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

The Greens will be supporting this motion. Indeed, we'd like this motion to go further. At the moment, under the current system, people are being deprived of access to medicinal cannabis because the pathway that has been established by this government sets up roadblock after roadblock. If the government was serious about providing access for people with chronic pain and with a range of other medical conditions for which medicinal cannabis would provide some benefit, they would set up an independent regulatory process, take it out of the hands of the TGA and put it within the framework of an expert independent body to allow doctors to prescribe it without requiring specific approvals and then state approvals beyond the approvals already granted through the medical system. At the moment, access to medicinal cannabis is a joke. It's about time the government got serious and recognised the serious need within the community, where people would get great benefit from accessing a drug that is proven to work for so many conditions.