Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor supports the Narcotic Drugs Amendment (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill 2021. There still remains much to be done in the emerging area of the therapeutic use of medicinal cannabis. The legislation implements a number of recommendations from the McMillan review of the original legislation that was passed in this place in 2016 and streamlines various processes for industry participants. Medicinal cannabis is a very fast-developing therapeutic product, not just here in Australia but across the world—a product derived from the cannabis plant, which has some 80 to 100 different cannabinoids, only two of which are used for medicinal or therapeutic, as opposed to recreational, purposes. Labor acknowledges Australia's outstanding medicines approval authority, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which has the responsibility for assessing and then approving therapeutic goods and registering those goods on the ARTG, the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. Currently, the lack of availability of affordable, safe, approved products as part of the existing legal framework for the TGA in this legislation is leading the vast bulk of Australians who use medicinal cannabis products to access them outside the legal framework.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Narcotic Drugs Amendment (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill 2021. This bill implements a select number of the recommendations from the review of the medicinal cannabis scheme undertaken by Professor John McMillan in 2019. It makes a number of administrative changes to the licensing scheme and application process for medicinal cannabis suppliers. It will introduce a single licence for the cultivation, production and manufacture of and research into medicinal cannabis. This bill creates a perpetual licence and periodic permit structure for most activities for which a medicinal cannabis licence is required. This should reduce the administrative burden on the industry, but it's unclear whether these benefits will result in better processing times and reduced costs for patients.

This bill also provides that assessments relating to supply chains are to be undertaken later in the application process, at the permit stage instead of the licence stage. This is a positive change as it's difficult for medicinal cannabis suppliers to identify supply chains at the start of their licence application process when their business is still developing. It makes sense for the department to evaluate supply chains later in the application process, at the time when permits are being sought.

The Greens do support this bill. These changes will improve the application times and reduce the regulatory burden on the applicants and licensees. In theory, reducing the burden on industry will result in lower-priced medicinal cannabis drugs. But will the regulatory cost for industry really be reduced to such an extent that the benefits will flow through to Australian patients? Will this bill really result in expanded medicinal cannabis supply pathways? This, of course, remains to be seen, and we'll be watching it closely.

The government claims this bill reaffirms their commitment to make available to patients a safe, legal and sustainable supply of cannabis-derived medicines. However, it's clear from my discussions with stakeholders that this bill does little to meaningfully improve patient access to medicinal cannabis. The government needs to take further practical steps to ensure more affordable, accessible local products are available for Australian patients.

Medicinal cannabis is an important drug used to treat or alleviate many health conditions and circumstances, including epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain and chemotherapy-induced nausea, and in palliative care. Yet, most Australians who need access to medicinal cannabis have no choice but to access it through the black market, as the committee inquiry last year heard. Researchers predict that over 600,000 Australians are using cannabis for medicinal reasons, but the vast majority are forced to source medicinal cannabis illegally.

The Senate Community Affairs References Committee inquiry into current barriers to patient access to medicinal cannabis in Australia reported in March last year. During this inquiry, we heard from patients across the country who had been unable to access the medicinal cannabis treatment that they needed due to regulatory barriers and enormous cost. Cost is a hugely prohibitive factor for patients needing access to medicinal cannabis. It is completely unacceptable that people can be thousands of dollars out of pocket—that's what we heard: thousands of dollars—trying to access legal medicinal cannabis products through the regulated system, when the black market is far cheaper.

Doctors are interested in prescribing medicinal cannabis, but they say they don't have the skills or knowledge required. There is no streamlined program for delivering education in this area. Doctors shouldn't be turning patients away because of the complexities of prescribing medicinal cannabis and their lack of training in how to prescribe and use medicinal cannabis.

Nothing has progressed to meaningfully improve patient access to medicinal cannabis since the Senate inquiry reported last year. When the government handed down its response to the Senate inquiry, I was very disappointed to see that they did not accept some of the key recommendations, including recommendation 5, which stated that if the TGA failed to address barriers to regulation, then a new independent regulator should be considered. It's clear that we haven't fixed the issues around regulation yet.

