to blame local government because the implementation had not occurred as fast as he would have liked and he went on to say he knows there are pockets of frustration but remember the Act is only 9 months old. That was on 15 April.There was no intention by the Minister in charge of this legislation Peter Dunne who put the legislation through the House to make any changes based on information and I have to say a very very detailed fact sheet—a fact sheet that tells us what has happened since the Act came into effect on 18 July what the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority is doing and the transition to regulations. In fact under this part it said that the authority is operating a temporary system of controls called the interim regime etc. etc.What has happened here is that members on the back bench were putting pressure on Cabinet to make some changes—because maybe the backbenchers were listening to their constituents. That is something that was happening right across this Parliament. We were being told that we had got it wrong and that we needed to make changes. That went on for months and months. The pressure built. The pressure on the backbenchers built. Their constituents were telling them what the problems were and the reports were coming out in the media on a daily basis. So from 15 April—Louisa Wall: And Todd McClay.Hon ANNETTE KING: And Todd McClay?Louisa Wall: In Rotorua.Hon ANNETTE KING: Oh Todd McClay—a Minister—was probably one of the Ministers who did know what was happening. But the pressure was going on in a very very strong way to the backbenchers. So then there needed to be an action and this is where I find it rather difficult. When you read the letter there is nothing about getting this changed at all. Then you hear from the Minister of Health that we have been discussing this issue last month—and we did it more than once. We did it several times. Minister was it after 15 April when we received the letter? The question that in Committee we can ask is whether Peter Dunne was in the loop. Why was he telling us: “No need for change. Everything’s going well. We’re pretty pleased with what is happening.”?Then I read the regulatory impact statement that the Ministry of Health has put out. It is dated 4 May 2014 I think. The ministry wrote that after Cabinet was looking at this issue so it did not actually give this advice to Cabinet before it made the decision. And the regulatory impact statement is very interesting. It says that we do not have all the information we need to fully assess the impacts of this proposal we do not know the number or the proportion of people we do not know the exact date the regulations will be made we do not know the impact on other regulatory actions we cannot say how much enforcement work is needed by the police and finally we do not know what proportion of people use these products or what the effect will be and there has been no formal review of this proposal planned. So in the Committee stage Minister I would like you to answer all those questions because you have been working on it for a long time before you have brought this bill to the House and we are going to have to trust your word on this.It was very clear when the original bill was brought into this House and my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway warned that if we did not take time and care over this bill we would get it wrong. He made that very strong warning in all the speeches that he made. He also said that we had the opportunity at the Health Committee to get it right and not to rush it. He asked for it not to be rushed and there was no need to rush it Minister because it was back in October 2012 that you got the first regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Health. It took until April the next year for the bill to be introduced—6 months later—and that original regulatory impact statement said this: “Current legislation has proved ineffective in dealing with the rapid growth in new psychoactive substances such as party pills and other legal highs which can be synthesised to be one step ahead of existing controls. Cabinet has agreed to new legislation to address this by prohibiting the sale of all”—all—“psychoactive substances unless approved by a regulator.” So back in October 2012 this is what it said Cabinet had agreed to—that it would have new legislation prohibiting the sale of all psychoactive substances unless approved by a regulator.It went on to say: “The new legislation will reduce risks to the public by removing untested and potentially harmful products from being sold …” etc. That is dated October 2012. Six months later we got the bill and it was rushed through the Health Committee I believe in about 2 months. So what we are seeing here is when the chooks do come home to roost. Sometimes even if it is said by Opposition members and the Government does not wish to take much notice of them maybe they ought to be listened to because we are back here trying to fix something that maybe we could have got right in the original bill.There was then an interjection I believe by one of the backbenchers over there of “Well what did Labour do about it? Labour did nothing about it.” Well I can tell you that Labour did do something about psychoactive substances. They had been around for about 15 years and they were legal. They were—[Bell rung] Sorry Mr Assistant Speaker I thought you were telling me my time was up but I have got—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): No 2 more minutes.Hon ANNETTE KING: —2 minutes. Legal highs were legal because the Misuse of Drugs Act bans only substances that are specifically listed in the legislation. Attempts were made under a Labour Government to ban using the Misuse of Drugs Act such things as benzylpiperazine and they were replaced very quickly by a new product. So we did ask the Law Commission to undertake a comprehensive review of the Misuse of Drugs Act. It was completed and given to this Government in 2011 I believe and then the Government took till 2013 to do something about it. It recommended that we did make changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act. The Government has chosen not to do that and put in place a very narrow bill which now needs to be changed. I am pleased that it is being changed. I am particularly pleased for Trevor Mallard who with Mojo Major went out to bat strongly against animal testing and I have to give some credit to John Banks. I do not always agree with the language that he uses but there is no doubt that he does have passion for animals as does my colleague Trevor Mallard and Mojo Major—Hon Members: Mathers!Hon ANNETTE KING: —sorry Mojo—Mojo Mathers who raised this issue on a number of occasions. So we are back here now to fix this problem. I would like to see it fixed as fast as possible but there are some questions that need to be answered by the Government around the delay and around answers to the questions that have been posed in the regulatory impact statement of May which was put out just a few days ago by the Ministry of Health.MOJO MATHERS (Green): I will be upfront. Today we had a difficult decision at caucus. This Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill has been difficult for us because on the one hand the Green Party totally welcomes the Government’s U-turn on the animal testing of these drugs. In particular I am thrilled that the Government has finally adopted in substance the amendment that I put up on the Psychoactive Substances Bill last year which ruled out the use of information from animal testing to support an application. I note that the Government voted then against that amendment and I know that thousands of New Zealanders are celebrating now because the Government has finally done a U-turn on this decision. But on the other hand we know that the other clauses in this bill around prohibition of the sale of these drugs will create a dangerous black market in these drugs. Later today my colleague and health spokesperson Kevin Hague will speak further on our concerns around these provisions. So after careful deliberation between the two fairly different clauses in the bill we have decided to abstain from voting but we do want to affirm our total support for the Government decision to back down on animal testing of party pills and legal highs.This decision is absolutely the right one. We are thrilled that the Government has finally listened to the tens of thousands of New Zealanders who raised their voices against the testing of these products on animals. The depth of public feeling on this issue was highlighted last year when more than 60000 people signed a petition calling for animal testing of party pills to be ruled out. People in their tens of thousands have marched signed petitions emailed MPs and written letters and finally just over a year later the Government has got it: animal testing is an issue that is not going to go away. The Government decision to rule out animal testing is morally and ethically the right one. It will ensure that thousands of animals will not be subject to the extreme suffering that is involved in toxicology testing.I want to talk about the process that happened last year when the Psychoactive Substances Bill came up because at that time many animal welfare organisations and people put in considerable time and effort to write substantive submissions on that bill on the issue of animal testing. They did this in good faith on the advice of the Ministerin charge of the bill Peter Dunne and Ministry of Health officials that the best way for concerns around animal testing to be addressed was via the submissions process. Unbelievably after all this effort their submissions were ruled out of order rejected by the chair of the Health Committee as not relevant and returned to them. These people were devastated that their democratic right to be heard had been rejected.In response the Green Party held our own hearings to hear the evidence that the select committee did not get to hear. The information that was presented at these hearings was well researched and directly relevant to the substance of this bill and should never have been excluded. We wrote a report that we presented to the Health Committee that summarised these submissions and we concluded that a clause should be added to this bill ruling out the use of information from animal testing to support an application. I put up an amendment doing just that.Ruling out animal testing is the best decision in the best interests of both animals and people. The reality is that the results of animal testing are notoriously unreliable. Because of this in 2008 the United States Environmental Protection Agency the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration started a process to replace all toxicology testing on animals with non-animal tests because these tests produce results that are more relevant to humans and therefore more reliable. They are able to do this because the technology and safety testing have come a long way in the last 20 years. Despite what a previous speaker said the alternatives to animal testing are many and include in vitro human cell line studies computer models micronucleus assays in vitro absorption tests and so on.We cannot claim to be world leaders in animal welfare when other countries are so far ahead of us. The United Kingdom has a ban on animal testing of recreational substances and this includes tobacco and alcohol on the grounds that such testing of recreational products is unethical and immoral. This ban has helped drive much of the development and research into non-animal testing of drugs. They have also confirmed directly with us that their ban will also apply to psychoactive substances when these drugs are intended for recreational use.One reason why animal testing continues to be carried out for most toxicology testing in New Zealand is that many of the non-animal tests are more expensive than animal tests. For example we heard at the hearings evidence from someone who wanted a product tested and when they took it to be tested for safety they were told it would cost $10000 to test it using animals. When she said she did not want to use animals she was then informed it would cost $30000 to test it using non-animal tests rather than those tests. So cost is the main driver of using animal tests in toxicology testing in New Zealand despite what people will tell you to the opposite. Basically our argument all along has been that decisions around safety testing should not be based on protecting the profit margins of the party pill industry.Just prior to the Psychoactive Substances Bill being debated last year someone sent me an undercover video of toxicology testing being undertaken on beagles in the United States. Although it was not the most gruesome animal testing video that I have seen it was definitely the saddest. Seeing these beautiful affectionate animals barely out of the puppy stage confined alone in bleak stainless steel cages forced to ingest drugs every day that made them feel sick and then killed for dissection was gut-wrenching and utterly heartbreaking. Make no mistake toxicology testing on animals causes a really high level of suffering. Once you have seen what has happened to animals in toxicology testing you cannot un-see it. This video confirmed for me what I have always believed—that testing for trivial purposes is utterly and completely indefensible. I know that there are thousands of decent New Zealanders out there who share that conviction. This is what has driven us to march in the streets and drives our passion. The great thingabout prohibiting animal testing of recreational drugs is that it will drive innovation and uptake of non-animal testing in New Zealand something that needs to happen and is long overdue. The animals deserve it from us.Hon JOHN BANKS (Leader—ACT): This is a surreal time in the history of this Parliament. If we were to close our eyes for a moment and think back 8 months there was a clamour in this House to enable the importers and the retailers of these mind-altering chemicals to have an opportunity to go out and exploit the vulnerable the poor the lonely and the dispossessed and to sell them these dangerous mind-altering chemicals for a profit and watch them slowly and progressively in front of their families and in their communities go mad—go mad.It was TV3’sCampbell Live programme that by instalments showed every member of this Parliament the madness of the decision that was taken 8 months ago by 120 members of this House to give this social experiment a burl. It has been a failure. The process we are going through this afternoon is a time-honoured process of dead rat swallowing. We got it wrong. I voted against it but we got it wrong. I saidtaiho but we got it wrong. I said that it was a crazy thing to do but we got it wrong. This Parliament got it wrong. It got it wrong. It got it badly wrong. Night after night on TV3 at 7 o’clock we saw the madness of what this Parliament did.The greed-driven drug importers and retailers were making a fortune and many of our young and vulnerable people were behaving like fruit-loops—like fruit-loops. So I say again in this Parliament today that we have got to get it right. We owe it to these young people who are lonely depressed out of work out of hope and looking for an opportunity to refresh their lives and give themselves some sense of worth. But taking drugs like mind-altering substances will not do it and I am stating that on the record in Parliament today.It is a bad idea to take these substances. It is a bad idea to drink far too much alcohol. It is a bad idea to smoke cigarettes. It is very expensive. In my long life I have never met anyone who has had an addiction to drugs alcohol tobacco or to any mind-altering substances—I have not met one person in my long life—who has said that it has made a difference that they feel good about it and that it has changed their life for the good. Not one person has ever said that to me. So we should proceed with this bill the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill today.I suppose on a lighter note I can thank Moonbeam the cat—the Prime Minister’s cat. That beautiful animal runs around his home in Parnell in the centre of my electorate and when the Prime Minister comes home from work each week he looks at that cat and says that he could not possibly allow that animal to be tortured to death in the name of and at the altar of a mind-altering drug experiment. Coming back he said that it cannot happen to beagle puppies and that it will not and that it cannot happen and should not happen to rabbits and now it will not. New Zealand is now saying no to animal testing for these mind-altering fun drugs which is exactly what I—and to be fair some of my colleagues—begged this Parliament to do 8 months ago. The numbers did not fall our way and the Mad Hatter’s tea party began.This Parliament should apologise to the young and the vulnerable the sick and the poor and those people looking for a high in life when there is so much low. We should be apologising to them today for giving them and selling them a fraud. Taking drugs to make you feel better is a fraud and we in this Parliament should be role models and saying no to these mind-altering drugs. If these substances have to be tested to make sure that they are safe and whether they are necessary—and they are not—then we should never ever sacrifice any animal at the altar of an experiment to try to prove that they are safe. The bottom line is—and everyone knows this in this House—that these substances will never be safe. These substances will never be safe.The original bill was well intentioned—I will gave that much credit to this House—in that it sought to ensure that psychoactive substances are safe but it was deeply flawed—deeply flawed. All the assumptions were deeply flawed. Every single member of Parliament who voted for it should stand up this afternoon and say that they got it wrong. I am prepared as a member of this House to say that I voted against it but we got it wrong. So we can put it right. The Prime Minister took leadership on the weekend and said that the Government is going to get it right so full marks to the Prime Minister. It is 8 months overdue but full marks to the Prime Minister.So what have we got here in the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill? Animals cannot be tested in this country to prove that these things are safe. You will never prove that these things are safe as long as the cows start walking home because they will never be safe. We should say in this Parliament today that these are dangerous substances and they will never be safe no matter what experiment you use and what jurisdiction it comes from. They will never be safe.As for evidence of harm—there is plenty of evidence of harm. We do not need to sacrifice beagle puppies on a gurney with their ears stapled to the ground and gas being pumped into them until they get to the LD50—half of them expire—to know that these substances are dangerous. We all know they are dangerous. The Assistant Speaker knows they are dangerous. Every member of Parliament knows they are dangerous. Our fine Minister of Health knows they are dangerous. We are taking them off the shelf. I know that there will be people out there who will say that it is their right to smoke this to suck that to inhale this and to drink something else. But it is our responsibility to say to people that it is bad for their health and to be very careful—very very careful.This bill is a vast improvement on the animal welfare front on the original flawed bill. We have not actually taken the opportunity to slam shut the door on animal testing because animal testing done offshore that is detrimental to the safety of one of these substances can be used to turn that substance down. I ask the Minister and I ask the Government whether they would say “Let’s do that and go back from today—but not for the future—so as of midnight tonight these drugs that have been tested on hapless beagle puppies and proved to be unsafe is a reason for us turning