Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai tēnā koe tēnā koutou e Te Whare. I stand today in strong support of the second reading of the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand. I want to thank all of the 1995-odd submitters who submitted to the Health Committee for what I understand was a deeply robust debate which unfortunately led to the Opposition kind of throwing their toys out of the cot for reasons which I will get to further down the track.Hon Member: That's very good of you. CHLÖE SWARBRICK: I believe it's somewhat inconsistent with their track record including the track record of that member who is now heckling me. I think when we talk about the issues that were the catalyst for this bill—that being the more than 50 deaths of New Zealanders—we frequently forget that we're actually talking about people's lives. We're not just talking about mere numbers and that is why it is crucially important that we actually do take a balanced approach to this issue.The premise of this bill is simple: we are seeking to address the causes of drug use and abuse instead of simply falling down the track that we have for the past 40 years of locking people up and throwing away the key—out of sight and out of mind. I'd like to ask members of the Opposition who seem to be calling for the continued criminalisation of people who use and abuse substances whether they genuinely think that a good use of public resources is locking those users up for $110000 a year. Is that a better use of public resources than it is to provide somebody with mental health and addiction treatment? What we know from the research including the most recent He Ara Oranga the mental health and addiction inquiry report is that the major drivers of mental health and addiction problems are isolation and trauma. Our current systemic response to issues of drug use and abuse further isolates and traumatises people. We know this through the likes of the recidivism rates that have been raised by Mark Mitchell a member of the Opposition. I want to turn now to a few of the critiques that have been raised by the Opposition because frankly they just don't make sense. If we're to talk about common sense we have the likes of the Hon Michael Woodhouse and Mark Mitchell saying that somehow the position of the Labour Party the Green Party and New Zealand First are mutually exclusive here. Michael Woodhouse in his—I suppose it was an attemptedly witty remark about the left and the far left on the one hand codifying police discretion and on the other posing the biggest change to drug law reform in over 40 years. Both of those things are not mutually exclusive. We had Mark Mitchell saying that on the one hand there's nothing new that's been added here with the formalising of police discretion but also there are new things in here and that's a problem because by adding these new things in we don't trust police but also there's nothing new. I don't know if Mark Mitchell was listening to himself speaking because ultimately what we are seeing here is the biggest change to drug law reform in over 40 years because it is the codification of that police discretion for the first time. There will be transparency and accountability and data on how police use their discretion which is currently used on an ad hoc basis. We even had the member Mark Mitchell saying that he as an officer had used his discretion and that he sometimes had got it wrong but the problem is we have no data. It was used on an ad hoc basis; there was absolutely no transparency on the criteria that he applied to use that discretion as an individual officer. The point here is a systemic change. The point here is transparency and accountability. The point here is to actually address the fundamental issues that drive drug use and abuse which are echoed in report after report that have been presented to this House and to members in this House—as early back as the Law Commission 2011 report on the fundamental flaws of the Misuse of Drugs Act recommending that we move towards decriminalisation of use through to the mental health and addiction inquiry of last year which showcased the reasons why people do engage in drug use and ultimately go down a path of drug abuse—those being and I can't reiterate it enough the issues of isolation and trauma which our current systematic response of criminalising people only serves to reinforce and make worse. I also want to raise the issue which has been pointed out by a number of Opposition members that being that we didn't support the National Party member's bill in the name of Simeon Brown which they say was ultimately doing kind of the same thing as this bill. It's kind of doing the same thing somehow but also this bill is massively different and they're not supporting this bill—meanwhile they supported Simeon Brown's bill. The major difference between the member's bill as put forward by the National Party member Simeon Brown and this bill is that we're actually talking about what we're going to do with the people who are affected by the issues of substance use and abuse. What was absent completely absent from the National Party's member's bill were users and abusers and the people whose deaths led to this bill in the first place. We are actually codifying how we are going to respond to those problems. On that point I want to refer to an article by National Party member Simeon Brown who wrote in October 2018 a response to a piece that I wrote for the publication The Spinoff where he said that the National Party was proposing a middle ground on drug law reform. He said Swarbrick frequently refers to Portugal as an exemplary model of decriminalisation. Yet she fails to note that manufacturing distribution and supply are still criminal offences and highly penalised in Portugal." The member goes on and then concludes "As a society we have to acknowledge that more needs to be done to support those suffering from addiction." If the Opposition are proposing somehow that they have a middle ground here but all they are calling for is increased criminalisation and penalisation of people in response to drug crises they are far removed from reality because it is anything but. What this bill proposes is exactly what the National Party member Simeon Brown and what many Opposition members said in their calls when speaking on his bill: they don't want to criminalise users. I'd just like to actually refer explicitly to what is put in this legislation—clause 6 which says "To avoid doubt it is affirmed that there is a discretion to prosecute for an offence against subsection (1)(a) and a prosecution should not be brought unless it is in the public interest." and "When considering whether a prosecution is required in the public interest in addition to any other relevant matters consideration should be given to whether a health-centred or therapeutic approach would be more beneficial." That which I've just quoted is supposedly the new not new clause per Mark Mitchell's contribution to this debate.I also want to refer to the point raised by the Hon Michael Woodhouse who said that I needed to go back to constitutional school—an interesting point from a member raising with one who has been to law school with another who hasn't. But the palpable patronisation that has been involved in this debate thus far—if all you can come back with when evidence confronts you is some ad hominem attacks I think there's one of us who needs to go back to school and quite frankly I'd hesitate to suggest that at this point it wouldn't seem to be me.This has been a highly publicised change—a highly publicised change. We have had the deputy leader of the Opposition going out in front of TV cameras on the tiles in Parliament and talking about how this is decriminalisation by stealth. All of the National Party members have their talking points and will continue to hammer this home. That is far from anything but stealthy when we are enabling such a long-winded debate on it let alone the entire select committee process which was not rushed through under urgency but heard from 90-odd submitters. I also just want to in closing point to what has been raised many times before including in the opinion editorial by the National Party member Simeon Brown and that is the case of Portugal. It's quite funny to me—it's interesting which is a loaded political term. It's interesting to me that the National Party consistently refers to Portugal consistently refers to evidence but wasn't willing to engage with João Goulão the architect of Portugal's change in front of the cross-party group which we invited him to."