Again, I'm calling on the government to fix these issues around regulation or to put in place an independent regulator immediately. Patients are sick of waiting and they shouldn't be kept waiting any longer. Ignorance and, I have to say, perhaps ideology are getting in the way of patient care, and this has to stop. We know what to do. Medicinal cannabis is safer than many prescribed drugs, such as opioids, which can be diverted and cause fatal overdose, and we've seen lots of media about the problems there. Yet Australian patients are needlessly suffering because they can't access affordable medicinal cannabis. The current system just doesn't work. It's broken, and patients who need medicinal cannabis are paying the price. It's time for the government to implement all the recommendations of the Senate inquiry into medicinal cannabis to ensure that all Australians have access to the medicine they need. It's just plain cruel, in our opinion, to deny people access to treatments when we know they work and when we know that they give people better quality of life.

Unfortunately, this bill has missed an opportunity to put patients at the centre. It's time to take action and transform these symbolic steps into meaningful change. The Greens are ready to work with all sides of this place to make medicinal cannabis more affordable and accessible to all patients who need it. Having said that, as I articulated, we will be supporting this bill, but this cannot be the final word. We need more urgent action so that patients can access medicinal cannabis that is affordable.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I support the Narcotic Drugs Amendment (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill 2021 because it implements a large number of the recommendations of the McMillan report. That's why we will be supporting this bill. Implementation of medicinal cannabis in Australia was reviewed by Professor McMillan of the Australian National University in 2018. The report was presented to the government in July of 2019—almost two years ago. One Nation has been attempting to get this legislation before the parliament since November 2019. Finally, after almost two years, here it is—and what a moribund display. Professor McMillan's report looked at the supply side of medicinal cannabis, not the medical decision-making. That was a shame, as the pathway system is heavily flawed. Medicinal cannabis will remain out of reach for everyday Australians who are unable to navigate the obstacle course that was put in place by the government and that was seemingly designed to prevent large-scale access. They want to stop this.

My constituents in rural and regional Queensland find it especially hard to access a doctor approved to prescribe medicinal cannabis. It would appear that prising the pharmaceutical industry's hands off prescription pads is a task for which this government lacks the will. In fact, we've seen an orgy of spending on pharmaceutical industry products in recent months without the slightest attempt at safety testing, products that the Chief Medical Officer, the Therapeutic Drugs Administration and the Secretary of the Department of Health refused to endorse as 100 per cent safe. Compare that sloppiness and lackadaisical approach to the rules applied to medicinal cannabis, where thousands of years of experience and 30 years of research establishing the safety of medicinal cannabis is far in excess of the experimental, provisionally approved vaccines that this government rushed to purchase and is now forcing on an unwilling population.

This bill, though, is long overdue. The changes to licensing will have a significant impact. Previously, anyone wanting to invest in medicinal cannabis production needed to apply for separate licences for growing, processing and production, each lasting 12 months and issued at different times. Each licence had fees and endless rules which created a huge compliance cost and introduced a substantial risk. Any cannabis business was in danger of losing their licence at any time through no fault of their own. It takes a year to build out a production facility. With no guarantee that the licence would be renewed, what incentive was there for small players to invest in medicinal cannabis? As a result, the industry has become dominated by a small number of publicly listed companies. As with any industry, competition is king. A heavily regulated industry occupied by a small number of corporates is not in Australia's best interests, and I'm pleased that Professor McMillan saw that. This legislation combines the three licences into one and extends the term to five years, with an automatic renewal for companies with a good record of governance. This will encourage new and. smaller entrants to the market and, in turn, prices will fall, and that's what we need.

The new licence for research is also a good measure. Research is currently funded by powerful interests associated with maintaining the status quo—no medicinal cannabis—rather than those seeking to expand human knowledge of the wonderful new world of the human endocannabinoid system. I look forward to new findings on the effects of the 460 compounds in cannabis that interact with the human endocannabinoid system to help our bodies heal themselves.

