Rurawhe AdrianBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. I rise with some regret in not supporting this Misuse of Drugs Amendment Bill in its third reading. There are elements of the bill that are very good. The work on synthetics—particularly the penalties for suppliers of such drugs—are good things. But I'm just going to take my contribution to talk about clause 6 and the misnomer of the arguments that we have had to endure throughout this bill's passage and again this afternoon. To start off with the comments from both Mr Ball and Ms Swarbrick that all clause 6 does in amending section 7 is to codify a discretion police already have given that every statement around this is an acknowledgment of an authority that the police already have in a public interest discretion if that were truly the case then the words in the bill would be completely and utterly unnecessary. They would be unnecessary because by their own admission the discretion already exists. I'll take up the point that Ms Swarbrick made about consistency across the force and being able to gather data. Well that's simply not going to work for two reasons. One is that there is no requirement in this amendment for police or anyone else to track and report on the discretion as exercised. They don't need to record they did it; they merely have to exercise it. They don't have to write it down. They don't have to write it down and they don't have to report it. That therefore also impacts on the consistency argument. Because they don't have to do any of that then each officer can apply their discretion in their own way for their specific reasons. So Ms Swarbrick's claim that this will somehow lead to consistency across police members across New Zealand is simply not borne out by the legislation. I do hope it is borne out in operations but it certainly is not created in the legislation. Along the way—and Ms Swarbrick admitted in the committee of the whole House stage—as it was written at the time before the final Supplementary Order Paper clause 6 would mean that in effect possession of all drugs was decriminalised because the argument would be that a medical treatment or a medical approach would always be in the better interests certainly of the offender in every case and in no case therefore would a prosecution be able to proceed. She agreed that that is exactly the case in the way it was written. Now along comes someone—and it may have been Mr Ball; I don't know—who thinks that with the simple addition of in the public interest" at the end of that clause somehow that creates a change. Somehow it creates a change. Well here's why it actually doesn't. Here's why it actually doesn't: shifting away from a discretion in practice and codifying it now means that they have created a potential legal challenge to that discretion because if a prosecutor and it most likely would be a police officer but it could also be someone from Crown Law depending on the circumstances but let's just say it's an officer were to determine that "Actually I am going to decide that in this instance"—and it might be the sixth time they've apprehended an individual for possessing meth for instance. If a prosecutor were to determine that "This time I'm going to say 'No it hasn't worked. Therefore in the public interest it's not a better option to do a medical treatment. Instead we're going to prosecute.' " as soon as it goes to court the lawyer—even if it's a court-appointed lawyer—is immediately going to challenge that because they've got an objective-based test they can apply. They can argue in the court that it has to be proven—it has to be proven—that a health-based approach would not have been better in the public interest in that case and that has not existed in the discretionary powers that officers have exercised before New Zealand First going soft decided to agree to codifying this in law. It is an absolute mistake. It actually ties police officers' hands. In one respect it's tying the hands. It says "You can never prosecute." but then when you really really want to you've opened it up to a challenge in court and that's the problem when you get bush lawyers trying to amend what is supposed to be decent and important legislation. They make a complete hash of it. But let's not kid ourselves. The main proponents behind this bill were the Greens. They have always had the objective of the decriminalisation of drugs and in realty for 99 percent of the time I would suggest that they are going to have achieved that with this bill as written. New Zealand First who have had a history of being quite tough on this area have acquiesced on one level thinking they've created a protection which is a protection in theory but not a protection in practice. So quite frankly the Greens come out of this the winner and New Zealand comes out of this the losers along with New Zealand First. We do not support this bill. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): This is a split call. I call Greg O'Connor—five minutes."