King Annette: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11805. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Labour—Rongotai):I want to continue on from where my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway left off. This Part 2 deals with a licensing regime. I think this is a very sensible approach that is being taken in this bill the Psychoactive Substances Bill. We did include as Iain Lees-Galloway said that we are going to have people who must have licences not only to import these psychoactive substances and to manufacture them and to research on them but also to sell them and to sell them at retail and at wholesale. So this is a very interesting approach to these particular drugs and I am wondering whether we are not putting in place a very very good regime for the future for the selling of tobacco because we know that these substances when they finally hit the market would have to be shown to be very low risk. This is the whole tenor of this bill. So having been found to be low risk we are then requiring a licence to be able to sell them at retail wholesale etc.What we do know is that tobacco is a much much more dangerous product. In fact not one cigarette is good for you. We know the dangers of tobacco—we have known for many many years—and we have seen the impact of tobacco on health and on mortality in New Zealand. I am wondering whether this is a very good opening for us to have licensing of tobacco sellers. At the moment you can buy tobacco at a supermarket in a dairy at the corner—it is freely available to people of the right age. We say that there is an age to buy these low-risk products and we license them and we run a licensing regime. I think the time will come to consider a similar regime for tobacco and I am thinking that maybe our committee in our recommendation to licensed retailers is groundbreaking in our approach for the future.What this licensing regime does is ensure that you have a fit and proper person or a body corporate that is a fit and proper body corporate to be able to apply for a licence. I think that there will be those who will be looking at what the meaning is of that “fit and proper person”. There is a feeling that some of those who have sold legal highs are not really particularly concerned about what the impact is of those legal highs on the people to whom they are selling. They are not all that concerned about what is in them so long as they are turning over a quick buck. I think the idea that when the application is by an individual the person must be a fit and proper person to have that licence and that is regardless of what they are doing—whether it is the body corporate or whether it is the individual for me I want to know what that “fit and proper” test is going to be. It does set out whether they have had a conviction and so on but are they able to get around that by getting somebody else to apply for their licence? This will be a part that we will need to keep an eye on.There are also going to be penalties—and they are quite stiff penalties in this legislation—for those offences relating to importation of psychoactive substances without a licence. If someone thinks that they are going to be able to bring in a substance and they are not going to have to have a licence they are going to find that they are hit by a pretty big fine indeed. In fact if they are an individual they will find that they could be in line for a term of imprisonment not exceeding 2 years or in the case of a body corporate a fine not exceeding $500000. So what we have put in this bill are pretty strong penalties for those who decide to import psychoactive substances without that licence. I think that is also a very good move.We do also in this bill require there to be a code of manufacturing practice. This was an area I was interested in because quite a number of these legal highs will be manufactured overseas. They will not be manufactured in New Zealand; they will be done on premises in different parts of the world. So what this bill does first of all is establish a code of practice that must be adhered to and that code is what that manufacturer will be audited against. So there will be an audit and the ability to audit a manufacturing premises and practices outside New Zealand. I can see how easy it would be to have an authorised person or persons within New Zealand to do an audit but I was concerned that it would be a very costly exercise to do an audit outside New Zealand. What we have been informed is that in fact the cost of that audit outside New Zealand has to be borne by the manufacturer of that product. So taxpayers do not need to feel concerned that they are going to be up for the cost of flying authorised people from New Zealand to the backblocks of China India Denmark or wherever the substances are going to be made. In fact this cost is going to fall on to the manufacturer who has to have that audit carried out.We also made an amendment in this bill which I am desperately trying to find and it was around changing the date for the code to come in force. The code was going to come into force after 1 year. This is the code that you would have to audit against the manufacturing of these products. We in the Health Committee decided that it should come into force much sooner than that. In fact we amended it so that it comes into force within 6 months. I think that work has to be done in getting everything in place and we acknowledge that work will need to be done but we are making sure that within 6 months there will be a code that goes alongside all the other changes so that we can audit the manufacturing of these products both inside and outside New Zealand.Another part here in Part 2 that I think is worth mentioning is that this part also sets up a Psychoactive Substances Appeal Committee. The function of this committee is to determine appeals against the decisions of the authority. This is seen to be having to have a natural justice course for appeals against decisions an authority makes. Of course in any of these things there does have to be the ability to appeal decisions—they are not always right; they do not get everything 100 percent right—so there does need to be an appeals committee. It is a three-member committee and one of the members of that committee must be a lawyer with not less than 7 years of legal experience so that there can be a legal eye put over some of the decisions if there is an appeal to this authority.This part is very much the working part if you like—the nuts and bolts of how this legislation is going to work. The other part that is in here is the approval of products and what sorts of products would be approved. It goes into some detail about the information that would be required and so on. I think we made this better at the select committee. I think we are going to make it work better and I certainly support the changes and the way that we are going about this whole regime by having a licensing regime and requiring there to be a high standard in terms of the manufacturing the selling the wholesale retail etc. of these products.