Derryn Hinch (Victoria, Derryn Hinch's Justice Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will be supporting Senator Di Natale on this issue. I endorse all he said about the suffering patients have gone through who are in need of cannabis oil. I have been to Nimbin several times and I mentioned during the brief debate last time around that you see kids there and you see kids who have hundreds and hundreds of convulsions. This treatment is a magic treatment for them.

You may recall that, back in the last sitting, Senator McGrath tabled a letter to Senator Xenophon at the very last minute, which I did not seen at that time. I have since read that letter. I have had meetings with the health minister, and I sincerely believe that the government had a scare campaign back then to try to conjure up as many crossbench votes as they could get. I was told stories by the government about how, in California, cyanide was causing deaths amongst people taking marijuana. I was told about this dangerous fungus that was being brought into Australia with foreign marijuana. It turned out to be the same fungus you find on rockmelons in the local supermarket.

I think One Nation voted it down because they wanted to protect the local industry. The danger and the problem here is that there is not enough of the local product at this stage. I would vote in support of the Greens on this now, and then, when the local product gets to a quality and a volume that can be sustained without any foreign cannabis oil, I would stand up and vote against the foreigners. But, until then, let's do it now. There are people suffering. I have talked to a man whose wife had her own faeces coming out of her mouth. I have talked to the parents of these kids with convulsions.

When I was doing the Sunday Night program, I campaigned hard against this ban on cannabis oil. It is a respectable product. It should be legalised. We should be doing all we can to help these kids and these terminally ill people—people like the man with brain cancer I met in Nimbin who has to get this stuff illegally to keep himself without pain. Another man has just done 10 months in jail in New South Wales because he illegally gave cannabis oil to the sick child of a family friend. So I will be supporting it. I hope the other crossbenchers do so too.