Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Mr Chair. I want to firstly add my call to the question that Dr Shane Reti has just asked about where how and in what circumstances the so-called patient" who has been prescribed what is presently an illicit substance somehow for their benefit is going to be able to take that. I can imagine somebody standing outside the Westfield shopping mall smoking a joint and using the defence that they were taking their medicine. In fact what would stop them from doing it inside the mall? Well the answer is: well probably a regulation.Louisa Wall made an extraordinary comment not on the face of it wrong that shows the ridiculous circularity of the argument that we're now having. She said I think paraphrasing that Parliament is not involved in the development of regulations—and that is true. That is technically correct with the corollary obviously that the Regulations Review Committee is there for a reason. Parliamentarians generally are not. But the reason we're having this discussion is because we are debating a bill which creates a regulation-making power with absolutely no detail about what that power is. We are delegating that—and this is my point—to unelected officials and that is not acceptable to the National Party.We are the lawmakers for better or worse. We stand or fall by the decisions we make in this House. It is not acceptable even in a regulation-making framework—so for example there are plenty of regulations that the New Zealand Transport Agency make under transport legislation but that transport legislation is carefully crafted to give the officials the sorts of criteria that is needed to do things like setting speed limits or things like that. We maintain using that analogy for example the prerogative and the power to decide what the blood alcohol limit should be in drink-driving conditions. We don't delegate that to officials because it is an offence regime and it is something that quite rightly sits within this House.So the whole point of the debate we're having is not that we should have regulation-making power that we don't have but that we shouldn't be delegating all of that power to unelected officials particularly now that we know that the delegation could include this committee—what was it called? This medical advisory committee of some sort will now decide—and I think this is why the Minister is quiet but he could clarify this for us—whether loose-leaf smoked cannabis becomes a medicine in the future. How on earth—Louisa Wall: It already is in Canada Michael.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: —it could possibly—well we're not in Canada Miss Wall; we're in New Zealand and we decide. In fact we're having a conversation this week about sovereignty and this party believes in the sovereign decision-making ability of this Parliament. We're not going to delegate it out to people who don't live in this country. So the question is: how on earth—and I hope I'm right on this because it's actually the only saving grace that the officials the so-called medical advisory committee might have greater nous than the Minister and his Government have about whether or not to delegate away this power.I can't for the life of me see how loose-leaf smoked cannabis could possibly be described as a medicine. It fails just about every test of dose control of THC limit and of the ingestion process. The blimmin method would be worse than the cure. We are heading towards smoke-free. It is a ridiculous situation.I can't believe we're actually debating how loose-leaf cannabis is going to become a medicine. It should be simply ruled out and that's what Dr Reti's very good member's bill and his Supplementary Order Paper that we'll continue to debate in clause 7—the famous 59-word clause. This is fundamental to the regime we're setting up. Otherwise there is no retort to the real accusation that what we are doing this morning is decriminalising cannabis. As I have said on a number of occasions we're going to have that conversation but we have to be careful not to conflate the two and that's exactly what we're doing."