Lees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Psychoactive Substances Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11796. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):I think it is too. Thank you very much. I feel the need to respond to a couple of the speakers on the other side of the Chamber. The first is the Hon John Banks. Let us be absolutely clear about what the Hon John Banks is advocating. If he does not get his way—if the Green Party’s amendment Supplementary Order Paper 260 which we on this side of the Chamber support and which John Banks supports is not passed—he wants the status quo to continue. He wants unregulated untested unknown drugs available in your corner dairy. That is what John Banks wants if he does not get his way. He wants to continue the sorry tales that we are hearing from mental health centres and addiction treatment wards up and down the country of the horrific impacts of some of these substances that are the result of the fact that we do not know what is in them and that our current drug law is not robust enough to deal with these new substances. That is what John Banks wants. I want the public to be absolutely clear about that.This Psychoactive Substances Bill is a good bill. It is a really good piece of legislation which I support wholeheartedly. I have been asking the Government to get on with this for a long time actually. It is a really good bill. Unfortunately the debate has been completely derailed. I see members opposite nodding and I think we have some agreement here about the fact that it has been derailed. It certainly has not been helped by the Government’s intransigence on this issue. I think that for John Banks to get up and say that he will block this bill if he does not get his own way and let young people continue to be harmed by these substances sums up John Banks’ philosophy quite well. I do not think that it is actually the ACT Party’s philosophy all that much—Hon Trevor Mallard: Oh I think it is.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —but it is John Banks’ philosophy. Well it might be the ACT Party’s philosophy. John Banks’ philosophy is clearly to take more interest in animals’ welfare than in people’s welfare particularly young people’s welfare. I really object to that from John Banks.I also object to the statements made by Shane Ardern. Shane Ardern was on the Health Committee. He watched the way it operated. He watched the really constructive approach—Hon Annette King: He said nothing.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Yes he was a casual observer of the process. He watched as members from around the House—members from different parties—tried to work constructively. But let us unpick what Shane Ardern said. He said that the only reason Opposition members wanted to hear the submissions about animal welfare was that we wanted to slow down this process. He used that emotive statement deliberately because he knows how much the public actually wants Parliament to get on with passing this legislation.Let us just show how nothing could be further from the truth. This bill was originally introduced in the House in February. That was already 2 long years after the Law Commission reported back with a comprehensive report one chapter of which has turned into this legislation. So the Government took 2 years to get the legislation before the House. It then let the bill sit on the table for months before it got before the select committee and then when the Government finally took it to the select committee it told us that we had only 2 months to get through the job of considering all those submissions getting the legislation right and getting the crafting of it right so we could bring it back to the House in a good form.Guess what! The Minister got up and said: “I do not think there are going to be any problems here. Not too many people are going to want to submit.” Hundreds of people wanted to submit on this bill and they got blocked because the National Party actually knew that it had got itself into trouble and that if it listened to all those people—if it allowed the democratic process which we think is so fundamental to life here in New Zealand to go ahead as it is designed to do—there is no way we would have got this bill back to the House in time. That is purely a function of the Government’s failure to prioritise these issues and get this bill to the House before this year. That is why we had the issue of whether or not we could hear submissions.The chairman took advice and I appreciate that the chairman got advice that the issues of animal welfare were out of scope. That did not stop the select committee from hearing the submissions. It did not stop the select committee from hearing the submissions. The thing that stopped the select committee from hearing the submissions was the National Party members voting against it. We then did not hear those submissions. We then got advice and this is where—