Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green): E Te Māngai tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. It's news to me that the Greens are legalising cannabis by stealth. We actually have a confidence and supply commitment to do exactly that by way of referenda in which we can expect and hope a positive public outcome occurs. But on 31 January earlier this year I opened the debate on my—formerly the Hon Julie Anne Genter's—medicinal cannabis member's bill and at that reading I said Surely the point of our laws is to keep people safe and to prevent them from suffering. Where people are already suffering it is to ensure that they get access to help or relief. So what happens when the law itself is responsible for suffering and prevents people's access to that help or relief? I believe it is Parliament's moral obligation to change that law or at the very least to be brave enough to listen to those who it is hurting—to open our hearts and our minds. This bill is about how we treat our sick. It is about what happens to all of us when we find ourselves sick. It is about the help that we as a society can give and the help that we deny."Now nearly 11 months later we are finally closer than New Zealand Parliament has ever been to a legal medicinal cannabis scheme. I want to acknowledge the patients and campaigners many of whom are in the gallery today who have spoken actually of their dismay who've said that this is not enough. I want to let them know that this represents a starting point. This represents parliamentary consensus of what this time last year was seen as radical unfathomable change. This is the closest our Parliament has ever been to this point. Today is historic and it is for you. In approximately an hour—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I don't think it's for me.CHLÖE SWARBRICK: No Madam Deputy Speaker it's for the people in the gallery who I was addressing but in approximately an hour—DEPUTY SPEAKER: Actually you're addressing me.CHLÖE SWARBRICK: Apologies Madam Deputy Speaker. I would address that to the people in the gallery. So in approximately an hour this bill will pass with a parliamentary majority. After that it will receive Royal assent and from that moment people who are in palliative care will no longer be turned into criminals for accessing medicinal cannabis. From that moment the clock will start to tick on a strict 12 month time frame to develop and implement regulations for licensing production import export prescription possession and consumption of medicinal cannabis. And subsequent to the passage of this bill the public can expect to be consulted with on the development of the regulations as has been pointed out by the Minister of Health Dr David Clark.We have negotiated collaboratively and creatively with both Labour and New Zealand First to achieve that progress for the extension of the criminal defence from terminal illness to palliative care and for the time frame of regulatory development of no more than 12 months. We recognise that patients and their friends and whānau have been waiting for far too long.We have also worked to see the inclusion of native strains of cannabis and local regulations to be developed. It is with a sense of hilarity that most people realise that despite Ministry of Health data providing ample evidence that approximately hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders are using cannabis on an annual basis technically cannabis doesn't legally exist in New Zealand. So to ensure that we create a common-sense framework for legal medicinal cannabis in Aotearoa New Zealand we will provide a mechanism to fold those local strains into these regulations.So that is the technical detail but what does any of that actually mean in practice? Well I think it is summarised well in an email I received on Friday last week from Emma Helleur: "Today it is my little brother's 21st birthday. He has been bedridden for the past five months and is slowly and painfully dying. All of the morphine fentanyl and painkillers in the world don't make him feel as calm as the cannabis. His doctors told my parents to get it and now my parents frequently and expensively have to source weed so he's not in a horrific amount of pain 24 hours a day. And now on his 21st birthday he is dying an incredibly slow and painful death. He will suffer every single moment until his lifelong illness takes him. As his family we have to stand by and watch him cry because he can hardly move. He can't even pick up a bottle of water. And this is how he is spending his last days. I would give anything to end his suffering. So I wanted to say thank you. It's too late for us to do anything about Jacob's situation but I hope that in the future no other sisters mums dads or brothers have to stand by and watch somebody that they love suffer."I believe that thank you from Emma extends to all of the parliamentarians who have taken off their tribal stripes and come to the table to respectfully and compassionately discuss and progress this issue. That thank you extends to the staunch and tireless campaigners who have extended and placed facts and figures in front of MP after MP after MP in Parliament after Parliament after Parliament. Thank you to the thousands of New Zealanders and hundreds who came before the Health Committee armed with research who opened their worlds and shared their stories who organised and advocated for those who couldn't make it out of the hospital bed or who couldn't speak words of their pain in front of the characteristically formal and may I say sometimes quite frightening select committee process.I am sorry that we could not make this bill everything that you wanted it to be. We never could. Whilst this is the most that we have managed to shift Parliament's sentiment on this issue in decades we're still far behind other jurisdictions and the public support far outpaced parliamentary action. So today I am calling on all of those who campaigned and fought to see this happen to not give up on the process. In the future it should not take Parliament this long to act on the evidence nor with compassion. But it will only happen if New Zealanders continue to push and prod their parliamentarians along. We are accountable to all New Zealanders.I have a vision for a local medicinal cannabis scheme in Aotearoa which provides us with an opportunity to move away from a reliance on big business overseas pharmaceuticals. It's not spurred by moral panic or a fear of anything that isn't cut or pressed in a lab but informed by evidence in the developing research. It opens up a market that allows those who have been targeted and penalised disproportionately under the war on drugs to use their skills to retrain and to contribute to society. It provides an opportunity to communities throughout regional New Zealand to not just stabilise unsustainable economic decline but to flourish on their own terms. That ability to delve into research and development should not be overlooked and neither should specialist education. Iwi-led Hikurangi Enterprises the first company in New Zealand to be granted a medicinal cannabis licence has worked with local polytech Eastern Institute of Technology in Ruatōria to adapt a horticultural course into a hemp one and in turn has produced a hugely oversubscribed polytech programme—one of the only polytech programmes in the country I might add that is not currently experiencing enrolment decline but an explosion of interest.Finally I just want to address the floating red herring in the medicinal cannabis debate: it's the fear that we have about people getting high. It is the oversimplified lens that we put on cannabidiol's pain-minimising properties and THC's psychoactive properties. What exactly do we think that prescription opioids do except to reduce pain and induce psychoactive responses not to mention come with much higher risk of addiction overdose and negative side effects? No one here is saying that cannabis does not come with harm—that would be irresponsible. Though what we are saying is that to minimise that harm we have to recognise that an illegal substance is exactly the opposite of a controlled substance. We get that control through regulation and the medical profession we believe is far better placed to figure out what they should be prescribing than some folks in comfy armchairs in an ivory chamber.Finally I just want to say my thanks to all of the staunch campaigners and advocates in the gallery this afternoon. I want to say thank you to former Green MPs who fought long and hard for this issue far before I came before this Chamber and I want to thank our incredible Green parliamentary advisers Holly Donald and Ralph Hall. We are incredibly proud to be progressing this legislation today. Kia ora."