Ward Mike: Misuse of Drugs (Industrial Hemp) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Ward Mike: Misuse of Drugs (Industrial Hemp) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
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MIKE WARD (Green) 
: 
 Apart from a pair of trousers made from the stuff I actually have no association with hemp. I have never used it and I did not know what it looked like. [ 
Interruption 
] 
Hon Annette King 
: You need to get a decent hat. 
MIKE WARD 
: My suit is actually wool as well. I tell members however that when I go down the street with Nandor Tanczos and he is in his hemp suit and I am in my woollen suit I am invisible. People do not look at me at all for some reason so obviously hemp has some advantages. If I have any passion at all I suppose it is to make life a whole lot more enjoyable and to make sure that this planet of ours continues to support us. Hemp has a role to play in that. Peak oil will hit us before too long—that is where the oil supply starts to run down—and we will need biomass as one of the things to fill the gap. Of course industrial hemp produces a lot of biomass very quickly and we will need it. We are removing forests from our planet at the rate of something like the equivalent of two football fields per second. That makes the equivalent of 7200 football fields of forests per hour. We need something to replace the fibre that comes from those forests and industrial hemp could be one of those products. 
Gerry Eckhoff talks about biosecurity tests. That is a red herring. Of course if there were no biosecurity tests there should have been and we would be at least as concerned as Gerry Eckhoff and anybody else in this country if that happened. If there are tests to be run there are organisations to do that and Medsafe does not seem to be the appropriate organisation to run the tests concerning hemp. If there needs to be regulations then the regulations should obviously be administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Nandor Tanczos was prepared to amend his bill to permit that. There has been talk that industrial hemp could be used to shield the growing of marijuana. Nobody has a greater vested interest in ensuring that that does not happen than the passionate people in my neck of the woods who have been involved with test crops of the hemp plant. The last thing they want to do is to imperil the future of the industry by letting marijuana be grown in the midst of it. 
Are we dumbing things down? Is this measure a move towards accepting marijuana? Again that is a nonsense; this issue has nothing to do with marijuana. We are way behind the rest of the world. There is only one other country in the world that has the same regime as us and that is the United States of America. France which has very strict rules on cannabis permits the growing of industrial hemp. If we were prepared to allow people to go to the expense of testing the stuff then I have to ask what we have found out that we did not know before that would tell us we cannot continue and allow the stuff to be grown commercially. I cannot see that we have learned anything we did not know before that should prevent us from telling those good people—who have put a lot of energy time and their own money into hemp because they are passionate about it—to go ahead grow it and we will put in place the kind of regime to make sure the community’s concerns are met. 
Hemp is an enormously valuable product. It produces fibre food and biomass. It produces a livelihood. But many people I have spoken to are just passionate about the idea of a planet that grows the stuff as a means of meeting a whole bunch of our needs in an environmentally friendly way—in ways that many of the products that we currently use do not do. This is a short call as this is not my issue but I congratulate Nandor Tanczos. I know that a lot of people around the country congratulate him on putting this bill up getting the issue out there and getting hemp planted as a test crop. We would hope in a very short time to hear this House say that it is time to enter the 21st century to go along with the rest of the world and to get some benefit from growing a crop that has huge value commercially and environmentally. Hemp is something that could produce jobs and livelihoods for people in this country as it has done in other parts of the world. I visited the Wool Bloc insulation factory in Nelson some time back and watched hemp being mixed with wool. It produces an excellent insulation and the acoustic properties of the insulation are enhanced enormously by adding hemp. The hemp that was used was Chinese hemp. The factory has also tried the local hemp. Hemp could be used in most of the pulp mills in the country as the situation stands right now. We have pulp mills that could use it with very little adaptation—we could use it tomorrow. 
I say well done to Nandor Tanczos. I am sorry the rest of the House does not see fit to support this bill. It is good legislation and I hope that before too long members will see the error of their ways and come up with something that will do the trick.