Swarbrick Chlöe; Andersen Ginny; O'Connor GregCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Co-Leader—Green): E te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. This is a really short piece of legislation and the Amendment Paper in my name is what I'd like to speak to today but I'd just like to contextualise that Amendment Paper within the reason that we have this amendment bill before us. So as I outlined in my first and my second reading speeches within the Misuse of Drugs Act (MODA) there is a self-fulfilling prophecy which continues to entrench an anti-health or anti - evidence-based approach to substances as classified within MODA 1975. To that effect there is a requirement that if you are to introduce a new substance for classification and therefore to bring along with it new criminal penalties you only need to pass an Order in Council which is typically rubber-stamped and waved through Parliament within a few minutes. However if you are to declassify or to down-classify a substance you need an entire amendment bill which is the reason that we have this Misuse of Drugs (Pseudoephedrine) Amendment Bill before us today. Obviously the intent of this Government is to try and get this passed before Christmas which is the very reason that we've had the deeply truncated select committee process but what this speaks to is the fact that there are fundamental flaws within the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975.So that's where I now get to the Amendment Paper in my name. This Amendment Paper would insert new clauses 4AA and 4AB and effectively would require that the Minister institute or create or commence a review on the operation of the broader Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. This is entirely consistent with the need for us to operate in a direction which is an evidence-based and harm minimisation approach to substances I'd say entirely aligned with the very arguments and rationale that the Minister in the chair David Seymour is making when it comes to this reclassification or down-classification bill when it comes to pseudoephedrine.To that effect we have seen it reflected in the Law Commission's work from 2011; from He Ara Oranga the mental health and addiction inquiry; and Turuki! Turuki! the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group review—all of which effectively said we just need a straight-up repeal and replacement to replace the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 with a health-based harm minimisation type of approach. But in lieu of having that political consensus why not add another review to the pile so that hopefully a Government further down the track does the right thing when it comes to the evidence and a harm minimisation type of approach.I guess that's just the baseline appeal that we would like to make across the House today as the Greens: entirely consistent with the approach that we have taken on cigarettes on alcohol on cannabis and on all other substances including pseudoephedrine let's take an evidence-based harm minimisation approach but let's apply that to substances across the board. Why not have an entire review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 because as the Minister is underscoring in his rationale for this legislation in front of us today the classification schemes and the moral panics that tend to be associated with them simply are not working and are not fit for purpose.Hon GINNY ANDERSEN (Labour): Thank you very much Madam Chair—thank you. Look I'll just take a short call. Even though it was an incredibly short time for select committee to hear submissions and gather evidence around what the impact of this bill will have on communities one of the points that I thought was really interesting is that there's a proportion within New Zealand of people who have either complex drug and alcohol—a range of issues that will take whatever's going at the moment. At the time that once was synthetic cannabis; other times there's been new kinds of drugs—fentanyl was a real risk that we've seen in other countries. But one of the observations is that as pseudoephedrine becomes more readily available the group of frequent drug users in New Zealand will use this drug and potentially use it to manufacture methamphetamine.So I think with that power to change the law for the Government there also comes responsibility to talk about what types of addiction services will be made more readily available to those people in our community who need that assistance but aren't yet still receiving it. So I would be really interested to hear from the Minister: if there is going to be more readily available pseudoephedrine within the community then what are the steps that will be taken to provide communities with the support treatment and ways of having more wellbeing more supported transitions and therapeutic communities that assist people to make positive choices and to move away from harmful abuse of substances When you're making a substance like this which can be potentially harmful more readily available it would be good to have an understanding about what the Government's plan is to provide assistance into those areas where they might be more harmful.GREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Madam Speaker. I've just got some questions of the Minister; they'll be around the context of this. Now I accept this is a very simple bill that by itself out of any context merely changes the legal status of a substance. However as the Minister knows nothing ever happens in isolation and I think it's important to note that the difference with methamphetamine from every other drug virtually that we deal with—some of them being mentioned by my colleague previously Ginny Andersen—is that this starts life as every ingredient which goes into itvery precursor is legal when it starts life and it's only when they are put together that you have an illegal substance.I'll give an example of that. When I was a younger police officer we had a major heroin epidemic in New Zealand and it was not unusual to have two or three heroin overdose deaths in Wellington. Now that was cured overnight because the Mr Asia syndicate—the very efficient Mr Asia syndicate—had been bringing basically all the heroine into New Zealand. So when they were busted they fell apart quite badly—ended up with one of them handless and headless in a quarry in northern Englands a result the whole syndicate collapsed and there was no heroin in New Zealand for quite some time.The next lot of heroin arrived because the very resourceful criminals and drug addicts who were left actually started to make heroin what we called homebake heroin using codeine-based products—very resourceful. We hadn't had a problem for about three or four years; all of a sudden we had a problem again where this homebake heroin which actually turned out to be more of a problem than heroin itself was actually harder on the body and resulted in more deaths than heroin did itself.Now coming forward to the question that I'm asking here: has the Minister in bringing forward this legislation considered what may happen heret was a very unlikely scenario that a country awash with heroin all of a sudden would have no white powder available and the same thing could actually happen. New Zealand has relatively secure borders unlike most countries where you can drive into or sail into—well you can sail into New Zealand but you lose control of the product. It's actually quite conceivable in New Zealand that we could end up with very little heroin around as we did during the COVID lockdowns I might say when it was very difficult to obtain this. Now with this product now available—there are other products; the main ones things like red phosphorus some of the acetic acids whose names I could never quite pronounce let alone remember but there was about four or five basic core ingredients that went into this.Has the Minister considered the importance of ensuring that there is a monitoring regime so that by for example working out how much red phosphorus is being sold another essential ingredient—some of those other core products are actually being sold so if the amount of them being sold stolen or otherwise acquired starts to rise is there anything that the member has considered? Certainly there's nothing I can see in the bill that will just give that security that this simple bill won't result in us going back to the old homebake heroin situation or allowing young amateurs around particularly school kids. Also bearing in mind we have a regime now where things are much more readily available through mail order through various sales regimes where those other ingredients are much easier to get hold of now. So is the Minister happy that we're not actually re-establishing the conditions where we could actually end up with a problem in the future without some sort of monitoring regime to make sure that we have that reassurance that it won't happen?