them down.” But we should have said in this bill that no evidence from any animal testing from any part of the world will ever form part of a decision to give the tick for one of these dangerous substances. That is what I wanted and maybe in 10 years’ time when I am back again we can revisit this legislation and do it again.What I want to do is finish as I began. I am going to accept my part of the responsibility for the Mad Hatters’ tea party that we have inflicted across the country on so many of the participants. It has been a bad experiment and this Parliament got it badly wrong. But today we are fixing the wrong because we can all make errors of judgment and mistakes. New Zealand says to the rest of the world today that first and foremost we do not believe that there should be any animal testing on any product under any circumstances unless it is for pharmaceutical lifesaving reasons because we believe in respect for all animals. We believe in the sanctity and the dignity of all the animals—however big or small—that we share this world with.That is the message from this Parliament—we are not going to sacrifice animals at the altar of mind-altering drugs. We are saying no to drugs today and we are telling young people that taking drugs is a very very risky business and that this Parliament’s responsibility is to try to help educate them on that front.BARBARA STEWART (NZ First): I stand on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. We all know in this House that psychoactive substances are a blight on New Zealand society and at long last this legislation will take these products off the shelves. There is little doubt thatParliament—and we are accepting our role in this—made an error with the previous legislation. We should have included a safety requirement in the legislation that these substances be proven to be safe prior to being available for sale and of course we should have had an animal welfare aspect in it as well. We are pleased that amendments have been made and we are committed to ensuring that this bill passes through the House as soon as possible so that these products can be taken off the shelves and right away from young people.Legal high manufacturers and resellers should definitely not be rolling in profits while the users are becoming a burden on our health system and experiencing dangerous withdrawals and terrible effects and of course many of them are committing crimes in our neighbourhood so that they can continue to purchase these substances. It is just not good enough. None of this should ever have happened. This legislation should be right at this particular time and we are very pleased that urgency has been accorded to this particular legislation.Ironically we heard through the select committee process for the original bill how difficult it was to remove all of the products from sale and off the shelves. We will not deny that this is not easy. It never is easy but at last today we have actually done something in this Parliament. We are pleased that urgency has been accorded to this particular bill. We have had so many constituents coming to our offices almost daily to tell of their trials and tribulations with these products. We have heard from parents at their wits’ end unable to keep their families functioning. It has been so sad.New Zealand First believes that the Government now owes it to the people of our country to ensure that there are dedicated services for people whose lives have been negatively impacted by the presence of legal highs—addiction services and counselling for parents and families who want to get their lives back on track. This has been a terrible experiment. We guarantee that there is a need for these services back in the community. It is not easy for anyone and it will not be easy for anyone until these addictive substances are out of the system of everybody who is taking them.When the Psychoactive Substances Bill was passed in Parliament we all believed that it was going to prevent the kinds of harm that our communities are experiencing. We have been too slow basically in removing these products from sale but we are pleased that the day has come when they are removed. To that end we are very glad to be here today to fix the mess that has been created while we waited for the law to take effect. I was delighted to hear the Hon Tony Ryall say that from Thursday these products will not be available for sale in any shop in New Zealand.We are absolutely rapt to hear that manufacturers have to prove that their products are safe and that no animals are going to be unduly tested to ensure that the products are safe. “Low risk” is a subjective term that we do have some qualms about and if that term is not changed perhaps the legislation will be back in Parliament again so that we can change it. We cannot afford to again expose our people in New Zealand to products that are not safe. These products need to undergo a testing regime that is similar to the pharmaceutical regime—very thorough and very detailed. We also support the new laws that prevent any information from animal testing being used for recreational drugs. This should really set a precedent for the future and alternatives to animal testing must be explored now with this legislation.In closing we are very happy in New Zealand First to finally see some progress which we hope will immediately benefit the people who are putting themselves in danger by using these untested psychoactive substances. New Zealand First has said very strongly right from the beginning that we believe that these products need to be banned. It is important for action to be swift. We are delighted that it is and hopefully by the end of the day we will know and can rest assured that from Thursday we will ensure that our communities and our people are safe right through New Zealand.MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): Let us take a little bit of a history lesson with the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill and go back to the late 1990s when psychoactive substances—so-called legal highs—emerged in New Zealand. They were a very new entity and it took until 2008 forbenzylpiperazine or BZP to essentially be banned through use of the Misuse of Drugs Act schedules. Those legal highs were taken off the shelf but the manufacturers of legal highs had already worked out that they could circumvent the legislation by altering the chemical compounds of these drugs and already had a strategy basically to beat that legislation. They have successfully done so for many years since then in the cat and mouse game in terms of these drugs always falling outside the current legislation the Misuse of Drugs Act.In July 2013 the Psychoactive Substances Bill was Peter Dunne’s and this Government’s effort to say: “Let’s take away the ability for them to do that and put the onus on them to prove that these products are safe.” In my view that standard of proof should be a very very high one. Ultimately what it really resulted in was a situation whereby in order for psychoactive substances to be available they had to have gone through a rigorous process including clinical testing and tests on animals so that they could be passed through as a low-risk product at the end. It is my belief that the starting point should always have been—and it certainly has been in my mind—that we did not want these drugs out there but by reversing the onus it took away the ability for the drug manufacturers to hold all the tools.So we got ourselves into a territory through this new model where essentially we are blazing new territory in world drug policy. Everyone knows that and actually many people around the world are looking at New Zealand. So it is sort of if you like pioneering stuff. It is not an easy track to take. If people had the answers to this they would have been trotted out many many years ago. So we have gone down this track. Of course with the benefit of hindsight we can accept that the products that were allowed to stay on the shelf as part of the transitional regime were dangerous. We are dealing with chemicals compounds and combinations thereof that are virtually unknown to science. It does not surprise me that we saw this sort of level of harm emerge once the bulk of the other ones were removed. This Government has moved quickly to actually say that being the case we need to get those off the shelf and recalibrate. Part of that recalibration is accepting that removing animal testing raises the bar. I have no problem with that.If that means that some will go underground as a consequence of this then so be it because I say to members in this House and I say to members of the public that there will always be some who do not obey laws regardless of what they are but in the main laws are there to guide society and to guide people who do obey laws as to what is right and what is wrong. Therefore the laws are really about providing consequences to those lawless people who will not obey them regardless of what they are. Not making laws because the lawless will not follow them anyway is not what we should do. What we should be doing is intending to guide the law-abiding citizens and ensure that the direction that we believe is safe and appropriate is the track that they go down.Although there will be some unintended consequences in terms of the degree of use underground that will always happen regardless of what the drug is and regardless of what the law is because there will always be some who do not obey the laws regardless of what they are. This is not so much of a U-turn as it is actually responding to what is pioneering legislation and difficult legislation because we are trying to get ahead of the ability for drug makers to spin their chemical mixtures well ahead of legislative responses so it is pragmatic and it does respond to the concerns of community. I commend members in the House. I am actually disgusted that the Green Party is takingthe approach that it is in this particular debate given the harms that it is causing out here. But I commend this as being a solution to an ongoing and evolving problem.CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Let us call it what it is. This Government got the Psychoactive Substances Act wrong. This Government got the law wrong. The Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill is an unprecedented U-turn—an unprecedented U-turn—by a shaky Government. Of course we support it. Of course we support it because we made the Government do it. We made it do it alongside the tens of thousands of people in every community around New Zealand the desperate families theCampbell Live show—yes John Campbell and theCampbell Live show—the radio stations and the newspapers including my own newspaper in Dunedin theOtago Daily Times. This is the result of community pressure. This Government got the law terribly wrong.When we voted for the original legislation we did so on the basis that it would rid our community of these substances. But what happened? They went out of the dairies but instantly a whole lot of new outlets—47—popped up. They got pretty much instant interim licences and many of them are now selling only legal highs. Eight of those were in Dunedin. One of those is in south Dunedin and it is situated next to SF Otago which is a community mental health facility. It has caused huge numbers of problems in the Dunedin community. [Interruption] I challenge the member across the House who lives in Dunedin to say that it has not. He laughs at the Opposition over here for raising this issue. It popped up a week after the Psychoactive Substances Act was passed and it has created a massive number of problems.What else have we seen? What have we seen since then? Attempts to try to get that facility closed have failed because the Ministry of Health said that it could not do anything about it. The Dunedin City Council said that its hands were tied. Meanwhile a Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority a very small group of people was formed in the corner of an open-plan office in the Ministry of Health to try to manage these issues—it is trying to manage them unsuccessfully. And what did it do? It gave licences to 47 outlets. It reduced around 300 substances to 42. It did not put in place a testing regime. Of those 42 substances that remained on the shelves in these purpose-built opened facilities with the interim licences from the Ministry of Health they had even worse substances that were given the licences to be sold.I want to show you the monthly report from the National Poisons Centre. In fact here is a colour version of the graph because it is a much better version for the people watching at home. The bar graph in red is the number of calls made to the National Poisons Centre in April of this year. It is higher than any number of calls that were made all throughout the last couple of years. From August last year when the Act was passed the numbers have consistently been high. What they show is that the substances that have been left on the shelves have been more concentrated have been more deadly and have had worse and worse effects on people in our community. We are seeing worse effects from withdrawal. We are seeing people vomiting for days unable to eat and unable to sleep. Psychiatrists are reporting that up to 40 percent of patients that they are seeing are related to legal highs.These are shocking shocking statistics. They are shocking concerns for our country. It was a shocking state of affairs to see the legislation pass through this House legislation from a Government that claimed that it was going to sort this problem out. We are now hearing that there are fears that the long-term effects of these psychoactive substances may be permanent and that there needs to be a lot more research done on this. There needs to be a lot more resources put into this. But what happened? What happened back in July last year when we raised these issues in the debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill as it passed before the House? We raised the issues of theimportance of providing more resources to the health system and what happened? Nothing. Nothing happened.I will read to you what was said in this House by me during the second reading of the Psychoactive Substances Bill. I said: “I was invited to and attended a symposium in Dunedin at the Wakari Hospital which is run by the district health board and mental health services and it included people working in inpatient services community-based mental health services emergency psychiatric services specialist alcohol and drug services and others. … They said that synthetic cannabis was a clinical burden on health services that emergency department patients had cyclical vomiting and seizures from smoking synthetic cannabis and that many of the patients had experienced delayed seizures up to a day after smoking synthetic cannabis.” They said that there was an increased demand on the health services. We said and we had put into the commentary on the Psychoactive Substances Bill that there would be an increased demand on the health services.Where has the reponse been from this Government around dealing with that increased demand? What did it do? It created a small group of people who sat in the corner of an open-plan office in the Ministry of Health and could not deal with the situation that they had been left with as the result of the bill passing. We raised these issues back in August. The National Poisons Centre has told us that the incidence of severe effects is going up and up every single month. A report produced in a recent edition ofNew Zealand Doctor magazine written by LeoSchep who is the toxicologist at Dunedin Hospital and who is widely considered reputable and credible on these issues said that “The ease of access and legal availability of these products has … created a substantial increase in the numbers of patients attending emergency departments and medical centres … The National Poisons Centre … had more calls last year about synthetic cannabinoids than any other single drug of abuse category.” He went on to describe the effects which I have just read out but what he also raised is that there is serious concern about the risk of causing ongoingneuro-psychiatric effects. This is one of the reasons that we had to get the legislation right and we did not get it right. The Government did not get it right last year. We have to get it right this year.Where are the resources? Where are the resources that are going to be provided in our communities after this bill is passed? Hopefully it will be passed and it will receive the Royal assent late on Wednesday night or early on Thursday morning which will make every single one of these substances unauthorised—unauthorised—and they will need to be taken off the shelves. There will be 2 weeks for there to be inspections of all those licensed premises to ensure that the substances are gone. Where are the resources though in our health system that are going to be dealing with the effects? Where is the Government on this? Where is the Government saying that it is going to put increased health resources into the community? This is a no-brainer.There was a second U-turn this week—I know that my colleagues have talked about this—and that was in respect of the 46000 people over 48 hours who signed a petition to ban animal testing. That again is a no-brainer. This is a bill that we must pass. We must get it through this House this week but the Government needs to own up and say that it got the original legislation wrong.SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): It is my intention to take just a short call on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill in the name of the Minister of Health the Hon Tony Ryall. In doing so I am pleased to note that as of 8 May at 12.01 the products that are currently on the market will become unapproved products that there will be heavy penalties for selling or supplying them and that it will also become illegal to possess them. That should be an adequate warning to anyone who is considering stockpiling.I say that 20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing; 20/20 foresight however is a far more rare and unusual thing. It amazes me that the previous speaker from the Labour Party Clare Curran could stand up and regale the House with her version of history and her version of what she thinks is the truth when she and her party voted to support this legislation as did every other member in the House with the honourable exception of the Hon John Banks the member for Epsom. When he was speaking earlier on in this debate he said we collectively got it wrong and we probably did. We did collectively get it wrong and the mistake we made was to apply a transition period to these drugs. We thought as a collective House that that was the right thing to do. It turns out that it was not. These are complicated issues. They are not just complicated issues for this Parliament for New Zealand and for New Zealanders but they are complicated issues for the entire world.Just a week or two ago inTime magazine I noticed there was a very good and comprehensive article about how the Americans are trying to grapple with this exact same issue. The article said “The most complicated drug problem in the world right now isn’tmeth or cocaine or heroin. It is synthetic drugs”. I want to make just a single point before sitting down and commending this bill to the House. It has got to do with the Greens’ position on this bill. Many of us put in a lot of time and effort to convince a lot of voters and put forward compelling cases as to why we should come to this Parliament to represent our constituencies and the people who put us in this Parliament. To come to Parliament and then as a caucus make a united decision to abstain on a hard piece of legislation is the ultimate parliamentary cop-out. The Greens to come to this House and sanctimoniously lecture members of the House about their positions on a whole range of issues yet when they come to a hard decision simply not to take it and not to make it is as I