'Heal themselves'—that's what's beautiful about medicinal cannabis. The benefits of medicinal cannabis, documented in pharmacopoeias dating back 200 years, are now proven by medical research around the world. So very little of that research, though, is Australian. This new research licence should create a new avenue for Australian academics to do something useful for a change. There's still much to be done when cannabis comes under the pathway system in Australia. It costs 100 times what the same item costs in the United States, and Australians deserve far better.

A One Nation initiative last year saw a relaxation of the licensing system for the production of cannabis for export. I do believe that the cannabis community missed the huge benefit in the Export Control Act 2020 amendment. Australia is now seeing the benefit of that legislation, with new facilities under construction, increasing supply and lower retail prices for domestic sales. That's not to mention bringing jobs and wealth into local communities, legally. A new $400 million facility has been announced near Toowoomba Wellcamp Airport, set to open the year after next. This facility will export $1 billion worth of cannabis to the world market. With those export volumes will come further reductions in the prices charged to Australian patients.

With the sensible changes now to licensing and the Narcotic Drugs Amendment (Medicinal Cannabis) Bill 2021, price reductions should flow through quite quickly, and we're pleased to see that. One Nation is proud of the work we've been doing these last two years to bring Australian whole-plant, natural medicinal cannabis to anyone with a medical need, by a doctor's prescription and supplied by a chemist. We also note that the government is looking to reschedule low-THC cannabis into schedule 3 as an over-the-counter chemist-only medication. One Nation supports that rescheduling enthusiastically, and we'd ask the government to get on with it. We're happy to work with the government in improving, in any way, medicinal cannabis access by the people of our country.

Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just last week I was presenting the potential benefits to Tasmanian primary producers in the industrial hemp and medicinal cannabis industries to the National Farmers Federation national conference in Launceston, where I live, for their Regionalisation Agenda 2030. It was ironic that one of the things we discussed was that the last time we saw the Narcotics Drugs Act amended was to allow Australian growers to export medicinal cannabis products to the world, particularly to the Canadian market and, of course, to the US market in California. Yet, while the primary production minister, Mr David Littleproud, was bragging that Australian farmers and companies are now the fourth-biggest exporters of cannabis products to the world—and we could potentially be the biggest, according to the minister—he won't let those companies and primary producers sell their products to Australian consumers, except under the extremely strict conditions which my colleague Senator Siewert has already gone into today. It's ironic. If we have a moral issue or an ideological issue with making cannabis products available to medical patients, why would we be bragging about the job that Australian farmers and companies are doing in terms of their export numbers without actually thinking, 'Well, shouldn't we be making those products more easily available to Australians who are suffering and who need them?' Senator Siewert also mentioned how expensive these products are. It makes perfect sense that, if we have that production diverted to local sources, of course we're going to have more supply, and it's going to make those products more accessible and cheaper for Australians who need to use them.

I also pointed out to the Tasmanian producers—I've been in trouble for talking about this before—that Tasmania is the poppy state. Not only have Tasmanian farmers made a lot of money over many years by growing poppies and exporting them to the world, but Australian companies like Tas Alkaloids were actually the companies that invented painkillers like OxyContin. That was synthesised and invented in Tasmania and exported to the world. That particular drug and others of that family have recently been involved in massive US court cases—some of the biggest-liability court cases in US history, with hundreds of billions of dollars of damages being sought from pharmaceutical companies for selling and distributing OxyContin, because it is so highly addictive. It's one of the most addictive narcotics that a human being can take, yet it's legal. I don't blame Tasmanian farmers for growing poppies, but I know many of them are struggling with the moral dilemmas of the product that they've been making, which was invented and synthesised in Tasmania and has been linked to this plague of death and addiction in the US.

Just from a risk diversification point of view, I was encouraging Tasmanian farmers to look at industrial hemp and its many applications, as well as the medicinal cannabis market. But they're restricted to exporting it. They can't make it at the moment for local consumption. So I think that's a really important point.

