O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): Thank you Mr Speaker. I stand opposed to this bill and I want to start by saying that I don't oppose it from any philosophical basis around the liberalisation of cannabis laws but from a strong belief that passing a bill that permits unregulated cultivation of cannabis—with the medical profession as gatekeepers as the previous speaker Jonathan Coleman pointed out—represents an absolute wasted opportunity to learn the lessons from those other jurisdictions. I congratulate my colleagues on bringing this to the House and for what they are trying to achieve it may not be a bad piece of legislation but again I agree with the previous speaker that this will lead to a situation where through the legal ability to grow cannabis the State will lose absolute control over any ability to regulate it.Any change we make to cannabis law liberalisation must achieve two things: one at best it makes it less available to those teenagers—our people under 20—who all the evidence shows are damaged by cannabis and by use of same and secondly what must be achieved is we must get it out of the hands of the criminal gangs. This will not achieve that.One of the problems is that many overseas jurisdictions are quoted in these arguments. I've been fortunate enough to go to the Netherlands and spend time with regulators and with growers with suppliers and with police—same in Portugal and the same in Colorado. One important factor around the oft-quoted Netherlands is that cannabis is not legal there; it is permitted. There is no legal supply of the drug. As they say Illegal in the back door legal out the front." There is a proposal now that the local bodies be allowed to grow the cannabis legally but that is still subject to some debate. So importantly it is not legal; it is permitted. I don't think we have a mature enough system to allow that to happen.In Portugal—again oft-quoted—it is not legal. You're still arrested; you just don't go through the criminal justice system. You end up in Portugal going into the health regime—again well-documented.Colorado is the situation or the jurisdiction that we most look at and they started their journey to full legalisation exactly where we are where they permitted people with a medical certificate to grow six plants. That very quickly morphed into the ability of others to grow those six plants for those people. The biggest commodity very quickly became the list that you could grow cannabis for and by then they'd lost control.What I fear with this bill is that it is going to deny the opportunity to get it right. We are going to have a referendum before or at the next election and that's the time when the public of New Zealand will decide which way we will go on this. That referendum is already going to be redundant by the time we get there because we'll end up trying to build a regime on the basis of what will be a very liberal highly available amount of cannabis there and we'll be trying to fix it. If we're going to do this if we're going to achieve what the architects of the bill want to achieve and if we want to achieve what I'm sure many here want to achieve which is a very sensible world-leading cannabis regime we are denying ourselves the opportunity to do just that by doing this piecemeal like we're doing here.What the Government bill that went to select committee yesterday has done is it has bought us time which will allow us to address many of the issues that have been brought up here today but it will mean that when we move forward we get it right. We don't have to recreate. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's been done. We pride ourselves on being world leaders on this and we can. If this goes to select committee I fear it will come out it will go ahead and it will come back but it will be a poor example of legislation and it will be a missed opportunity to get this absolutely right.What I implore the House and my fellow members to do is don't send this to select committee. Let's get it right let's start with a blank bit of paper and let New Zealand end up with a highly workable cannabis regime that makes it safe for our children and for all those in the future and most importantly that gets it out of the hands of criminals. Thank you."