say the absolute ultimate cop-out. I am sure that Green supporters all around the country are watching that lack of decision on their part.There is an old proverb that says that when you reach a fork in the road take it—when you reach a fork in the road take it. My invitation to the Greens is that they should reconsider their cop-out position and that they should reconsider their decision to abstain from this legislation. They should actually come out make a decision and show that maybe one day in the future they could potentially be a fit and able coalition partner for a future Government many many years away from today. But right now they have shown and proved completely and conclusively that they are not fit to make any kind of hard decision and that they do not do so on the hard issues of the day. I commend this bill to the House.LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to participate in the first reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. I do so as a member of the Health Committee which considered the original piece of legislation. I want to acknowledge the 119 of us in this House who voted in support of that legislation. I was one of those people. But I do want to highlight a couple of learning opportunities for us as a Parliament. The first learning opportunity was the manner in which that bill was rushed through the House. The reality is we had a truncated process to meet a deadline that the Government knew about. It forced us as a Parliament to rush through a piece of legislation we are now here having to correct. The reason we are here to correct it is that the people of New Zealand collectively have come out they have marched and they have shown that democracy in this country works. I also need to pay tribute to John Campbell and theCampbell Live programme for allowing the content of our community to be seen and for allowing the large number of people in communities around our country who have huge problems with these substances to have the forum have the platform to then influence this Government.As a member of the select committee I thought it was very interesting that the transition provisions—you are right—were put into the original legislation because we did not want blanket prohibition. That was the reality. We recognised that there were products in the country that needed to be regulated. We did not want prohibition so what we did was say that if the products had been sold within the last 3 months that was the qualification for them to be sold. But the major flaw in the bill that we as a collective group of parliamentarians enacted on 18 July last year was that we were to develop regulations around the approval process for psychoactive products. What the public of New Zealand needs to know is that the Ministry of Health was empowered with that responsibility. It was the responsibility of the then Associate Minister of Health Todd McClay to implement that piece of legislation.What I have just found out through one of his own press releases is that on 21 March this year the Ministry of Health concluded its submission process. So in fact the Ministry of Health at this point in time has not developed the approval process which is actually the biggest flaw in the Act that we are now aiming to address. That is absolutely the fault of the Government. The Government is trying to say it is the fault of Parliament. Actually it is not; it is the fault of the Government.What I want to do is acknowledge our local councils because we did empower our local councils to develop local approved products policy. What I know is that in my community of Manurewa my local board organised a meeting on 14 August last year so that my community could participate in a process to develop our local approved products policy. Local councils like Napier City Council and Hamilton City Council were on to it. Our councils our elected local board officials were on to it. This Parliament was not on to it. We are all here tonight rushing this bill through because of the implementation of the primary piece of legislation which that Government absolutely has to take responsibility for because unless you have developed a regime—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.LOUISA WALL: I thought it was appropriate after the dinner break to talk about why this Parliament voted for the Psychoactive Substances Act. It became a problem for us as a country because on 1 August 2013 there were temporary class drug notices that were going to expire. That would have enabled 30 substances in 50 products that we had deemed unsafe to go back on to the market. So it was with some urgency that we rushed the legislation through. For those people listening Associate Minister of Health Dunne introduced the bill on 26 February 2013. The first reading was on 9 April the second reading was on 27 June the Committee stage was on 9 July and we passed the legislation on 17 July. So my primary point before the dinner break was that on 18 July when the Psychoactive Substances Act became an Act of the New Zealand Parliament no regulations had been created. The importance of those regulations was in fact in the development of a psychoactive products approval process. In fact one of the reasons we are here today is that the Government to this day has not implemented a regime that would see us engage in a process that could deem products to be safe and fit for human consumption.One of the wins I believe we had on the Health Committee was ensuring that the purpose of the Psychoactive Substances Act—and I am going to read it—was “to regulate the availability of psychoactive substances in New Zealand to protect the health of and minimise harm to individuals who use psychoactive substances.” So as a House as representatives of communities right across the country we did recognise that we hadto do something. So I want to acknowledge the Ministers who have been involved in this piece of legislation. Initially it was the Hon Peter Dunne then it was the Hon Todd McClay and now we see the Hon Tony Ryall leading the passage of this Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill through the House.But one of the major issues of contention I guess has been around section 66 of the Psychoactive Substances Act. As a member of the select committee we were really clear that we wanted to empower local communities to develop local approved products policy. What we saw was a very mobilised energised community and local government sector which undertook that task earnestly. So we saw Napier City Council come out in early January 2014 with a comprehensive local approved products policy but the problem that we had was that the regime that should have regulated whether or not products were safe for consumption by New Zealanders was not implemented and to this day it is not implemented.I do want to highlight as a member of the select committee that we were not able to hear submissions about whether or not psychoactive substances should be tested on animals. I would like to acknowledge Mojo Mathers for the leadership that she showed in actually holding her own hearings and getting a lot of New Zealanders to make submissions outside of the select committee process. In fact my colleague the Hon Trevor Mallard has been engaged in a process just recently that has led to 48000 New Zealanders being very clear that they do not want to test these products on animals.I just want to clarify for the record the position of the Hon John Banks. On 27 June in the second reading debate on the Psychoactive Substances Bill he said: “If you cannot prove your [new-found] drug of choice is safe without putting animals in abject misery you cannot sell the drug.” So the emphasis for the Hon John Banks was in fact about protecting animals. I understand that and I commend him for that position. But when we look at his vote against that bill it was not because he did not want these products to be sold; he just did not want animals used in the testing regime to determine whether or not those substances were safe.I think we were all very clear as a Parliament that prohibition from a central government perspective was not the solution. We unfortunately have been flooded in terms of the market for these products. But what I would like to highlight in my final few minutes are two issues that I think are going to be really important going forward and that the Minister will have to oversee. One is around enforcement of the products. So at 1 minute past midnight on Thursday when this legislation has Royal assent and becomes the law of the country we have to make sure that police are empowered with the resources to ensure that a black market does not develop. In fact that was one of the compelling reasons why we as a select committee approved this bill because we were worried about the products that were in the country.The second issue is the health and well-being of addicts. Because these products have been allowed to be sold in our communities we need to ensure—and Minister this is I guess directly under your responsibility—that people who have addictions people who have mental health issues and people who need support through no fault of their own can access support whether it be counselling or other forms of support to help them through this process. Obviously none of us want people to transition from these drugs to other illegal drugs. They need support so that will be one of the critical follow-ups. My colleague Iain Lees-Galloway who holds this shadow portfolio—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member’s time has expired.Bill read a first time.Second ReadingHon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health) on behalf of theAssociate Minister of Health: I moveThat the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill be now read a second time. I would like to thank members for their contributions in the first reading debate.I think it would be worth just reminding ourselves of the key provisions of this bill. Interim approvals for products are revoked. There is a recall order for all these products with interim approval. Interim licences to sell psychoactive products by retail or wholesale are revoked. Retailers and wholesalers whose licences have been revoked must comply with the recall order as though their licences were still in effect—this is the issue of the 2 weeks that we were discussing by way of interjection across the House earlier on. Licences for the products are going to be cancelled forthwith.At 12.01 a.m. on Thursday the products are illegal. We are allowing a 2-week period for the seller’s licence to exist because that gives us the ability to have greater enforcement powers during that 2-week period. So we can access the site; we can ask for information.Another point is that the Crown has no liability for losses or damages arising from the enactment of the legislation and of course there is to be no animal testing of psychoactive substances. As members know there is this exception where information from an overseas trial can be used if it will help protect public health.The impact of the amendments will be that there will be no products permitted to be sold from the legislation’s commencement until regulations are made which is expected to be within the next few months. New products will have to be developed and trialled and go through the processes.I would like to thank those members for their contributions and I commend the further progress of the bill to the House.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Labour continues to support this legislation the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill because it does remove untested drugs from the shelf and it also precludes animal testing from being used to prove that psychoactive substances are either low-risk or no risk. Those are two policies that we wholeheartedly endorse.There has been a lot of debate this evening about who voted for the original legislation the Psychoactive Substances Act and why people voted for it. This bill should not be misinterpreted as overturning the original legislation. This bill amends the original legislation. It takes the transitional provisions out of the Psychoactive Substances Act and it precludes the use of animal testing which was already somewhat restricted in the principal Act due to a compromise position that was able to be reached at the Health Committee. This bill should not be interpreted by the public as somehow overturning the overwhelming vote in favour of the original legislation the Psychoactive Substances Act.I just want to respond to John Banks because he seems quite tickled with himself that he was the one MP who voted against the original legislation. He then went on to say that somehow or another voting against the legislation meant that he was saving youngsters from using these drugs saving them from the perils and dangers of these drugs. Well let us be really clear here. If Parliament had followed John Banks’ lead on this legislation all the drugs that were out there before this Act was put in place and all the ones to which temporary ban notices had been applied would still be out there—something between 200 and 300 different products. We had so little idea about what was out there. We do not even know how many drugs were on the market and we haveno idea how many stores they were being sold from. It could have been 3000 or it could have been 4000.On the day that the Act was passed we went down to 47 drugs on the market and we went down to around 160 licensed retailers. That was the impact of that Act. So imperfect as it was and as much as we are back here as we predicted 12 months after the first reading trying to fix it up it was a vast improvement on what we had before. For John Banks to get up and crow about how his vote against the original legislation was somehow protecting the youth of New Zealand I think is bunkum and it needs to be called for what it is. John Banks seems—Louisa Wall: He loves animals.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Look John Banks loves animals and he prioritised the protection of animals over the protection of kids but in fact there was more than one way to deal with this issue. Although National blocked the amendments that would have dealt with animal testing at the time those of us in the Opposition who actually cared about protecting our youngsters from high-risk drugs said we would pass the legislation regardless and we would find other ways. Trevor Mallard offered a Supplementary Order Paper to the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill and that is one mechanism by which we have been pursuing this. Today we are finally going to get there with the mechanism in this bill.The principles behind the Act are still sound. It is just the implementation in a lot of ways that has been poor. We have talked about how it has taken a long time to get the regulations in place and therefore the untested drugs have stayed on the market for much much longer than I think Parliament really anticipated. When we passed the Act we were being told by the Government and by the advisers that this was going to take the high-risk drugs off the market. We were told that the transition phase would be short and that it would be dealt with before now and that—getting the regulations sorted out—has been one of the biggest failures which of course we discovered in part because of the Prime Minister’s discomfort with animal testing could have been dealt with if National had voted for Mojo Mathers’ amendment in the first place.The other question that is now in front of us goes to implementation and resourcing as well. We have heard about how there are half a dozen people in the Ministry of Health trying to deal with all the licence applications trying to deal with writing the regulations and trying to deal with the complaints about different substances. Half a dozen people simply have not been enough to implement this legislation properly.But there is the other question: how well-resourced is our addiction treatment sector to deal with the potential for a large number of people coming off these drugs? I am going to be honest. We do not know what the impact is going to be. Some people might be able to come off these drugs and have no need for addiction treatment services. There may be a flood of people accessing addiction treatment services. There is no way the Government is going to be able to step those up to respond to that crisis because we simply do not have the trained people out there and addiction services do not have the resources and will not be given the resources to respond should there be a flood of demand on those services.The other thing that has been missing in all of this is information—information for families information for users. I was talking to someone in my electorate the other day who works for youth justice who was telling me that the young people whom she deals with were telling her which products were the bad ones and what the effects of them were. She said: “We’ve gathered all this information.” I said: “What did you do with that information?” and she said: “Oh we didn’t really know what to do with it. We haven’t passed it on to anybody.” She did not know—this is someone working for a Government agency—that what she should be doing is passing that information on tothe Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority so that it could be making decisions about which products needed to be recalled. That is how poor the information has been from the Government on how to make this Act work properly.It is important as we go through this next phase that the Government ensures through the district health boards that families have information on how to support people coming off these drugs and how to support people who are addicted to these drugs. That information simply has not been available and that has been a lot of the cause of the community outrage. People have not known what to do. The Government has not run any programmes. There have been no social marketing programmes to tell people how to report the harmful effects of psychoactive drugs. There has been no programme to teach people what low-risk use of these substances is.It was not enough to pass the legislation. It had to be implemented properly. Our Ministry of Health had to be resourced properly. Our district health boards had to be resourced properly. Our addiction service treatment centres had to be resourced properly. Our public health services needed to be resourced properly. None of that has happened. That is another reason why this Act has had a really unfortunate start and that is why we are back here trying to tidy it up again.We support the amendments in this bill. We think they will tidy up some aspects of the Act but the Government needs to do a lot more. It is not just about passing legislation. It is actually at the feet of the Government to make sure the resources are available to make this legislation work properly.Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua): Thank you for the opportunity to take a short call on this second reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. There has been a fair amount of self-righteousness coming from the Opposition parties as to how they could have easily themselves solved this question. But in actual fact it is a complex situation that this Parliament and successive Parliaments have been trying to grapple with for over 22 years. In fact the Misuse of Drugs Act back in 2005 was not successful in addressing the problem. Those were the good old days when benzylpiperazine which was sheep dip was cheap and available. It was legal and people were getting highs from it. But since then these substances have mushroomed substantially throughout New Zealand so that by 2008 a whole array of them was being manufactured. The manufacturers are indeed individuals who are extremely ruthless and care not one jot for the young people of New Zealand.Attempts were made by the Hon Peter Dunne when he issued temporary class notices and of course prior to that there was the Law Commission’s extensive paper when the genesis of the present bill came into being in 2013. The idea behind it was to minimise risk to protect the public health and with the thought that the manufacturers would be required to show minimal risk. As it has turned out this is not easy. The inventive minds of the manufacturers are there to do everything they can to sabotage.But I know that Hunua the electorate I am very proud to represent is a classic example of what has happened right around the country. After this Psychoactive Substances Act came in people were a little confused even though the substances were less available. I know there were marches in every town and hamlet in my electorate saying “We do not want them. They are causing significant problems throughout the country.” and that is why the Government has quite rightly responded.The enforcement is starting tonight. The police and authority enforcement officers will be visiting retail premises to ensure the affected parties are aware of their obligations. This is happening over the next 48 hours. As the Minister of Health the Hon Tony Ryall has pointed out active enforcement will occur on 8 May. Police and enforcement officers will visit all retailers to ensure that products have been removedfrom sale and are being removed to the wholesaler. It is clear. It is concise. The message to the public is absolutely clear. I support the bill.Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai): There is no doubt that Parliament wishes to pass the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill as soon as possible but that does not mean that there are not issues that we ought to raise. I do agree with those who have said that there is no good in going around beating ourselves up on who did what and when. We need to correct the original Psychoactive Substances Act. I think it was a genuine attempt to do something about the issue. We did not get it right and now we are attempting to address it but there are a couple of issues that I want to raise and hopefully when the Minister of Health is in the chair he will be able to help with some of the answers.I have read carefully the regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Health. It is dated 2 May. In it it talks about animal testing and it says that Cabinet agreed in November to test on animals. That was a decision that was made 4 months after the legislation was passed. It says: “In November Cabinet agreed that animal testing for psychoactive substances should be limited to rodents”. Unfortunately Cabinet members were given poor advice at the time in that they were told that rabbits were rodents as well. In fact rabbits are not rodents. What is interesting though is that when you go on to read this part of the regulatory impact statement it says this: “The Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee has considered this issue and advises that animal testing using rodents and lagomorphs”—which are rabbits—“would allow the Act to function largely as intended. While it would mean that some products could not be assessed due to the application using data from non-permitted animal species potentially ruling out some low-risk products it would allow robust assessment of the risk of at least some products.”The word in here is “advises”. The ministry was advising Cabinet as recently as 2 May to continue to test on animals including rabbits. The Prime Minister announces on 5 May that the Government no longer will test on any animal. I would like to know what changed the Government’s mind between 2 May and 5 May. Why was it going to happen? Why was it agreed by Cabinet and what made it change its mind? We can guess and I guess there are a number of reasons including the work of Mojo Mathers the work of Trevor Mallard and the 43000 signatures that have appeared very quickly on a petition. I do not believe that this was a principled decision made by the Government. It was a decision made out of the thought that it would lose votes from animal lovers. I am glad that it has made the decision but I have to say there is no evidence that this was a principled decision.The second issue also comes out of the regulatory impact statement. Nothing has really been made of this at present but it very much is in the Minister of Health’s area. The regulatory impact statement tells us that it does not have good data on the number of people who use psychoactive products with interim approval. It has gone on to do an assessment of what services would be needed for people who could be addicted and it has done it by extrapolating from an area that is called the largest provider of alcohol and drug addiction treatment services and that isWaitematā District Health Board. It seems to me that that is a pretty rough way of guessing because it might be the largest provider—and some of that could come from very good work by the district health board—but does it mean it has the most addicted people?My concern is that it has been estimated that between 150 and 200 people “might be sufficiently dependent on these products to require a degree of professional withdrawal management”—and that comes straight out of the regulatory impact statement. My concern is what services will be put in place because there is no doubt there is going to be the need for services come Thursday when the substances are removed and peopledo not have access to them. I am not saying “Don’t do it.” I am saying you have to look at the consequences the ongoing consequences and what is in place to ensure that we give the best possible to people who are addicted.There is a very good email sent to the Hon Maryan Street from one of her constituents raising this issue. A client of the Pascoe Street alcohol and other drugs clinic is saying there will be a significant increase in clients presenting with withdrawal issues and related difficulties. It asks what provision the Government intends to make in order to address the likely increase in demand for addiction services while maintaining—and here is an important point—the present level of services to existing clients. Although there will be a need for these people to have services once we withdraw these illegal highs from the market you cannot do it at the expense of existing clients. They need to have their ongoing support.There have been many reports including out of the Auckland City Mission that say—and I am sure Mr Sabin will be interested in this—that this could be a bigger problem than methamphetamine. The big worry is that at this point—and this was late in April—“At least 90 percent of clients coming throughdetox have used synthetic cannabis.” So even then those who were wanting and needingdetox had been those using synthetic cannabis. The person who is quoted in this story is saying it is the hardest thing they have ever come off. So I do think it would be useful for the House if the Minister was able to tell us what services will be available for these people come Thursday. Will we have enough staff do we need additional resources and will additional resources be made available to assist people coming off these highly addictive and soon-to-be illegal highs? I would feel some comfort if they were able to be answered because there is no doubt that for members of the House it will turn from our banning them to what services are available and the stories of people not getting the services they need in different parts of New Zealand.So it is going to need to be very carefully managed. I think the Minister ought to ask every district health board to provide as soon as possible information about what capacity and facilities they will have to be able to provide services to those who are highly addicted and are going to need to bedetoxed off these illegal highs. Hopefully the Minister will be able to answer those in the Committee stage.KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to start by picking up on a comment from Dr Paul Hutchison about the actions that police are apparently taking tonight going around to stores and advising them what the outcome of this debate will be. I have to say that I am slightly offended by the assumption about my rhetoric in advocating against the interim prohibition.I sat on the Health Committee that considered the psychoactive substances legislation and was very pleased with the outcome from the select committee process. I have to say that this bill we are considering tonight the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill leaves me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand one of the issues that was raised in the select committee was the matter of animal testing and members will be very familiar with the Green Party minority view in the select committee report which sets out the arguments against using evidence from animal testing. It sets out what the alternatives to that are. We went on in the Committee stage to advance a Supplementary Order Paper in Mojo Mathers’ name. Unfortunately it did not gather the necessary majority support at that time. I am very pleased that apparently I think all members of the House are now convinced by the arguments for the change that Mojo Mathers proposed at that time.On the other aspect of the bill however I am sure that all members of this House are aware that we oppose in fact the effective repeal of the interim regime and replacement of that interim regime with a prohibition regime until the Act takes full effect. So ourparty probably disagrees I think with all other members in the House on this point. I just want to take this opportunity in the second and third readings in this debate to advance our reasons for that and to respectfully disagree with other members.We believed that that interim regime established by the Act although very far from perfect was the best way of approaching the period between the completely unregulated regime that had previously applied and the Act taking full effect. We thought it was the best way to go about that. We think that the prohibition regime that is being substituted for that regime now is the wrong approach and is being taken for the wrong reasons.Paul Hutchison also spoke about some of the opposition to the Act in his electorate being based on wrong information or misleading information. I think that is a bit of a common theme. I have been travelling around the country quite a lot and people have been saying things to me like “We don’t understand why Parliament chose to legalise synthetic cannabis.” Well OK. There are two problems with that idea. The first is that these substances were many. They were not a single substance and the substances that are still legally on the shelf tonight are in fact still many. They are different products. They are made up from different compounds. They have different effects. Some of them are very low risk. Some of them may be higher risk. It is a mistake to assume that they are all the same thing or that they all pose the same level of risk. Yet that is the assumption that members of the public have been led to believe in.The second point of course is that Parliament did not legalise the availability of these substances. They were legally available. In fact Parliament chose to impose a very substantial regulatory regime on the interim regime and an even more substantial regulatory regime would take effect when the Act comes to be in place completely.The third thing that I have heard from members of the public who are justifiably concerned about what is occurring out there in the community is the assumption that the harm caused prior to the Act is still being caused. So for example there was a national day of action that community organisations held some little while ago. The Television New Zealand piece that preceded it was largely comprised of an interview with someone whose son tragically had suffered some very major psychological effects of consuming a psychoactive substance. That consumption had occurred some 3 years prior and that substance had not been on the shelves for some considerable period. In all of the debate that I have seen about substantial harm still being caused actually the debate has related to substances that are no longer available.Fourthly there is I think a widespread belief that problems have got worse. In fact I think as some speakers in the debates on this bill so far have probably alluded to that is not the case. The number of outlets has drastically reduced. The number of products on the shelves has substantially reduced. Sales have reduced and harm has reduced. I want to quote from the Ministry of Health. NicolaKean who is a producer forThe Nation programme asked the Ministry of Health I guess 2 weeks ago now—so just prior to the announcement of this approach—what the trend is if any for people presenting at accident and emergency for problems with psychoactive substances since the law was introduced. The ministry’s answer was: “While it is early days the Authority has received anecdotal reports demonstrating the number of severe presentations to emergency departments has reduced since the Act came in. The Authority monitors approved products received from the Centre for Adverse Reactions Monitoring (CARM) and calls from the public to the National Poisons Centre on a regular basis. These reports also show a reduction in the number of severe issues being reported. Where severe adverse reactions are reported the Authority has the power to act and has already removed products from the market where reports to CARM identified they posed more than a low risk of harm.”There you are. The Act as we passed it was working. The interim regime was reducing harm and the power existed for any products that were identified as causing harm to be removed from the shelves. And the ministry the authority was taking that step. Therefore it was a bit of a puzzle when I heard Mr Dunne on the television saying that this new regime an interim prohibition on all of these substances was being introduced but it was not possible to identify any particular substance associated with reports of adverse reactions. That is unbelievable nonsense. The regime absolutely existed to be able to identify reports of harm with a particular substance. The ministry the authority had already been using that fact to suspend products to take them off the shelves.The fact is that the community concerns were being driven by increased visibility. That is precisely what we wanted to happen. For every shop still selling these products at least 20 had been closed down. So although usage had been reduced it was being concentrated and being made more visible around the surviving outlets. Visibility access to treatment is precisely what we want. I absolutely understand those community concerns but the way that the Government should have responded to those concerns was with better quality information for communities better quality information for local bodies better access to information about treatment and better resourcing for treatment services. Communities deserved leadership and instead what we have is a knee-jerk response that although popular is based not on fact but on populism. Thank you.MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): It is no surprise that the Green Party is not actually voting against the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill; they are abstaining. I actually think that the New Zealand public deserves better than that. The Greens are either for it or against it. To sit somewhere in the middle on an issue that has concerned and affected so many people in this country—Hon Trevor Mallard: The member’s been on both sides of the issue.MIKE SABIN: Well OK let me pick that up Mr Mallard. I actually think that the starting point for this legislation is that no drug use is the safest drug use. No one forces people out there to take mind-altering substances of any sort all right? People should all be grown up enough to know that when we take a mind-altering substance—surprise surprise—it will alter our mind. For some people that will be substantial and for some people that will lead to addiction. The legality of a substance will never alter the chemical nature of a substance.So I think the starting point is that not only in this House should we acknowledge and accept the issues around drugs but also the populace of New Zealand and those who choose to ingest those drugs should do that too. One could argue that once people are addicted then possibly there is an excuse. They take because they cannot not take but the reality is that they have made a conscious choice to take them in the first place. So there is actually a responsibility in this that should be shared by all of us not just parliamentarians.The second point I would say is that because of the ability of the drug manufacturers—or those I like to think of as drug peddlers actually—to beat the legislation through altering chemical compounds the starting point of this new approach is actually to put the onus on to those people who are manufacturing to show that the drugs are low risk. And what does low risk actually mean? Actually low risk will mean that it is something that is not capable of causing addiction because we know that addiction is harmful. Therefore it must be something that is not capable of stimulating sufficient dopamine or neurotransmitters of that nature for people to get withdrawal symptoms when they stop using them. So therefore by definition it shouldbe something that is not capable of giving a high and therefore not capable of creating an addiction.So what we should end up with here is drug peddlers who spend countless millions of dollars and a long period of time to end up with a product that will not make people high and therefore will be low risk. So I actually think that this legislation has merit. It is a legitimate track to take. I just want to remind us all that the difficulties that this legislation and that New Zealand has been traversing is pioneering sort of stuff. There is no one way to reach the promised land I guess of eliminating the harm that drugs cause but we all have a responsibility in this and this Government is taking its responsibility seriously and is doing something about it.BARBARA STEWART (NZ First): I rise again on behalf of New Zealand First to support the passing of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill which will see synthetic cannabis and other untested substances removed from sale in our country. We are absolutely delighted to hear that the police and the enforcement officers are out visiting shops at this point in time and ensuring that vendors are aware of changes as a result of this legislation.New Zealand First hopes that the call for specialised support for families and for those addicted to these substances will be listened to. The current mental health and addiction counselling services are not set up to deal with the huge problems that we anticipate will be out there. Support has to be provided for those who are caught up in this synthetic drugs crisis. Resources must be made available for young people and their parents. We know that these chemical substances are very difficult to get off. They are highly addictive.It is very important to ensure that drugs are subject to lengthy testing. We do not want to see any come back on to the market that have not gone through the whole rigorous testing regime. OnCampbell Live tonight it was interesting to hear a scientist who helped develop synthetic cannabis say that it was never meant to be consumed by humans—very interesting I thought because really who else was going to consume it? So it was interesting.We need to ensure that any changes to these products incur huge financial disincentives for the manufacturers. At the moment they are making millions while they are putting New Zealanders at risk. In New Zealand First we stand by our original position which is that these products really need to be banned and this legislation effectively does that. So we are very pleased to be supporting this bill tonight.Dr JIAN YANG (National): I rise to support the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. The reason is very simple. This is a very short call but I will say a few words. As an immigrant from China I was not familiar with legal highs simply because legal highs are illegal in China. We have now heard about all sorts of problems relating to legal highs. When we came to New Zealand one key reason was to live in a good safer environment—particularly safer communities. So this amendment bill will provide a better and safer community for our young people. That is why we will support the bill. Thank you.Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): I want to start by doing something sort of slightly unusual and that is to compliment the Minister of Health. It is not something I have done that often but I think it is important to say that the world has improved a lot since Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne was packed off to Bali and this Minister took charge of this particular policy area. A degree of rationality has come into the debate. We have stopped having the embarrassing appearances onCampbell Live when the Associate Minister goes to places where legal highs are sold but he has no understanding of the communities that are involved.I also want to compliment the Minister of Health on the consultation on this legislation the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill and the fact that he worked hard to get it to go back and forth to the point where an overwhelming majority in Parliament are prepared to vote for it and no one is prepared to vote against it.The other person whom I would like to thank for his work in this area is David Farrar because what has become absolutely clear to us over the last couple of weeks is that there has been a massive change of view following the questions that have been asked in Mr Farrar’s polling of people around New Zealand as to their attitudes to these legal highs and also to the testing of them on animals which are being asked I understand both in the quantitative research and also in the focus groups that the National Party is running I think four times a week. You know I want to say that it is good in this particular case and in fact generally that the National Party is working hard to understand the limits of the tolerance of New Zealanders and to accept—and I accept and I accept with regret—the fact that as a Parliament we got the original legislation wrong. We got it a bit wrong.If Tony Ryall had been in charge of the regulatory system that went with the original legislation then the legal highs that are being sold today and will not be sold on Thursday would have been not gone by lunchtime but certainly gone by Christmas. Any competent Minister would have set up the regulatory regime. Peter Dunne worked on this legislation for years. He worked on it. He had his little moment—not moment; he had his year—of problems and he had the leaking of the report. He had a bit of time off but he came back and he had responsibility for the regulation in this area. And did he do his work? He did not. As recently as 15 April—15 April—he wrote a letter to me. He probably wrote one to everyone else as well because we do not have a special or close relationship Mr Dunne and I. He was saying what good legislation it was and to give it a chance. Well how wrong he was.Again I want to congratulate David Farrar and his protégé the Prime Minister on getting to the point of understanding what Kiwis think. What having this legislation did was allow us to focus on the people who were using these products. They were widely and generally available but in my particular case it was only when there was a store 30 metres from my electorate office and I saw the queues there before school waiting for the shop to open that I really understood the addictive nature of this stuff. That is how I got to understand the fact that in Naenae so many people—mainly but not only young; I have seen mainly but not only young—were being affected by it. Seeing the kids in the pushchairs being pushed in and out of these places by their parents and seeing the transactions that were occurring within metres of the shop between people who had an ID that said they were 18—although I must say that some of them did not look like it to me—and people who were clearly much younger than that age and the exchanges the drug deals that were going on there was shocking.I am not absolutely aware of the sort of kawa or the protocols and I do not want to breach anything that is confidential from a select committee that you Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch and I sit on but I might say without referring to that that generally we got to the point in the discussions on this where I think we got a better understanding of the dangers of it. We got from the officials a defence of the testing regime but a defence that was not convincing—a defence that promoted the position of Mr Dunne but was not convincing I think to parliamentarians.I came to this debate not as an expert in the drug regulation area and not as someone who has had any experience in the health policy area—I think the only experience I have had in that was discussion with Heather Simpson when I declined to be the Minister of Health in 2005—so I respect the knowledge of a number of colleagues who know much more about this. But what I have been for many years is an owner of petsand in particular an owner of dogs. I came to this issue as a result of the representations that were made to me by my constituents and other people from around Wellington who pointed out what could happen under this legislation.Without going into any detailed family matters I have a close relative who is actively involved in medical research and that involves on occasions animals. I do not think it is wrong. I think there are occasions when it is necessary and where people are working in research with therapeutic outcomes I think that that can in fact be vital. I hope that in the future as computer modelling moves on animal testing will not be necessary. I know that it is substantially reduced but if it is for a good purpose then I think that it is important that it occurs for now. But there can be no excuse for killing animals for the purpose of boosting the profits of dealers in recreational drugs. There is no moral argument for that. To say that it is OK for rats and not for rabbits as the Prime Minister tried to do for a week or so—now we understand that Cabinet took that decision and then reversed it—is wrong.We have come I think to a good position on this. I regret my vote for the original legislation and that I did not understand the legislation and I did not understand the requirement to have a competent Minister administering it when I voted for it but we have got to the point now where we have made some progress.Bill read a second time.In CommitteeTIM MACINDOE (Junior Whip—National): I seek leave for the Committee to consider all parts of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill as one debate with the questions to be taken separately.Hon Trevor Mallard: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I think the whip meant to say “all clauses” not “all parts”—all clauses.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Yes we do not have parts only clauses. Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection.Clauses 1 to 8 and scheduleKRIS FAAFOI (Labour—Mana): Thank you very much for letting me have a call on this Committee stage of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. Clause 7 is the one that I think most people will be focusing on in this debate. There have been a few political volleys fired from both sides of the Chamber tonight but in terms of my constituents they do not care. They just want to make sure that what is being done here tonight is enacted as fast as it can be.I do want to take this opportunity to thank a number of people who certainly—like in Trevor Mallard’s electorate in my electorate in Mana and particularly in Porirua—brought this issue to my attention. Particular thoughts go out to a couple of mothers whose sons were particularly affected and they shall remain nameless but the effect that synthetic cannabis has had on their sons has been immense. Again I will not mention names but one who approached me was very very concerned about her son’s use of the product and then her son went on to assault the shopkeeper of the store that was predominantly selling this stuff in the electorate. So for those people out there who—Hon Trevor Mallard: After she talked to you?KRIS FAAFOI: After she talked to me. So for those people out there who are I guess judging why this has come about whether or not they think this is vote grabbing or just reacting to media coverage I can tell them right now that that is definitely not the case. I guess this is a win for those of us who have heard the concerns ofcommunities who have reflected it to our caucuses—and who cares who came first because this absolutely needed to happen.In particular I do want to take the opportunity to thank some people locally: the local police force that brought their concerns to me; the local city council which was not too happy that this House I guess it thought lumbered the responsibility—Hon Trevor Mallard: Peter Dunne asked for it.KRIS FAAFOI: —yes—of a local approved products policy on it. I want to thank some local community workers and a member of a gang who was also concerned. One morning in particular the police let me walk around the canopies in Porirua to see what was going on in the shop and they took me into the shop. Like Trevor Mallard said there was a very long line in the shop and there was regular patronage. But the thing that got me was some 15-year-olds who should have been at school but who were not whom we spoke to. They knew that this product was doing them harm. In fact I was completely baffled as to why one product that was being sold had on the packet “Not fit for human consumption”. That is just mind-boggling.As has been said by Trevor Mallard as well we do regret the fact that some 18 months to 2 years ago the original legislation went through. Although it was a good bill it did have flaws and we are here tonight to make sure that we rectify this because the drugs were having an awful effect in communities. To the person who was representing the Star Trust and who was saying that this House is merely reacting to political concern or concern in the media I say that he is someone who makes money out of other people’s misery so I am not concerned about what he thinks about what this House is doing when something had to be done.Also there are some other people I thank: Jenny Lester from the Porirua Healthy Safer City Trust is someone who brought this to my attention and the Porirua City Council which was making positive steps to bring in a local approved products policy anyway. I guess again it was not overly happy that that responsibility was given to it but it was taking proactive steps towards that. In a submission that I made to that council the council asked why this stuff was not banned altogether and I—as did other members of the Labour caucus—fed all of this feedback into the policy position that we came to a week or so ago.So this bill is a good thing. It is regretful that we have to come here and make good what we thought 18 months ago was going to be a good move. But in the end this stuff is bad news and it should not be sold freely into our communities and 15-year-olds certainly should not be smoking stuff that says “Not fit for human consumption”.Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua): Thank you for the opportunity to take a short call in the Committee stage of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. There is no doubt about the specific objectives of the bill which are to revoke all interim product approvals to revoke all interim retail and wholesale licences to require the recall and disposal of all products for which interim product approval has been revoked and to provide that the results of trials that involve the use of animals cannot be used in the assessment of a psychoactive product.As I said earlier on in the electorate that I represent Hunua there has been huge concern about how these psychoactive drugs affect families affect individuals and devastate the lives of those who are affected. But the point that I really would like to make is that there has been a fair amount of self-righteousness about this bill and how easy these issues are to solve. They are not easy to solve. They are highly complex. For anyone to think that there is a simple solution they have just got their head in the sand.I must reflect on the day of revelation—yesterday 5 May—when Trevor Mallard and John Banks said what a great day it was for the rats the mice the beagles and therabbits of New Zealand. It was almost as though they had taken on the persona of St Francis of Assisi but again—Hon Trevor Mallard: More the Pied Piper in my case.Dr PAUL HUTCHISON: —indeed—there is complexity here because on the other hand we have big issues in New Zealand. We are pouring out 1080 knocking off rats and mice and goodness knowswhats in our forests because they get our birds. We have got the duck-shooting season going on right now. We have huge rabbit infestations right throughout the country.These issues are not simple. However the Government has responded with clear and concise action. It is reassuring that today enforcement notifications have been made clear throughout the country and indeed on 8 May no more psychoactive substances will be legal in New Zealand.Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Sometimes this House has to do very important but very complicated and very difficult things. Tonight is one of those occasions. I join many of my colleagues who come with no joy to find that we are here rectifying something that we got wrong 18 months to 2 years ago when we last debated this issue of psychoactive substances. We debated and we put in place a regime that was the first in the world that was going to allow these drugs on to our market a regime that was all around the fact that they were tested and shown to be safe. As many speakers have alluded to in the speeches this afternoon and tonight this was all predicated on there being a regime for testing in place. It is with no pleasure that I say that we cautioned at the time that we were rushing the Psychoactive Substances Bill for an incredibly complicated piece of legislation. The devil was in the detail and how it was that we were going to show the safety of these drugs was always going to be an incredibly complicated and difficult path for us to traverse.It is not just a matter of walking into a laboratory throwing some substances under a laser light and saying that this is not safe or that that is not safe. The way in which we prove the safety or otherwise of many substances and compounds that we consume either as food or as medicines or in this case that were going to be consumed as recreational drugs is no small or easy path. It takes many years. It starts with people doing things in a laboratory. The traditional path is that it then moves on to animal models and then it moves on to human clinical models. Whether this is something that we are willing to permit for the use of recreational drugs is an important issue for this House to answer. I am very pleased that we are standing here tonight and are going to say no—we are not going to allow the testing of recreational drugs on animals.For me personally as a constituency MP this issue cuts to the heart of why it was that I was elected to represent my electorate of Wigram. I voted with my party as many members of this House did. In fact most members of this House voted for a piece of legislation that we thought we were doing the right thing with. We thought we were putting in place a piece of legislation that would actually reduce the harm in our communities around the use of psychoactive chemicals and drugs but this has not been the case. Like many of my colleagues I have spent too many hours listening to constituents telling me their stories about what these substances have done to their families. I recall one mother coming in and being absolutely distraught and I can understand why. Not only was her 14-year-old son no longer going to school; he was stealing from her and neighbours in order to finance his habit and she had had to call the police the night before because he had physically assaulted both her and the other children in the family.This is not something that you can stand idly by as a constituent MP and say it is OK. The regime we put in place was not working. It was not stopping the harm in our communities. I could not stand by and say to the people of Wigram: “Justtaihoeverything’s going to be OK.” because it was not. We also have some responsibility now and that is that we as parliamentarians have to ensure that the support is there for the people who are going to be having the addiction issues as these drugs are no longer available. We have to ensure as my colleague Annette King has suggested in earlier contributions that we have adequate funding for people to access addiction services and that district health boards are properly resourced to grapple with these issues and to be able to make sure that New Zealanders are getting the best service that they can as they come off these drugs. The regulatory impact statement for this piece of legislation makes it really clear that a lot of the people who are using these drugs are not going to be able to afford the trip to the general practitioner to get the referral to the addiction service. We have to make sure that that support is in place. We are here tonight to fix something that we got wrong 2 years ago and we need to make sure that we are putting it right and putting the best interests of our community at its heart.MOJO MATHERS (Green): I spoke earlier at the first reading of this bill the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill of my belief that the U-turn that has been taken by the Government on prohibiting the use of information from animal testing to approve applications for the use of psychoactive substances is in essence the same as the amendment that I put forward on the Psychoactive Substances Bill a year ago. I would like to take the opportunity to just thank all the parties that voted in support of that amendment which included the Labour Party—in particular Trevor Mallard’s hard work on that—John Banks Mana and the Māori Party. I also spoke about the shocking process that the bill went through whereby all the voices of the animal welfare organisations and people speaking out against the use of animal testing to approve these drugs were rejected by the chair of the Health Committee.What I would like to do is to actually go through the report that we produced as a result of the hearings that we held. We held our own alternative hearings to hear these submitters who were excluded from having the right to their democratic say. There were a number of major organisations that spoke and presented their submissions. These included Save Animals from Exploitation the SPCA Helping You Help Animals the New Zealand Anti-Vivisection Society as well as a number of individuals. The first thing that most of the submitters actually said was to acknowledge the need for strong regulation of psychoactive substances. They accepted that the situation that existed at that time was not working and they were welcoming the intent of the bill. Some of them even talked about their private lives and people whom they knew who had been turned upside down by some of these drugs. A lot of them talked about their utter dismay that democratic process had not been followed that they had made their submissions and done their research in good faith that their concerns around animal testing would be heard by the Health Committee and they had done so under the recommendation of the Minister at the time and the health officials. To then be rejected was for them a deep betrayal of democratic process.What there was also was a fairly detailed submission from the Anti-Vivisection Society. You see what had happened was that right back 6 months previously it had under the Official Information Act got hold of a report that had been produced by the Ministry of Health that outlined a proposed testing regime for these drugs. At that point in time the testing regime was to involve a number of stages. There were the preclinical toxicological trials and then the human clinical trials as well as the post-registration surveillance. It is quite important to understand that a testing regime is composed of all these three elements. It was never proposed that a clinical trial would be able to prove safety to the point that the substance goes straight to being used by the general population. There were always going to be human clinical trials involved. This is something that the public often do not realise when they say that they do not wantanimal testing so let us go straight to testing them on drug addicts and so on. Actually we need controlled studies and they were always going to be part of the process with human volunteers. They start with micro-dosing and monitoring very carefully for the clinical signs of reactions and so on. So whatever tests they use for the preclinical trials are designed to weed out the most toxic substances the most likely to have extreme dangerous reactions.The original Ministry of Health standard for safety—actually “safety” is not the right word to talk about the whole testing regime. It is about low risk because actually we cannot prove that any recreational drug is safe. Alcohol is not safe and tobacco is not safe and yet we use them and we accept the risks that come with their use. So it is always going to be about trying to screen out the most damaging of these drugs and then focusing on the low-risk drugs and educating the public about their use. The reality is that the Ministry of Health’s initial proposed testing regime included four types of testing—for acute toxicity for repeated-dose toxicity fortoxicokinetic investigation and forgenotoxicity. For all four of these there are validated alternatives to animal testing—not just one or two but three or four or more—and all of them have been validated. That means that they have been demonstrated to give as good if not better results than those of the equivalent animal trials. So I utterly reject the claim by Paul Hutchison that we are being somehow kind of unscientific or airy-fairy or what have you. That is not the case. There are established international studies on these areas.The reality is that report was commissioned by the Anti-Vivisection Society using an overseas expert because we do not have the expertise in New Zealand. That is the problem. New Zealand is small. It is a country of only a few million people. We are not experts in alternatives to animal testing. The experts are overseas. We have to rely on overseas input in this area to achieve the goal of having low-risk products that have been tested using non-animal tests. We can do it but we must look overseas for the expertise and the tests involved. Thank you.Le’aufa’amulia ASENATI LOLE-TAYLOR (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First as we welcome this bill the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill to essentially ban legal highs and because we think that it is absolutely disgraceful that families and communities had to suffer for such a long time before we as parliamentarians thought it was necessary to correct the mistakes that were made in the original legislation. Indeed it was an embarrassing shameful and humiliating situation where 41 legal high products remained on the shelves. Those 41 products were actually sold in bulk through the Papatoetoe Heaven and Dreams shop. I think clause 7 in this new amendment bill will address most of the issues that have been raised by some of our local residents. I am sure that Pat Taylor and a few residents of Papatoetoe will now be very happy to know that the Government is actually doing something about this. Mr Paul Hutchison was saying that these situations are not easy to solve. I have a very strong message for you at this stage. It can be solved. The only reason it cannot be solved is that we are incapable of making it easy to be solved.On theCampbell Live show we could all see that Mr Dunne was completely out of touch. A situation that was also hurting a lot of families is that there was no clear acceptance from Mr Dunne at the time to understand the issues that have been raised as a result of legal highs. It is a national issue and it is one that is tragically affecting regional towns and low socio-economic areas the most. That is why we should have been more proactive earlier and that is the reason why instead of waiting for local councils this amendment bill should have been introduced a lot sooner.The side effects of legal highs include agitation confusion paranoia seizures violent behaviour haemoptysis and psychosis. I am sure that everyone is now an expert on the side effects of these particular drugs. I have seen frightening evidence of themajor health problems they cause and their direct influence on domestic and family violence and that is the sad part about it. It is that there have had to be deaths and there have had to be suicides before we could even respond. It is becoming the norm for New Zealand parliamentarians that we have to wait for a major incident to happen before we can actually fix the problem. Hundreds of people are reported to have experienced harm in one form or another from legal highs but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the hundreds of sad cases involving injury and death there has been a failure to eliminate a threat posed by legal highs and it has boosted an unhealthy culture of drug taking in New Zealand.We now have an image as a country that is receptive to taking drugs. Mr Dunne sat on his hands while a culture of synthetic drugs was taking place. I even spoke to Mr Todd McClay quite a number of times. I told him that something needed to be done. His response was that the bill that was passed last year was the best option that this country could take. The reality is that 147 legal high shops remained with 50 of them in the Auckland area. Although the number of legal high outlets is lower you can still be sure that the number of people taking drugs did not come down. That is the reason why there were long queues in places like Tauranga and Te Awamutu and some of the outlets throughout the country. You can find the majority of these outlets in places like DargavilleKarikari andEdgecombe. About 82 are specialist drug shops judging by their names such as Heaven and Dreams and Cosmic Corner and they are sold in tobacconists video stores sex shops tattooists and bodypiercers. With fewer outlets as proudly announced by Mr Dunne it definitely does not mean that there are fewer people taking drugs.A new generation of young people are getting the wrong message. They are getting the wrong message about synthetic drugs and it is not the message that we should be portraying or putting in place for the future generations of this country. This drug-taking culture is affecting everyone in New Zealand. During thePolyfest festival secondary school students were actually waiting outside the Heaven and Dreams drug store because they wanted to pick up some of their drugs before going to the festival. The actual owner was giving it to them from the side door of his shop. These are some of the things that we ought to be looking at and we are supposed to be protecting our young generations from.Many of these legal high shops are willing to sell to anyone. They will not be willing to admit that they are selling to the wrong age. Legal highs are an unnecessary temptation for teenagers and there was not enough accountability for these retailers. The number of people using legal highs is now vast and families communities police and hospitals must now deal with a new stream of addicted users. The serious threat to the health of New Zealand families and communities was palpable.Since the initial Psychoactive Substances Act was passed New Zealand First has been advocating on behalf of concerned local residents to do something or to reverse the position we had. Tonight I am actually very happy that we are looking at a complete ban on these items. We became aware that the decision to support the Psychoactive Substances Act was a mistake but it was based on the information that was made available to us at the time. The call for action on legal highs was nationwide. Over 30000 people have actually joined a Facebook group and those who took to the streets for a march against legal highs ought to be taken notice of and ought to be considered seriously. New Zealand First was there. It was a country-wide protest including over 20 towns from Whangarei to Invercargill. These were people who had experienced firsthand the damage legal highs were capable of inflicting on individuals and society. What I saw was a community standing up for itself because the Government was notstanding up for the community. It was a mistake in the first place and communities and families were made to suffer before the Government could actually respond.This new legislation proposes to ban all synthetic drugs until they are proven. We would prefer an outright ban because that is what much of the community has asked for. We have seen living proof that the notion of reducing harm—and I think there has been talk about low risk. The right translation or interpretation of “low risk” is that there is some risk. When there is some risk whether it is low risk or high risk that means there is still risk. Those are the things that we need to pay attention to. Attitudes like those held by those who said that there is low risk must also be eliminated. Those are the attitudes that should not be welcome in the debate on legal highs.If appropriate measures were taken and proper regulations put in place when the initial Psychoactive Substances Act was passed we would not have seen some of the attempted suicides in Manurewa we would not have seen some of the domestic violence that we have actually witnessed inŌtara and the people in Papatoetoe would have been able to go to bed at night without the fear of some badly behaved local residents who were actually desperate for their synthetic drugs. Many other countries have applied a law that invokes a straight ban by using broad terms to encompass all types of synthetic cannabis. New Zealand is the only country in the world to adopt a free-market clinical-trial regime for recreational drugs. The Government is now taking the right action and the term “low risk” should be eliminated from the debate altogether.We should not be able to look for approval of any low-risk products in the future. We should be looking for products that are completely safe and have no risk at all. Two clear requirements must be present in the law on recreational synthetic drugs: first to prove the product is safe before it can be sold and second to notify authorities if there are changes to its composition. That should be part of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. That should be what we are supporting and that is what we should be focusing on in order for the people of New Zealand to be satisfied with what we have actually introduced here tonight.It is important to specify that safety measures have been put in place and that everyone is in support of those safety measures. That is what New Zealand First would like to see happen and we are pleased to know that this week we will be able to turn round and tell those legal high shops that they can no longer operate in the way that they have been.CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I would like to do something unusual here tonight and that is to actually thank John Banks for his contribution to this debate on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill—not only tonight. Actually I have to admit that I was wrong in criticising him when he spoke against the original legislation in August last year and for the reasons he spoke against it. I would also like to acknowledge Mojo Mathers for her passionate consistent defence of the no animal testing regime and also Trevor Mallard for the work he has done on this. I have to say that this unlikely trio has probably sparked something new in 2014. I sense that we are actually opening up a new debate on animal testing in this country and the reasons for it. I think that is an important thing.I also unusually want to thank the Minister in the chair tonight for being here as the Minister of Health and by his presence signalling that this is a significant and important issue. I am going to ask the Minister respectfully whether he can answer a couple of questions tonight if not in the chair then in the third reading because I think that the people listening to this debate tonight throughout New Zealand have got a couple of questions still in their minds that do need answers from the Government around the implementation of this bill and around the resourcing of the care of peoplewho are badly affected by these terrible drugs. And they are not just drugs; they are actually poisons.I also unfortunately would like to take issue with what one of the Green members Kevin Hague said tonight about the impact of the Psychoactive Substances Act since it has been enacted. I suppose I cannot blame him because he relied on the regulatory impact statement which I know was prepared in some haste and actually does not reflect the full facts. I do want to put on the record again that there has been a recorded increase in the number of contacts with the National Poisons Centre. This is not just because there is an 0800 number on the drugs as they are being sold; this is because there are stronger adverse effects. Although the number of drugs that are actually for sale has lessened in the actual physical number moving down from 300-odd to 40-something some of them are extremely toxic. There are more and more toxic adverse reactions presenting at emergency departments and being reported through the National Poisons Centre. Again—and I am going to table this at the end of my speech tonight—this here is the latest report the April report from the National Poisons Centre which I do hope the Minister has had access to. I know that it was sent to the Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne. The graph shows in red the line where those numbers of calls about adverse reactions have gone up and they are going up every month. This is a significant issue.I also want to draw attention to a couple of other things and I know that the Hon Annette King also drew attention to these and they are the estimation that has been made of the number of people being badly affected who have developed dependency and the inadequacy of the research and work that is being done within the Ministry of Health. This is not to criticise individual people; this is basically to say that the resources are not in place to do this work. Estimating that 100 to 150 people might be dependent on these drugs throughout the country is woefully inadequate. It would be my contention that there may even be that number of people who have a dependency on the drugs in Dunedin alone—perhaps even more. I am sure that many of my colleagues around the Chamber tonight would get up and say that they know of dozens and dozens of cases of people who have a terrible dependency on these drugs and of the impact that it is having on their families and their communities.I ask the Minister to please tell the Committee what plans are in place for increasing the resources that are available through the Ministry of Health—Hon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health): Just to touch on a couple of the questions that members have raised implementation of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill is going to be a priority for the Ministry of Health. A considerable amount of work and effort has gone into it. If I look at the drafting of this bill it has involved Crown Law health legal outside Queen’s Counsel and the Parliamentary Counsel Office. So we have had lawyers for Africa helping us with this bill and the ministry is very focused on the implementation. In fact I have been advised that even today the police and the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority have been working together in respect of visiting a number of retail premises to ensure they are aware of their obligations. I will talk about those later.The Ministry of Health is in very close contact with addiction treatment providers across New Zealand and it is going to continue to liaise with them and to conference at least weekly in order to gauge what is happening around the country. A recent national teleconference shows that all services as the member Clare Curran has noted have noticed a particular increase in inquiries and the seeking of treatment. In respect of the recent announcement of this bill even that has encouraged some of that increase. Preparations are under way to make sure that services can meet this level of support.The ministry has material and information that is available. The Alcohol Drug Helpline has agreed to extend its services during weekdays with an extended period of time.Emergency department physicians have also met. They are not expecting any major disruptions but the emergency department leaders will maintain surveillance and support and advice will be fed through to the Ministry of Health. I have had discussions with a number of district health board chief executives who advise that their district health boards are ready and able and that they do expect to be able to have the resources to meet community demand. The Government will be keeping a very close eye on this because we all share the concerns the member has.MEKA WHAITIRI (Labour—Ikaroa-Rāwhiti):Tēnā koe Mr Chair.Tēnātātou katoa. I rise with all members of this Committee to lend my support to the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. All I can say to be succinct is thank goodness. Thank goodness for the communities up and down this country who rallied and who marched to get these terrible drugs out of our communities.Hon Trevor Mallard: Meka can you say thank you to Billy Graham. I forgot to in my speech for the work he did.MEKA WHAITIRI: Yes I was going to mention him Mr Mallard. Many of the members on this side of the Chamber and other members who care passionately about their communities have been invited to got involved with or been part of a lot of the rallies that occurred up and down the country. I for one was fortunate to join in the rally down in Naenae with Billy Graham who called it down there. He is a wonderful person who is passionate about the community of Naenae. I was attending with my colleague the Hon Trevor Mallard; the Mayor of Hutt City Ray Wallace; councillors; and community workers. Clearly the meeting that was held in Naenae was a reflection of the community’s absolute disdain for these drugs—their absolute disdain for these drugs—and their desire to get rid of them. So in Naenae the message was clear and both Trevor and I as parliamentarians representing areas of the Hutt were charged with bringing this message to Parliament to say that people in Naenae wanted them banned completely.From Naenae I was fortunate enough to attend another rally. That was called by councillors of the Hastings District Council again to say that people do not want these substances regulated; they actually want them banned. So again attending that rally that message was clear to those who were there. The local paperHawke’s Bay Today watched the people who went in an outlet that was selling them and the front page of the paper showed people going in over the space of 6 minutes. It was enough for me to say that people in Hastings do not want these drugs and want them banned. So that was community meeting No. 2.Following on from the steps of that meeting I met with the Gisborne District Council and the Mayor of GisborneMengFoon who again asked what this Government is doing about these substances because they want them