Mallard Trevor: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMallard Trevor: Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 06 May 2014. Volume:698;Page:17534. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): I want to start by doing something sort of slightly unusual and that is to compliment the Minister of Health. It is not something I have done that often but I think it is important to say that the world has improved a lot since Associate Minister of Health Peter Dunne was packed off to Bali and this Minister took charge of this particular policy area. A degree of rationality has come into the debate. We have stopped having the embarrassing appearances onCampbell Live when the Associate Minister goes to places where legal highs are sold but he has no understanding of the communities that are involved.I also want to compliment the Minister of Health on the consultation on this legislation the Psychoactive Substances Amendment Bill and the fact that he worked hard to get it to go back and forth to the point where an overwhelming majority in Parliament are prepared to vote for it and no one is prepared to vote against it.The other person whom I would like to thank for his work in this area is David Farrar because what has become absolutely clear to us over the last couple of weeks is that there has been a massive change of view following the questions that have been asked in Mr Farrar’s polling of people around New Zealand as to their attitudes to these legal highs and also to the testing of them on animals which are being asked I understand both in the quantitative research and also in the focus groups that the National Party is running I think four times a week. You know I want to say that it is good in this particular case and in fact generally that the National Party is working hard to understand the limits of the tolerance of New Zealanders and to accept—and I accept and I accept with regret—the fact that as a Parliament we got the original legislation wrong. We got it a bit wrong.If Tony Ryall had been in charge of the regulatory system that went with the original legislation then the legal highs that are being sold today and will not be sold on Thursday would have been not gone by lunchtime but certainly gone by Christmas. Any competent Minister would have set up the regulatory regime. Peter Dunne worked on this legislation for years. He worked on it. He had his little moment—not moment; he had his year—of problems and he had the leaking of the report. He had a bit of time off but he came back and he had responsibility for the regulation in this area. And did he do his work? He did not. As recently as 15 April—15 April—he wrote a letter to me. He probably wrote one to everyone else as well because we do not have a special or close relationship Mr Dunne and I. He was saying what good legislation it was and to give it a chance. Well how wrong he was.Again I want to congratulate David Farrar and his protégé the Prime Minister on getting to the point of understanding what Kiwis think. What having this legislation did was allow us to focus on the people who were using these products. They were widely and generally available but in my particular case it was only when there was a store 30 metres from my electorate office and I saw the queues there before school waiting for the shop to open that I really understood the addictive nature of this stuff. That is how I got to understand the fact that in Naenae so many people—mainly but not only young; I have seen mainly but not only young—were being affected by it. Seeing the kids in the pushchairs being pushed in and out of these places by their parents and seeing the transactions that were occurring within metres of the shop between people who had an ID that said they were 18—although I must say that some of them did not look like it to me—and people who were clearly much younger than that age and the exchanges the drug deals that were going on there was shocking.I am not absolutely aware of the sort of kawa or the protocols and I do not want to breach anything that is confidential from a select committee that you Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch and I sit on but I might say without referring to that that generally we got to the point in the discussions on this where I think we got a better understanding of the dangers of it. We got from the officials a defence of the testing regime but a defence that was not convincing—a defence that promoted the position of Mr Dunne but was not convincing I think to parliamentarians.I came to this debate not as an expert in the drug regulation area and not as someone who has had any experience in the health policy area—I think the only experience I have had in that was discussion with Heather Simpson when I declined to be the Minister of Health in 2005—so I respect the knowledge of a number of colleagues who know much more about this. But what I have been for many years is an owner of petsand in particular an owner of dogs. I came to this issue as a result of the representations that were made to me by my constituents and other people from around Wellington who pointed out what could happen under this legislation.Without going into any detailed family matters I have a close relative who is actively involved in medical research and that involves on occasions animals. I do not think it is wrong. I think there are occasions when it is necessary and where people are working in research with therapeutic outcomes I think that that can in fact be vital. I hope that in the future as computer modelling moves on animal testing will not be necessary. I know that it is substantially reduced but if it is for a good purpose then I think that it is important that it occurs for now. But there can be no excuse for killing animals for the purpose of boosting the profits of dealers in recreational drugs. There is no moral argument for that. To say that it is OK for rats and not for rabbits as the Prime Minister tried to do for a week or so—now we understand that Cabinet took that decision and then reversed it—is wrong.We have come I think to a good position on this. I regret my vote for the original legislation and that I did not understand the legislation and I did not understand the requirement to have a competent Minister administering it when I voted for it but we have got to the point now where we have made some progress.Bill read a second time.