Brown Simeon; Dyson RuthSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Madam Speaker for the opportunity to take a call on the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill. Look I'd like to make a few comments and I just want to say thank you to the previous member Chlöe Swarbrick for explaining how this bill has not been done and dealt with under any urgency by this Parliament. I'd like to remind this House that it was on 30 July last year that the Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters said at the post-Cabinet press conference after the news came out that 25 people had lost their lives from synthetic drugs that his Government this Government would deal with this issue with unction and urgency". Well it's one year further on from that. We now know there has been upwards of up to 80 people who have lost their lives from these dangerous drugs and the Government has only just got a bill to the second reading in this House. We still have the committee stage of the House. We still have the third reading. The Government has still not addressed this issue and people have continued to die from these insidious drugs. People are still making money from people's misery from selling these drugs. The law as it currently stands still says that a person will only get a maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment if they are found guilty of supplying synthetic drugs.Hon Tim Macindoe: Shameful.SIMEON BROWN: That is something which—yes Mr Macindoe—is incredibly shameful and which this Government should reflect upon because their words have not stacked up with their action. Their action has been poorly lacking and incredibly slow one year on since the Deputy Prime Minister said that this would be done with urgency—unction and urgency. The Green Party has also come out and Labour Party members while my bill was going through the parliamentary process consistently opposed to increasing penalties for the suppliers of synthetic drugs. I do applaud them for seeing the sense and the need to increase the penalties for those supplying those dangerous synthetic drugs and classifying them as class A under this bill. But those changes could have been done by Order in Council a year ago. Those two substances AMB-FUBINACA and 5F-ADB could have been listed as class A substances a year ago by the Minister of Health. This Government has sat on its hands on an issue while 80 people have died. Chlöe Swarbrick said we need to think about those who are addicted to drugs. Well 80 people have died from addictions to these drugs—80 people have died from addictions to these drugs—and we need to tackle the suppliers who continue to make money from those addictions.While we support the clauses in this bill which will finally ensure that those two substances become class A drugs and do provide temporary drug class orders to be issued for emerging and potentially harmful drugs the National Party cannot support the decriminalisation of all drugs which is included in this bill and which is a new power because if you read clause 6 which has two parts to it the first part affirms the police discretion and the second part includes a new element which the police must take into account. The evidence before the select committee said there would be no instances where the police would prosecute under this piece of legislation. There does need to be a health-based approach but there also needs to be a criminal element to our drug legislation to actually say that these drugs are dangerous. We think about the drugs which this impacts: meth heroin MDMA—serious drugs all being decriminalised under this piece of legislation. The law should be making it very clear: they are illegal. The message that Parliament should be sending is that they are dangerous and we should not be decriminalising in this way. Thank you Madam Speaker.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Ruth Dyson): A split call—I call Priyanca Radhakrishnan."