Barry MaggieHon MAGGIE BARRY (National—North Shore): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. I rise to talk to the Psychoactive Substances (Increasing Penalty for Supply and Distribution) Amendment Bill in its third and final reading. I am saddened by the remarks of the member who has just resumed his seat. While I don't doubt for a moment that the Minister of Health has best intentions at heart I still find it difficult to understand why increasing the penalty for the suppliers and the peddlers of these drugs is a bad thing. I think that unfortunately the issues with—Darroch Ball: It's happening in the Government bill. Hon MAGGIE BARRY: No it isn't the same as the Government bill and I supported your Supplementary Order Paper actually Darroch Ball. But I do believe that this is an issue that requires more immediate action. I think that the bill under its sponsor Simeon Brown has very carefully listened to the tragedies actually. I was there on the forecourt of Parliament on the day that Calum's father Lewis Jones was there but when I spoke to Lewis and heard about what that family had gone through and also what their son Calum had gone through I felt that the time to act was needing to be immediate. The idea that you could place it on hold and take it through a larger body of legislation and all the rest of it which could take a long period of time to get through this House rather than to vote through something that would initially at least address part of the problem which is the fact that these people who peddle the drugs—and my colleague Simeon Brown did detail the tragic last day of Calum Jones where his dealer sent him something like around a hundred texts to try and get him to take more drugs and then just turned up on his doorstep. So there was young Calum with a child and with everything to live for. He had got clean he was back in his environment and this demon pursued him and really besieged him. That is the kind of person and that is the kind of action that deserves much harsher penalties. I have had personal experience with this in my own wider family where younger people in particular have been predated upon around these psychoactive substances to the point where they're given them for free. I mean there are just no boundaries with these people—mixing them in with fentanyl to make them more addictive so that there is more likelihood of having a profit. The people who peddle this stuff are sometimes but not always addicted. They are individuals that have no moral compass whatsoever and what Simeon Brown's bill is attempting to do—and you know the title tells it like it is. It's about the distribution and the supply. This is not a redundant bill. This is not something that will fail except by a lack of political will from the other side of the House which I think is deplorable. So the petition that came to Parliament reflecting the experience of that one individual Calum Jones but also hundreds and hundreds of others before him was I think an inquiry that was worth having. To this day I can't understand why the Government would not have it. As my colleague pointed out this is a Government who is far more partial to inquiries than any other in New Zealand's parliamentary history. Why did they turn this one down? Oh because they thought that they could get political advantage from introducing another bill. Really? What does that serve in terms of the victims of these drugs? You know this bill was never intended to solve all the problems—no one bill can. The bill that the Government is proposing will not. There are a number of approaches that need to be taken and I think the longer they delay and the longer the time when the penalties are increased and when the health benefits and so forth of rehabilitation are put in place the more people will die and it's as simple as that. You combine it with what we saw the other night in the House with the Corrections Amendment Bill which has removed all of the useful things about drug and alcohol rehabilitation which the Hon Louise Upston had worked very hard on and consulted widely on and which we believed would be a phenomenal deal-breaker if you like or game-changer for people who were addicted despite their best efforts and who needed to be cured of that before they could become the people they needed to be. So for me the Corrections Amendment Bill also was a wasted opportunity because it did not address the addiction and requiring people to get drug and alcohol treatment while they were in prison and when they come out and that is a big miss. That is a shame that will result in deaths and a lot of misery for a lot of people. Again I don't understand what motivates this Government to walk away from the humane and the appropriate approach and instead fall back on dogma and their own bills rather than have the largesse to acknowledge that there are other pieces of legislation that will help and assist so that the Calum Jones tragedy does not repeat itself on a daily basis. I might need to be corrected on this Simeon Brown but I seem to recall that the police did manage to get those texts from the dealer and he was being charged with—Simeon Brown: He was convicted. Hon MAGGIE BARRY: He was actually convicted. So it can work. You can get these people and find the evidence through the text trail that they leave and make the point that they are predating on the vulnerable. They are really profiting in a way from the death and the misery of others. They need to be held to account under the law and they need the penalties. Why would you not have the same penalties as we have for marijuana as you do for psychoactive substance supply? What signal does that send these people? When I was in the Wairarapa a while ago—probably about eight years ago now—the psychoactive substances were available everywhere; in dairies garages and all the rest of it. We have had I suppose from that time before the law was clarified properly—and it still is too loose from my perspective—young people thinking it was OK to smoke this stuff because it was available readily. It didn't appear to be illegal. It caused enormous harm and it is phenomenally addictive. The stuff that they put into it—which changes all the time of course because they need to change it to remain legal—are horse tranquilisers and things that are physically very violent to become clean from. I know that people were having terrible physical responses if they didn't smoke the psychoactive substances and because they changed and because the dealers changed and they are more nimble than the law and more nimble than the politicians that make the law the misery continues. I think essentially when you look at what this bill is trying to do it's a small bill and narrowly focused but its provisions around amending with clause 4 section 70 to increase the penalty for selling or supplying unapproved psychoactive substances—where's the harm in that? So how do the people on the other side of the House live with themselves saying Ah well it's not going to solve all the problems. It's too punitive." Actually if it saves one or two or three lives and if it punishes more of these dealers that are peddling misery and death it's worth doing. The high horse on a political agenda isn't really a comfortable place to be when there are young men like Calum Jones with their lives ahead of them who are predated upon by people who need to have penalties that match the harm that they are doing to others and that's perhaps where we differ between parties on this. You take a more benign relaxed approach. You think that perhaps if a perfectly formed law is there that all problems will be solved. I'm not quite sure what the psyche is behind your logic. I don't agree with it. But what I believe and what I think would happen with this bill if it went through is that by increasing the penalty from a maximum of two years' imprisonment to a maximum of eight years—and by the way bringing it in line with other drugs—it would send a very strong signal. For the small towns and for the big cities with the dairies and the communities where this stuff is still being peddled this would be an effective deterrent. We are seeing a growing number of illegal products on the market so it's very important that these suppliers comply with the Act and with the testing regimes which are being set up through trial and error to try and ensure the approval of these substances. So for me when I look at what is in this bill and when I think back to the conversation that I had with Lewis Jones Calum's father he was a man who was deeply troubled by what had happened to his son and who desperately wanted this not to happen to anyone else which is why as a New Zealand male who was not necessarily used to telling very personal and private stories he told the stories of his son. He told how when they did the autopsy his sons' internal organs were just completely ruined. These drugs are phenomenally dangerous. They need to be stopped and the way to do that is to get through to the suppliers to take this bill and its measures—which to me is not a massive step. I'm disappointed in the Government and its supply partners in not recognising that this was something that could have been done. It's not going to achieve everything but it's going to achieve a heck of a lot more than what is happening at the moment thanks to the inaction and the blocking of this Government to a bill that would do a lot of good to a lot of people.I think in memory of Calum Jones this House should stand ashamed of itself tonight and members who haven't yet got the call should stay seated. So this is a bill that should have passed and is not passing because of the dogma and ridiculous philosophy of this Government and its coalition partners. Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker."