Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Chair. I believe this may be the last call that I have and I wish to cover a particular area under the licensing production standards. But before I do I just want to respond to some of my colleagues. I thank member Swarbrick for her kind words.Yes I have met with industry—certainly Manu Caddie from Hikurangi—and indeed as we discussed our changes to employee eligibility the vast majority if not all of industry players that we met with were happy with the modifications we made in consultation with them. By the way I would also contend that I've met with more industry players than the Minister and his team have on the basis that a number choose to remain undisclosed for commercial reasons and a number are somewhat concerned that the ministry has such influence at the moment around research approvals for medicinal cannabis etc. that they don't want to fall off side. So I would contend that I've met with more industry players than the Minister and his team and so I can speak somewhat on what's been relayed to me.It was also discussed that there was some concern about the eligibility of fit and proper persons who might be licensed. Certainly for the licensee the eligibility criteria also relate to significant relationships that may influence the business—absolutely no apologies for that. The Australians write this into their legislation—oh that's right not regulations; they write it into their legislation so that everyone can see it and everyone can talk about it.Secondly around employees I have as an eligibility criteria no current gang affiliations—no apologies for that whatsoever. This is the manufacturing of cannabis. If you have an active gang affiliation I'm afraid you are not suitable to be manufacturing or in the manufacturing business for cannabis. We make provisions for that under the clean slate Act equivalent which says Look if you have no further criminal record and currently you're not an active gang affiliate and have not been in prison for two years or more you can be an employee again." But if you are I'm afraid that under our scheme—and we will stand beside that—you are not suitable as an employee.Now I want to come to the last quantity if you like of work on the licensing that I want to address and that's production standards. Fundamentally we believe medicinal cannabis should be a medicine like any other medicine and go through a similar process albeit fast-tracked and abridged in places. That will give us access and affordability but fundamentally it's just another medicine. It needs the same quality standards that Medsafe applies to other medicines and we were prepared to advance the Medsafe process through section 23 of the Medicines Act—provisional consenting—that advanced that whole lot along. But fundamentally it's just another medicine. What that means is it needs to be produced under pharmaceutical standards and that pharmaceutical standard is GMP: good manufacturing practice.All of the industry players whom I spoke with agreed: GMP—don't shift off that. Some people initially said "Look why don't you go to the GPP standard that Canada has?" It's a hell of a lot easier—10 percent tolerance. So if the level is 10 you could be sort of zero or 20 and it's still OK—"near pharmaceutical". But eventually every industry player that I spoke with said "Stick with GMP Shane." for several reasons. First of all if we want to export you can only be GMP certified. Secondly in our hands we require clinical trials to follow up the eventual retail distribution and you may well be able to bring phase zero one and two trials from offshore and demonstrate that these products are safe—all well and good; we describe all of that in parts of the work we're putting forward but fundamentally to do clinical trials you've also got to be GMP standard.So we stand beside and we describe in our bill that production standards for cultivating processing and manufacturing need to be GMP standard—that is pharmaceutical standard. However we didn't want to lock that terminology in. What if in five years' time Medsafe decides "Look there's a better standard."—call it X Y Z who cares? Will we have to come back to the House and discuss that? Maybe not. So what we've actually said is that it needs to be compliant with existing Medsafe policies and practice and how we've woven that in is by saying it has to be a medicine because under the Medicines Act if it's a medicine it has to be compliant with Medsafe policies and practice. So we've thought this through really carefully—all the details right through from cultivation to processing to manufacture.Just finally to touch on the fact that we're extra extra cautious around commercial production not personal production. I've already mentioned we state this in the bill. We also did something rather nice to make sure it is commercial production by saying that if you're a cultivator you must have a contract with a processor; if you're a processor you must have a contract with a manufacturer—just making absolutely sure that our intentions and what we want to achieve is commercial production of accessible and affordable medicinal cannabis."