David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to commend the words of my colleague Senator Steele-John and the work that he's done in this space over a number of years. The Greens firmly believe that recreational and medicinal cannabis should be legalised. I note that this Improving Access to Medicinal Cannabis Bill 2023 is seeking to provide greater access to medicinal cannabis. The Greens are on record as repeatedly pushing for greater access to medicinal cannabis, and I commend the senator for bringing the bill to the house. The truth of the matter is that this parliament and different state and territory parliaments have legalised access to medicinal cannabis, but done so in a way that only people with wealth can access legalised cannabis through the current rules. So, yes, if you have chronic pain, if you have untreatable nausea, if you have untreatable depression, if you have a variety of extraordinarily debilitating illnesses where medicinal cannabis has been proven to be of enormous benefit and you have money then you can access legalised cannabis in Australia. That's the combination. But if you have untreatable chronic pain; untreatable, ongoing nausea; terrible effects, potentially, from an array of traditional medicines to deal with pain and nausea, you go to your doctor and your doctor says, 'I think you could be best served by cannabis. Here's a prescription for cannabis.' You then go to the pharmacy and you realise it is $500 a month. You are on Centrelink. You're not getting legalised cannabis. You are not getting the medicine you need to help you. That's the state of the law in Australia at the moment. It's the state of the law and it's a reality, and that's the reality we need to fix.

In my work as the drug law reform spokesperson for the Greens, the issues with medicinal cannabis have kept coming back and back to my office as we have been moving to legalise recreational cannabis in this country. Indeed, I was at a public rally, only in the last few weeks, in regional New South Wales and a woman came and saw me and said that she had had a cannabis prescription from her doctor for the better part of two years. She had had one round of cannabis prescription. She'd gone to the pharmacist and paid the $300 to $400 to get the cannabis prescription. It was amazingly beneficial. It was everything she wanted. It took her off a variety of prescription painkillers. It was amazingly effective but she could only afford it once. Since then she had had to go back on the drip of the highly addictive, deeply troubling traditional painkillers under a traditional prescription, which she felt dumbed her down, gave her nausea, affected her appetite, affected her life, because she couldn't afford the legalised cannabis. Then she said that, in fact, on occasion she had just been getting black market, recreational cannabis and that had been really helpful and had been having the same effect. She lived in regional New South Wales. She had a choice then. She could get the black market, recreational cannabis, which was having the same health benefits as the legalised cannabis at a fraction of the cost, but then she couldn't drive. And if she couldn't drive she couldn't go see her doctor, she couldn't go shopping, she couldn't catch up with her family. So, again, because of the ways the laws operate, she then stopped taking the recreational cannabis and went back onto the prescription medicines again.

There's this toxic mix of broken laws in relation to cannabis that are all founded on this damaging political consensus amongst the Labor Party and the coalition—