Seymour David; Mallard TrevorDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to rise on behalf of the ACT Party in this general debate infrequent as these calls are. I want to reflect on a couple of themes during the debate that we've already heard from various members—one of them being the National Party's proposed medical marijuana bill.I want to say that ACT supports that bill with one condition: that it be made an omnibus bill to also amend the Constitution Act so that members of Parliament cannot speak vote or make laws unless they have a clear test showing that they are not affected by any kind of drug. It's been a critical condition for 800 years since Magna Carta that if we make laws in a Parliament or if a Government is to rule then it too must be subject to the laws that it makes for everybody else. When we debate in this general debate today the idea that people should be liable to have a drug test to receive a benefit or not when we talk about health and safety in the workplace and the very real dangers that people face from drug consumption in the workplace—sawmills all sorts of places where you can get very nasty injuries from people abusing drugs—it seems to me only fair that people in charge of an organisation with as much potential to do damage as a Government should have the same impositions put on them to check that they are up to it.If anybody doubts the necessity of this drug testing for politicians let me give some recent examples of questionable decisions which I'm not saying are a result of drug impairment but one has to wonder. Take Chris Hipkins the Minister of Education and his management of charter schools. He got on TV this morning and he said that he'd spent the last year trying to reform charter schools in order that they teach the New Zealand curriculum and have registered teachers. Well guess what Chris Hipkins? They already had them. A whole year of back and forth messing with the futures of 1500 kids to deliver exactly what he already had perhaps with less accountability.Or what about Stuart Nash who presides over a police force that is spending its time running around looking for drunk old people in bowling clubs and challenging their licensing decisions. That is the kind of decision making and presiding over a Government I'm talking about that may benefit from tests.What about James Shaw the Minister of Statistics who introduced a new electronic census and then went overseas while we had the lowest turnout for a census in decades. He introduced a new electronic census without doing the very obvious thing: keep the old paper system while you introduce the electronic one so you have a cross-reference. We now have no idea how accurate this year's census was and that is as a result of James Shaw.What about Andrew Little the Minister of Justice who is actually reforming the electoral laws. He wants to ensure that the leader of a party can effectively expel a member of Parliament from this House. Well there are three other countries that have that feature in their electoral law and they are Zimbabwe Sierra Leone and Pakistan. Now I think a Minister of Justice who is trying to bring New Zealand into line with Sierra Leone Pakistan and Zimbabwe possibly needs to be tested.But then there's Winston Peters who says that ending benefit sanctions no longer requiring people to be looking for work and showing up with a clean drug test prepared to actually go and do what every other New Zealander does paying tax to fund them—Winston Peters thinks that reducing benefit sanctions has no effect whatsoever on the fact that we've had the first increase in jobseeker support numbers in a decade or at least since 2010. That is a fail. We could go on. There are a number of other Ministers from whom I've heard nothing at all. It's possible that they are suffering from a lack of motivation and have not done anything. They perhaps should be tested too.So I put it to you Mr Speaker the ACT Party is quite happy to support the Government's medicinal marijuana bill; we're quite happy to support the National Party's bill. But we humbly submit that a minor improvement could be made by ensuring that the bill also amends the Constitution Act and perhaps the Electoral Act so that members of Parliament before they make dopey decisions have to pass a clean bill of drug-testing health before they do it. Thank you Mr Speaker.SPEAKER: The member's time has expired and I will advise members that we are having trouble with the clocks. We have to go back to the old-fashioned system of getting a one-minute signal and getting interrupted.