banned. Across the river the one outlet there has people coming in. The feedback from concerned people in Gisborne was asking what we are doing in Parliament and saying we need to take the message to this Government yet again because regulation is not meeting what they want as community leaders and community workers. They want them completely banned. Following that there were two more rallies one in Napier and again one in Hastings.My point is about the passion and the drive of our communities to say that these are bad substances that are in our communities and are infecting ourwhānau and we need to get rid of them. I again want to support not just the people who were mentioned in bringing the amendment—clearly the Government has had an about-turn from all the feedback it has received. But the original Act the Psychoactive Substances Act is oneof those where you wonder how it actually got in. I need to acknowledge that I was not in the House at the time but I definitely—Hon Trevor Mallard: Oh! Blame us.MEKA WHAITIRI: Yes. Yes that is right—I was not in the House. But look it is like collective responsibility. If you are a parliamentarian you have to defend that this was passed. But like I have said I am happy to stand here and say that we have amended that Act. The substances are going to be banned. I know that the people of places like Maraenui like Flaxmere like Kaiti like Elgin and like all the small communities that I stand here proudly to represent will be absolutely pleased that we are making this move to completely ban these substances. So that is my small contribution to what I consider is a very important bill and something for which all our communities have rallied to say enough is enough. So I support this bill. Kia ora.Su’a WILLIAM SIO (Labour—Māngere): I am going to take just a short call on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. I am not on the Health Committee which will review this particular bill. I have attempted to look quickly through it prior to it coming here. I think we should welcome the decision that the Government has taken. Although of course Labour claims some responsibility for that I think it is also kudos to the wider community out there who demanded of this House that the way forward for us was to change the legislation that we initially passed.One of the groups that was quite vocal—and rightly so—against the previous legislation was local government throughout New Zealand. I wonder whether the Minister in the chair the Minister of Health would be able to crystallise information for local government in New Zealand in particular on just how this new legislation will impact on the role of local government. As I said just quickly scanning the legislation there is no reference to it there other than reference to the Psychoactive Substances Expert Advisory Committee. The Minister should know that with the previous legislation local authorities up and down this country were quite vocal about the responsibility that the previous legislation imposed on them without giving them the appropriate protection in how to advocate strongly for the views of their particular communities. I suspect that local government would be happy that we have essentially followed the advice that it has given this Government by banning the availability of many if not all of the legal highs that were available.There is another concern I believe which was one of the reasons why I was supportive of the previous legislation and that is the concern about what happens if when we are banning these legal highs that then makes them available for the underground market. I think that although we welcome the U-turn of this Government in this legislation and although we welcome its U-turn on testing these substances on animals there are those two particular issues that I wonder whether the Minister would be able to shed some light on—first the role that local government plays in the new legislation and second the efforts that need to be made to prevent the black market.As everybody else in this Chamber has said these products are a scourge in our community. I suspect that no one here in this Chamber who is a parent would like to see their children picking one of these things up and consuming it. Not too long ago there was an email that was circulated within the emails of Government departments where somebody suggested that there was a legal product being produced that would taste like a strawberry and look like a strawberry. I think the police identified that it was a scam but these are the potential dangers that I think still lie unanswered.I remember that in 2001 the community inŌtara and theŌtara Music Arts Centre brought down a group called the Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E who were Samoan rap dancers. They were hard-core rappers who came down to talk to the young people here about their experiences living in Los Angeles. The issue obviously got on to drugs. What Irecall from that conversation was that they said that New Zealand had not yet experienced the full force of the kinds of bad drugs that they saw on their particular streets. The fact that we have allowed some of this stuff to be on sale for a while now is still cause for concern.So yes I welcome the legislation but I wonder whether the Minister is able to just shed some light. It is not clear to me from the legislation before the Committee what role local government plays and what the transition process is. Although I suspect that local government will welcome the banning of these substances there is a strong mood within local government throughout New Zealand at the moment that this Government tends to impose legislation on local government and then let local government pay for it. I think it has every right to do so but I think that shedding some light on what that responsibility is would be very very helpful.Finally also how do we then address the black market? If we are banning these substances and we are going to make it difficult for some of these things to be produced and sold to our young people—and I agree with the banning and I agree to our making it difficult—how do we make sure that they are not readily available in other markets? Thank you.Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): When we rush legislation there are frequently poor outcomes. That has been acknowledged by a number of members in the House. I want to make a short contribution covering one of the background informers about this situation that is lesser known and not so much in the public eye. Certainly in my area I want to draw attention to the work that Clare Curran did in Dunedin to raise awareness and an appetite for action. We together visited an outlet in South Dunedin recently close to a community mental health facility. It was pretty shocking to see the fly-by-night nature the lack of any investment. There was a real awareness that this was a dangerous business to be in just from walking into the shop itself.But I wanted to speak a little bit more about the poisons line—the National Poisons Centre in Dunedin—which has advised on the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. I know that the centre supported the Government’s decision-making in the original Psychoactive Substances Act and that it has provided a huge amount of support to those wrestling with addiction in recent times. If viewers at home can pause for a minute and imagine that their child perhaps an 18-month-old has swallowed a range of unidentified pills or maybe even some leftover synthetic cannabinoids and they are then in the situation where the child is frothing at the mouth or unconscious currently we have the ability to ring an 0800 helpline: 0800 POISON. It is written on most toxic products in New Zealand. But what many people at home may not appreciate is that currently the Government has a proposal that it is consulting on that would rollHealthlineQuitline the Alcohol Drug Helpline the National Depression Initiative problem gambling support and the 0800 POISON number into one service. I want to suggest that this raises a number of serious questions that I would like the Minister of Health to address either now or in his third reading speech because this is raising concerns in our communities. Where these poisons exist a need exists for a service that is supported by professionals and that is able to respond immediately.This proposal to roll these services into one service one helpline has been parodied on TV. I am aware of a parody that literally imagines a scenario where the line is called and it says: “If you would like to speak toHealthline press 1. If you would like to speak toQuitline press 2. If you would like to speak to the Alcohol Drug Helpline press 3. If you would like to speak to the National Depression Initiative press 4. If you would like to speak to problem gambling support press 5. And if your child is frothing at the mouth and unconscious press 6 and please hold for the operator.” This is anabominable thought. It is truly unacceptable that we would get to that point where people were waiting for such a service where people were not able to immediately access the service. This service which supported the legislation that the Government consulted on—this particular service that the Government consulted in the formation of the Psychoactive Substances Act and in the legislation we are passing through the House now—and which the users of these substances have regularly used is under threat. Its funding is only $1.5 million a year from the Government and yet it maintains a database that together with the service costs around $2.8 million a year. The data is constantly being updated.This service is under threat. I would urge members of the public watching this debate who are concerned about the 0800 POISON service going—for all of the advice that is provided post-9/11 on chemical threats for all of the advice it provides every day for addicts and for those people who have swallowed unidentified items—to contact the Minister of Health to express their concern. The current process that is being engaged in is called a constructive dialogue. At the start when this proposal was launched there was going to be a competitive tender process. That has since been shifted into what is called a constructive dialogue. That smells and looks a lot like a process that is opaque. That is worrying. We do not need cronyism in this aspect of our reform. There may well be some economies of scale to be gained by rolling many of these services together but it seems highly unlikely that rolling in the 0800 POISON service makes sense.Clause 1 agreed to.Clause 2 agreed to.Clause 3 agreed to.Clause 4 agreed to.Clause 5 agreed to.Clause 6 agreed to.Clause 7 agreed to.Clause 8 agreed to.Schedule agreed to.Bill reported without amendment.Report adopted.Third ReadingHon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health) on behalf of theAssociate Minister of Health: I moveThat the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill be now read a third time. I would like to thank all members for their contributions to the debate and particularly thank all those party representatives who have worked so constructively with the Government over the last 48 hours in respect of the bill such that we have been able to build a broad consensus across the House on the issues in the bill.This bill when it comes into force will remove from the market all psychoactive products with interim approval. The police and the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority have been working closely to prepare for the change. Starting today police and authority enforcement officers have been visiting retail premises to ensure that affected parties are aware of their obligations. Retailers are being advised that they need to secure all products and return them to the wholesaler. Wholesalers are being advised that they will be required to recall all the products from their customers. Manufacturerswill be advised that they will need to recall all products and dispose of them as directed by the authority. All parties will be advised that they can be expected to be visited by the police and the Psychoactive Substances Regulatory Authority enforcement officers and that any non-compliance may affect their ability to reapply for a licence under the full regime.The day this legislation commences there will be active enforcement. At 12.01 a.m. on Thursday 8 May the legislation will come into force and makes it clear that no one may sell supply or possess psychoactive substances. Later that day police and enforcement officers will visit all retailers to ensure that products have been removed from public view and are being returned to the wholesaler. As part of the recall notice retailers and wholesalers will be required to maintain records of what products are returned when they are returned and which manufacturers they are returned to. This will be matched against information from manufacturers about what products they received from whom and when.It is also very important for us to consider the people who may be dependent on the products that this bill removes from the market. The Ministry of Health expects that some people will experience serious symptoms from ceasing to use these psychoactive products and withdrawal from these products can last for 2 weeks or longer. I explained to the House during the Committee stage that the Ministry of Health is working very closely with the sector to monitor these things. I am advised that the addiction treatment sector believes it can manage this demand within existing resources but the Ministry of Health will continue to monitor that very closely.On what this legislation does this Parliament is quite clear. We are removing the interim licences so these products that were previously enjoying an interim licence will no longer have a licence be licensed and will not be able to be sold supplied or possessed. We are allowing that the individual retailers can maintain their licence for 2 weeks and the purpose of this is to enable the authorities to have access to the retail premises and ask questions and obtain information from the people with their retail licences.The Government is indicating that regulations will be passed in the next few months on the testing requirements needed to consider any new applications under this legislation. Parliament is being quite explicit in inserting a principle into the legislation and making it very clear in a provision that we will not accept any information that comes from animal testing in support of any application. Parliament is also being clear that this is notwithstanding new section 12(2) in clause 6 which makes it clear that we will be prepared to consider animal-testing data from overseas only when that data can be used to decline an application under this legislation. Parliament is also being quite clear that there will be no compensation.The message from this Parliament is very clear. As of 12.01 a.m. on Thursday these products are no longer legal and it will be an offence to sell supply or possess psychoactive substances. I would like to thank all members for their participation in this debate and give them an assurance that the Ministry of Health will be working very closely with the regulatory authority and the police to ensure that the message is out there: Parliament has changed the rules; those licences are removed.JAMI-LEE ROSS (Junior Whip—National): In accordance with the agreement amongst the parties in the House tonight I seek leave for the House to sit past 10 p.m. to complete the third reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is no objection.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Labour supports the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill because it removes the transition provisions from the Psychoactive Substances Act which in effect will remove from the market all the untested drugs that are currently available on the market and it also removes the provisions that allow for animal testing of psychoactive substances in any tests that are used to prove that a psychoactive substance is of low or no risk. It improves but does not overturn the original Psychoactive Substances Act.I want to remind anybody who thinks that passing the Psychoactive Substances Act was a mistake that before it was passed we had no regulation over psychoactive substances at all. There was an unknown number of products out there being sold from an unknown number of outlets. When the original Act was passed we took control. We now know how many products are out there for sale and more have been removed from the market since the original Act was passed. We now know how many retailers there are out there. We even know who wants to import substances so that they can carry out research on products to perhaps make them one day become approved products. We know a lot more about what is going on in the legal high industry as a result of the passing of the original Act.However it was not enough. It did not satisfy legitimate concerns about untested substances being available on the market and being used by people particularly young people without us being fully cognisant of what both the short-term and long-term effects of those products are. The decision to leave on the market the products for which there had been no previous complaints made was made for legitimate reasons by a select committee the Health Committee that was under pressure to deliver on a very very short deadline to meet the Government’s requirements. But it was it turns out the wrong decision to make.Overturning that decision has been an amazing demonstration of people power—the people who have demonstrated in towns and cities around New Zealand and the people who have lobbied their MPs. I do not think there is probably a single electorate MP or list MP in this House who has not had a very large number of people come and ask that we improve the legislation. Those people have worked tirelessly to ensure that their representatives understand what it is that they want to have done.I want to particularly acknowledge in my own community the people on the Psychoactive Substances Task Force which is a self-established group within the city and which I have been a member of. It has involved the police it has involved concerned parents and it has involved health practitioners. It was formed ostensibly to make submissions to our local council to make sure it made the best use of the provisions in the Act to apply a local approved products plan. But also as time went on it became a lobbying vehicle. As a member of it I found I was spending more of my time being lobbied by the people in the group than talking about what we were going to talk about with the council. That was fair enough—that was fair enough.I hope that everybody in that group and people around the country know tonight that the politicians have listened. We have responded and I think we have responded in a way that does what people wanted us to do which is to get rid of these untested drugs without undermining the original intent of the legislation. That is a position that it seems a number of parties arrived at independently. We could all see that this bill is the smart way forward and I do want to acknowledge the Minister of Health Tony Ryall for his work in ensuring that we did get cross-party consensus on this legislation.We want to pass this legislation tonight. I find it slightly ironic that we are rushing to fix up a mistake that was caused by rushing the original legislation but nevertheless the people want these drugs off the market and that is what Parliament wants to do. We want to do it tonight so let us get the job done and do what the people want.Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua): Thank you for the opportunity to speak briefly in this third reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. Undoubtedly for 20 years or so successive Governments have been grappling with how best to minimise harm from psychoactive substances and their use and availability in New Zealand has burgeoned over the last few decades. This is a very complex area and undoubtedly those who manufacture psychoactive substances are continually trying to invent new substances that detrimentally affect New Zealand families and young people. In fact nowhere in the world are there clear answers as to how best to deal with this problem.However as Iain Lees-Galloway has said prior to the Psychoactive Substances Act which we are amending coming in we did not have a regulatory regime and there is little doubt in my mind that the Act remains the best way we know of dealing with emerging psychoactive substances. This amendment bill revokes all interim approvals for psychoactive substances. It has emerged from an outpouring throughout New Zealand of the concerns of ordinary people about these substances and the Government has acted very decisively. Many speakers have indicated that perhaps there are simple solutions. They are wrong. Many people have indicated that the science around ensuring there is minimal risk is easy. They are wrong. It is not easy nor is the science around animal testing.There is no doubt that the National Government is constantly monitoring world literature to do everything possible to ensure that we exercise best practice in this country. I do find it absurd that the Green Party is abstaining but nevertheless the rest of Parliament is in agreement that the best thing we can do is send clear messages at this stage and then progress on and use best practice science and evidence to ensure we do everything possible to minimise harm and protect the health of New Zealanders.LOUISA WALL (Labour—Manurewa): Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak in the third reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. As a member of the Health Committee which heard the primary piece of legislation I want to reiterate the sentiments shared across the House that the context that the country was facing was one where these products were out there. We needed a regime that regulated them but what we have seen is that regime fall short of creating the appropriate framework for us to determine what safe substances are. In fact what we have seen is that the substances that are currently available have been incredibly detrimental to the health and well-being of our communities right across the country. It was an honest attempt by the select committee within the context of a bill that needed to be rushed through by 1 August because the Associate Minister of Health the Hon Peter Dunne had temporary class drug notices for 30 substances and 50 products that would have expired.We had to react and create a regime that now has enabled us as a society a community to regulate these products and I guess the next test for the Minister of Health is in fact the development of the psychoactive product approval process. I know that that consultation process concluded at the end of March. It is part of a work programme that could eventually see some types of products be available for our communities. It is within that context that I want to highlight from the primary legislation the local approved products policy. As a select committee we were really clear that local communities local government should be empowered with tools to then be able to say where these products should be sold.I want to congratulate our local government representatives around the country on passing the ball back to Parliament so that we could create this framework to enable safe substances to be sold. I want to highlight that the ball is in their court about where those products can be sold so all of them should continue with their consultations andwith their development of these local approved products policies in anticipation that eventually there may be some products that will be available.I think it is worth highlighting that because we were also really clear through this process that prohibition was not the answer. I know that my colleague Kevin Hague had some particular perspectives around that given that the most damaging drug in our country is alcohol and many New Zealanders die through the consumption of alcohol coupled with tobacco. As a mature nation we had to have I guess a grown-up conversation about where these psychoactive substances fit within the context of us regulating those substances.I am not going to talk for much longer but I do want to highlight that there have been incredible activists in our community. There is a woman called Julie King who lives in Tokoroa. She is part of a group called Love Soup. I have never been there but I have seen her Facebook posts. She is an ordinary passionate woman living in our community. She loves her community and she was really concerned about what these products were doing not only to the young people but to the people within that Tokoroa community. She took it upon herself with other people within that community to make a stand.I want to acknowledge that engagement because I think that what we have seen in this process is that democracy does work that people actually do have power and that when they develop a critical mass they will get reactions from political parties and people in power. So we do have to commend the Government for doing something. At the end of the day it does not matter who did what because we are all here tonight and our votes will be recorded. There is some consensus about the passing of this bill.Finally I want to thank a local group called group called the Warriors of Change. They are young people based in Manurewa. On 11 May 2013 they organised a rally. We had a shop right in the middle of the Manurewa township and the young people decided that they did not want these products sold in their community. I want to commend them for their activism and for their motivation to show that as a community they did not want the shop where it was and they did not want these products sold. I want to credit them the local board members and local bodies right around the country for the work that they have done. As we have seen through collective action pieces of legislation like this one can be passed and they are actually going to benefit the people of our communities in New Zealand. Kia ora. Thank you.KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to begin by as others have done thanking the Minister of Health for consulting the Green Party on his draft bill the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill last night. Again I record that the Green Party will be abstaining on this bill. I know that others have been puzzled by that but the simple fact is this. This bill does two things. One of those things we strongly support and the other we strongly oppose. It leaves us with no other respectable position.I want to continue from where I left off with my second reading speech. In the second reading I spoke about some of the reasons that lay behind the widespread community concerns about the availability of these substances and how those were based on incorrect understandings of the law and of the situation around this wide range of substances and my concern about the failure of the Government to respond to that misinformation with leadership and proper information. In this speech I want to focus not so much on that issue as on the response of the Government to the current situation.This bill reimposes prohibition. The Law Commission the Ministry of Health the New Zealand Drug Foundation the vast majority of submitters on the original bill the Health Committee the Minister of Health and this Parliament were all right—prohibition does not work. It seems bizarre to me that I need to be making the argument for that case since so many members of the House in fact made that point and madethose arguments in the various debates that we held in the House on the original bill. I will not quote members tonight. But the fact is that that is the approach that the Government is now imposing in the interim.I am just going to run through some of those arguments. The thing about prohibition is that it does not suppress demand. It may reduce it very slightly but the fact is that demand still exists and the market will still respond to that demand with supply. In a couple of months’ time if theCampbell Live programme takes its camera crews out to Naenae maybe from about 10 o’clock at night through to maybe 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the morning and instead of going to the shop it goes to the alley behind the shop it is going to find demand being met by supply.Prohibition takes supply out of the hands of regulated controlled retailers and instead puts that supply into the hands of criminal gangs or other illicit suppliers. Unfortunately what that means is that the drug dealer on the street in the alleyway behind the shop at Naenae and the drug dealer in the tinny house are not subject to those same controls. Those people supplying the demand that will not go away as a result of this bill tonight will not be checking people for their ID or for proof of age. We should expect that supply to people under age will increase as a result of this bill. Those people will not be making a distinction between those products that are low risk and those products that are high risk.We should expect that the supply of products that are high risk will increase as a result of this bill. Those people those illicit drug dealers will in addition to having a range of psychoactive substances—those currently legal and those currently illegal—have in another pocket other drugs like methamphetamine. So the product of this bill will be that the demand which will not go away as a result of this bill will also be met by the increased supply of currently illicit drugs. We are going to be seeing a significant increase in harm.As the prohibition on cannabis has proven demand is not suppressed by prohibition. Cannabis is absolutely prohibited and yet most adult New Zealanders have smoked cannabis. It has not suppressed the demand. Further this bill which is going to be passed tonight—and I respect the fact that the Green Party speaks in a minority on this bill—undermines the very Act that it amends because what will happen as this bill is passed is that it will set the platform for illicit chains of supply for psychoactive substances and those chains of supply will still exist when the bill takes full effect. So rather than a managed transition in which we move from having a completely unregulated market through to having a regulated market we do our best in the passage of this bill to undermine the regime that we are trying to impose.Others have spoken about the need for treatment services to be put in place because one of the consequences of this bill for any people who do have some degree of dependence on any of the substances that currently exist is that they will find that they suddenly have no access to a legal supply of the substance on which they are dependent. So that is one of the problems around supply. I welcome MrRyall’s comments about the preparations he has made but I note that none of that actually increases the supply of treatment services. None of that actually deals with the withdrawal that we fully anticipate—which Dr LeoShep has spoken about—with this bill.There is another matter related to access to treatment services. With the passage of this bill those people who wish to access treatment services or who have a need to access treatment services will find those treatment services harder to access and that is for a couple of reasons. The first is that there will no longer be information at the point of sale or on the products about how to access treatment services. So that is one of the reasons. The other reason is that in order for people to be able to access treatment services once this bill is passed they will need to admit to criminal offending. That willbe a significant barrier for many as it is for those who require treatment for dependence on other currently illicit substances.Finally I want to speak about stockpiling and there has been some reference to stockpiling in this debate tonight. One of the consequences of this bill and of the Government’s approach to this bill is that there will be stockpiling—there has already been stockpiling—and the consequence of that is twofold. On one hand it actually increases the supply of these substances to fuel the illicit trade that we should fully anticipate will take effect from tomorrow night and on the other hand it also means that individuals will have much larger quantities of these substances that will become illicit. That means that they will be more subject to crime. Also that larger supply of these substances is inherently more dangerous. So I am very disappointed that rationality and evidence-based policy are the casualties of this bill tonight.I was proud of the quality of the debate of the maturity of the debate that we had around the original bill the Psychoactive Substances Bill and I think it is unfortunate that probably most members of this House understand that the bill that we are passing tonight will make the harm from these substances worse and not better. The Green Party will be abstaining on this bill.BARBARA STEWART (NZ First): On behalf of New Zealand First I would like to rise to support the third reading of the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. We are pleased that prompt action has been taken by the Minister of Health Minister Ryall so we would like to commend him for that action. We are pleased too with the participation of all parties in this House and their desire to ensure that this legislation is passed as quickly as possible. There has been huge concern in our communities about psychoactive substances and there is no simple solution to the issue of taking these psychoactive substances. Whether they are legal or illegal we are pleased that the psychoactive substances that are being sold in shops throughout New Zealand will not be available on Thursday.We are pleased too to support the new testing regime regarding animals. We know that Parliament wanted to reduce the harm of these psychoactive substances yet the bottom line was that the legislation had to be right and it was difficult to get it right. On this occasion we did not get it right. We did not do enough but tonight we have put it right.We wanted to reduce the harm that these substances were having right around New Zealand. We have to thank the people who came into our offices with the very sad stories about their youngsters who had taken these particular substances and who were continuing to take these substances. We understand that the information is not available as to how many people are going to actually seek help regarding the substance-taking. We know it is far harder to get off these chemical highs than it is to get off the natural products so we are told. So I was pleased to hear the assurance from the Minister that there will be resources available for all of those who seek help in this particular instance.It is ironic that the profit margin for the product owners manufacturers and sellers of these particular synthetic drugs is large. I was interested to read that the annual retail sales in New Zealand total around $140 million so it is little wonder that the dairy owners were not happy when the legislation changed.I must acknowledge the efforts too of Julie King who organised the recent marches right throughout New Zealand. It was a credit to her. It is no little thing to do that so thank you Julie.Tonight in New Zealand First we are very happy to support this bill. These products will never be safe. We are pleased that the products are going to be withdrawn from shops in our communities. There was not anything positive to come from these synthetic drugs only misery.MIKE SABIN (National—Northland): I am pleased to take the last call on this Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill. I just want to acknowledge Minister Ryall for the work that he has done behind the scenes. This is a very very difficult piece of legislation because it is a very very difficult area of drug law because of the challenges that these chemicals present which the drug manufacturers and the drugpedlars have exploited for many years now—since the late 1990s in fact.I am a little shocked but we expect what we expect from the Green Party. To abstain on something like this because Green Party members have strong views for and strong views against when the New Zealand public are struggling desperately with this subject—this whole Parliament has been—shows us really how unprepared that party is for ever being on the Government benches because every day a Government deals with matters that it has to make tough calls on. We cannot please all of the people all of the time. That party seems to think that if it cannot fall on one side or the other it will just sit squarely in the middle. Actually the New Zealand public expect greater of them—Kevin Hague: Split the bill then.MIKE SABIN: —and although I have the greatest respect for Kevin Hague I do not actually believe he has done his party any service today. Green Party members have demonstrated why they should never get anywhere near these Government benches. The public deserve better from them than abstaining on something that is very very important.What this legislation does is it removes the 41 products that were on the shelves as part of the transitional regime. With the benefit of 20:20 hindsight one could suggest that these products would have been harmful. They are made up of compounds and chemicals largely unknown to science that really serve only one purpose in my view and that is to make the drugpedlars money through the misery of addiction. These substances lock very quickly into theneurotransmitting parts of the brain and very quickly cause addiction and goodness knows what other psychological disorders. So this legislation gets rid of those 41 products and says that they will also have to prove that they are of low harm. I have expressed to this Parliament that low harm means that they cannot have a possibility of causing addiction—which is harmful—so I will be watching on with interest as to how this issue is traversed.It also removes the animal testing provision. I have absolutely no problem with that. What we are dealing with here is that if we have to raise the bar and say to those people that the standard for them as a drug manufacturer needs to be higher because if it is going to be used by humans we do not believe that animals should be subject to that well that is fair enough. Actually I do not think we should lose too much sleep if the onus going on drug manufacturers is that little bit tougher. So if they need to spend more millions and it takes them longer to be able to get their product to a position where it is available to go back on the shelves then so be it. I actually hope that what this legislation does is to put out of business drugpedlars drug manufacturers and those who would create addictive substances to create misery through addiction in order to make money.I want to commend the Minister of Health for what he has done. I want to commend colleagues across the House for supporting this legislation. It is a tough piece of legislation. It is pioneering stuff. Today this Parliament has sent a very clear message about accepting the harms that are created by psychoactive substances. Could I ask the New Zealand public to please also accept that we all have a choice to make when it comes to ingesting things like these or other substances. The legal status of a drug is never going to alter the chemical nature of that drug and we should all remember that.I commend this bill. I think it has been necessary but at least we have got on and done what needs to be done. I commend it to the House.A party vote was called for on the questionThat the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill be now read a third time.Ayes107New Zealand National 59; New Zealand Labour 34; New Zealand First 7; Māori Party 3; ACT New Zealand 1; Mana 1; United Future 1; Independent: Horan.Abstentions14Green Party 14.Bill read a third time.The House adjourned at 9.58 p.m.