Pugh MaureenMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much Madam Chair. And it's certainly my pleasure to stand and take a call on the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill. I've been in my office listening to this debate for several hours and even standing here this morning listening to the contributions from this side of the Chamber it seems to me that clause 7 that we are talking about has opened up a huge amount of discussion. And what has appeared to me is that there are so many questions that are unanswered in this legislation. I heard the Hon Dr David Clark earlier this morning talking about how he does not want to commit too many details to this bill because he doesn't want to make any mistakes and so there is going to be more consultation. Well that says to me that this bill is not ready to pass through this House and I actually believe that we should be pulling this bill from the discussion.I felt that the comments made about the expertise of Dr Shane Reti were entirely—although Dr Clark said they were not meant to be critical they absolutely were. We're talking about a man who has been on the coalface of community health for many years. He has seen the impacts of the use of drugs in the communities that he's served overseas and here in New Zealand. He's researched this bill very thoroughly and as he's said himself talked to more experts in relation to this. To have a licensing regime that is rigid and attached to this bill before it passes through this House is completely appropriate. Now a doctor of theology may pray to God that he's got it right but actually in legislation we need it to be written down on paper so that the community the growers and anyone that is associated with the production of medicinal cannabis has it clear in their mind what they are getting involved in. This is the thin edge of a wedge and we need to get it right.And as the Hon Michael Woodhouse pointed out earlier there are flow-on effects in other pieces of legislation if we do not get it right. Once we've opened this door that horse has bolted and we need to make sure that if we are going to open this door to medicinal cannabis and especially loose-leaf that we have got some very tight rigid licensing regimes in place.For me when I look at the licensing in the proposed bill we are looking at 55 words that apply to it. Then when I look at Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 178 we've got 18 pages of detail. Now it's not a war of words and it's certainly not a competition about how many words are contained in the SOP but the detail that is in it is what the public would expect from good legislation. And there is nothing that I have found in SOP 178 about licensing that would caution me not to adopt this as part of the legislation. It not only applies to the licence holder but it also applies the same standards to employees of anyone that is involved in the manufacture the production and even the disposal of the product. That is completely appropriate from the community's point of view. I would challenge the Government to come up with a very solid argument about why we cannot have licensing detail in this legislation as it is laid out here in SOP 178.Now the eligibility for a corporate to be a licence holder is also broken down so that the licence holder—if it's a body corporate or a corporate body—must also nominate a specified person. So that specified person must also have the attributes that are laid out in SOP 178. They must have no other drug-related offences they may not be associated with gangs they must not have been involved in the crime of dishonesty as defined in the Crimes Act and they must not have been convicted of an offence that has an imprisonment penalty of two years or more. That is completely appropriate. Thank you Madam Chair.