Ball DarrochDARROCH BALL (NZ First): The last thing that we just heard from the last member that sat down Anahila Kanongata'a-Suisuiki was actually quite true: this legislation is isolating and focusing on the drug dealer the offender and not on the innocent user or the user of the drug. That's quite true. And in no way do I believe that the author of this bill has in any way pretended or said in this House in his opening speech that this bill is all-encompassing and deals with all of the issues around drugs in our society and the abuses and the harms that they do to the individuals that use them. It's not perfect and I'll get into those bits in a second but what this bill intends to do and what it does is increase—and focus deliberately and specifically on the drug dealers and the drug manufacturers. If we look at that in its isolation which we should then every member of this House and every party in this House should be supporting this bill.New Zealand First will be supporting this bill through to the select committee phase. That is no guarantee that we'll be going past that because we do have some issues with what's in it but let me first say that I can't actually fathom why any party wouldn't be supporting this bill. There is a huge difference and there has been ambiguity with the speeches from the Labour Party so far between identifying the drug dealers and the drug users. Of course this is not a silver bullet but it's common sense to target those suppliers to target those dealers and to hold them to account and that's what this legislation does. Unfortunately the Minister of Police Mr Nash said in part of his speech that these weren't bad people. What he was talking about were the people that were using the drug and being addicted to it and he's quite right—they're not bad people. He also said that the suppliers are bad people so why are we not supporting this legislation through to select committee to iron it out and to have a look at the positives of what this legislation can bring?One of the stats that Mr Brown used was the number of convictions which had increased from 2013 to 2017 and he used the numbers 23 to 145. That's a 600 percent increase in three or four years. Now if that's not an epidemic such that we must look into every single avenue that we can to deal with these drugs and the abuse of these drugs then I don't know what is. New Zealand First is not willing to do nothing about it. There is a piece of legislation that is in front of this House that has the potential at this stage to do some good to hold these people to account and that's why we will be supporting this bill.I'd just very quickly like to run through a couple of the very latest convictions for the supply of these drugs. A man who sold synthetic cannabis in Rotorua was in jail for 4½ months after previously pleading guilty to two charges of the same. In one of the first prosecutions of its kind two men have been sentenced to home detention for importing deadly psychoactive chemicals. A woman caught peddling a so-called zombie drug has been told she could be off to prison for all of this. It needs to be kept in mind when talking about this bill and talking about what this bill intends to do from two years to eight years for the maximum sentence that this is the maximum sentence for the worst of the worst—the worst of the worst. So when we stand up and speak in this House and address this bill we can only be talking about the worst of the worst drug dealers and manufacturers not about the people—the victims—of this deadly drug. New Zealand First will be supporting this like I said. We do have some issues with it—for instance one of the main ones is why the member has chosen eight years. Why has the member chosen the class C drug level of punishment? If you look at the class C drugs you're talking about cannabis oil and cannabis seed and we're dealing with something much much greater. I'd like to see the logic behind why it's gone from two to eight years but New Zealand First will be supporting it from this point.