Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this urgency motion about access to medicinal cannabis. It's an issue which is a personal passion of mine and a key priority of the Australian Greens. It's long past time that Australians got access to medicinal cannabis treatments—treatments that we know work, treatments that have the potential to relieve pain and suffering, treatments that can prevent nausea, treatments that can ease the symptoms associated with conditions like multiple sclerosis, treatments which do have a role in pain management.

This government should be ashamed of its record when it comes to giving access to medicinal cannabis. For many years, we've seen people who have championed this cause—people like Dan and Lucy Haslam, who had to lobby the government about the unbearable suffering caused by Dan's chemotherapy. Dan had bowel cancer. He was having chemotherapy. He had nausea and it wasn't relieved by a range of anti-nausea agents. Medicinal cannabis was the only thing that provided him with some relief to allow him to continue to eat and have some quality of life while he was receiving treatment. Sadly, Dan has since passed away. Of course, the great tragedy is that, even if Dan were still alive, he would not be able to have a consistent legal supply of medicinal cannabis to ease his suffering—even now.

Several years ago, the Greens decided that we needed some action here. We introduced the Regulator of Medicinal Cannabis Bill, which was cross-party legislation. It was a clear example of how the community, working together with their parliamentary representatives—and, of course, the Greens were front and centre in that change—allowed us to put pressure on the government.

The government, rather than accepting this as the most logical and rational approach to how we regulate cannabis—that is, to create a separate body to deal with many of the issues that are unique to medicinal cannabis—gave us their Narcotic Drugs Amendment Bill. That has effectively been a regulatory nightmare. People have to jump through hoops. There are so many obstacles that one needs to pass before one can get access to medicinal cannabis. You only need to look at the number of people right now who are being prescribed medicinal cannabis by their medical practitioner, which is only several hundred, to know that this scheme isn't working. The TGA medicinal cannabis experiment has failed, and we need a new approach.

Of course, this parliament gave the government the benefit of the doubt when they said that they were serious about reform in this area. Instead, we've got this disaster of overregulation and red tape and the continuation of an ideology that stops people from getting access to this treatment. We've tried to modify the government's proposal. In fact, we've done it through a disallowance motion. Indeed, we were successful in our disallowance motion, through the Medicinal Cannabis Legislation Amendment (Securing Patient Access) Bill 2017, in the Senate last year.

I have to remind the Senate that it was Senator Hanson and One Nation who voted against that piece of legislation when it was put before the parliament. That was legislation that would have given compassionate access to people who needed medicinal cannabis. Of course, I'm pleased that after the Greens had that vote recommitted—thanks to former Senator Jacqui Lambie, who made it clear that she had been unable to vote on that legislation—One Nation changed their position and we were successful in getting that disallowance through the Senate. We have continued to advocate for a process that removes barriers to access to medicinal cannabis under Special Access Scheme category A, ending the duplication in the regulatory process and ensuring that clinicians are informed. But the bottom line is we need to overhaul the system.

We'll support this urgency motion, but, sadly, this is a motion that gives patients false hope. Even if this motion does pass, it won't have any effect. What we need to do is have this government change the law. That is the only way we'll start to see people getting access to medicinal cannabis. It's so clear that the only model is to create an independent pathway—one that's separate from the TGA—that says, 'If you are suffering from a terminal illness, indeed, if you are suffering from a range of other conditions for which the evidence base is clear, then a doctor will be able to prescribe you this medication, because we know it's effective and we know it works.'