I was joined in my presentation by Tim Schmidt, who's the head of the Tasmanian Hemp Association and also on the national board of hemp. Tim's group advocates for industrial hemp. Industrial hemp can be used to make medicinal cannabis products; there is an industrial process for that. While his organisation doesn't, strictly, advocate for medicinal cannabis in terms of other species of cannabis, he recognised the profitability for farmers. Of course, in talking to farmers, you've got to talk to them about why this crop could make them money compared to what else they're using in their paddocks. Tim said that, in the market for good-quality industrial hemp that's being used for medicinal cannabis in Canada, farmers are receiving up to US$12,000 a tonne for their product that's being sold into those medicinal markets. That's for hemp; cannabis products can actually yield even more. The figures that Tim talked to Tassie farmers about were up to $20,000 per hectare for growing good, high-quality cannabis for the medicinal market. So it's a win-win for farmers if they can see that this is sustainable for them and it's worth it for them to do this, and it's a win-win for Australians who need to access these products. Why not access locally sourced products rather than importing products from overseas?

Senator Siewert also mentioned that the illicit market just for medicinal cannabis products is around 600,000 Australians. It's estimated that only four per cent of those are receiving those products via prescriptions. This bill goes into some details about why there are so many restrictions on Australians accessing medicinal cannabis or CBD products. I know that in Tasmania it's been nearly impossible. I've been trying to get some people onto trials in Tasmania, and it's been nearly impossible to do that. Some of them have had to source their prescriptions from Victoria and other places.

So I asked myself: why is it so difficult for a product that we know works and that is a good alternative for other dangerous narcotics that are legal, like opioids? It's the mentality, the ideology, around it. We go back to the 1930s and the days of Reefer Madnessarguably one of the worst films ever made—which tied in with the prohibition on marijuana in the 1930s. It almost destroyed the hemp industry, let alone cannabis for medical purposes—and it's still alive and well.

In 2012, I was asking FSANZ in estimates why Tasmanian farmers and Australian farmers couldn't grow industrial hemp for food? Hemp is one of the highest sources of omega-3. It's a really profitable and good product for farmers to be growing. I couldn't get a straight answer out of FSANZ. But, as it turned out later, the police had issues with farmers growing industrial hemp, because they didn't believe that they could control it and that there were risks with the illicit narcotics market being associated with that. One of the things that the police had apparently raised—as we saw later—was that people might hide illegal cannabis crops inside industrial hemp. It's ironic that, when I raised this with Tim, he said, 'Well, actually, it's a joke, because the plants will cross-pollinate each other.'

After I visited Tim's industrial hemp crop, I then went to visit a local sawmiller in Meander, Deloraine. He said, 'Where have you been today?' and I said, 'I've been visiting Tim Schmidt and his hemp crop.' This sawmiller laughed and said, 'Tim's not very popular around here, Peter,' and I said, 'Why?' He said, 'All the local pot growers don't like him because his industrial hemp is ruining their pot crops.' So the idea that somehow this amazing product, which we've used for more than 10,000 years, needs to be restricted in terms of its access because someone might grow a pot crop nearby is ludicrous. But it's typical of the attitude that we've seen that has restricted the growth of this amazing industry that has so much potential.

I want to talk about the Australian market for medicinal cannabis. We're seeing a lot of private equity interest in companies that are going through the process to register—obviously working out the cultivation side of that, which is the primary production side, through to licensing and permits and, of course, the supply chain. The market is estimated at $171.7 million in Australia at the moment and has been forecast to grow at 42 per cent per annum. Of course, there's a reason for that. It's because there's a very strong demand for this product. There are people out there who need it. They know that it works, they want to get off opiates and they want to try alternatives.

While the TGA has recently changed CBD products in terms of its scheduling, once again, unlike other countries that list CBD products as food products so they're available for the medicinal market, Australia is going through a very restrictive process for any company that wants to register a CBD product to be available over the counter at your local pharmacy. It's going to be very difficult for them to do that and they're going to have to do it at such a low level of efficacy that it's going to be hard to prove that it has any effect. Believe it or not, the target is mostly grumpy, middle-aged white men like me who want to sleep better at night-time. That is the international market for CBD. Tim Schmidt, who is a very well-respected farmer—he's a beef farmer and he farms a lot of crops—said to the audience in Launceston that CBD is not a dangerous product in any way, shape or form. Once you take the THC out of it, it has a lot of really good benefits. It was interesting also to hear Senator Roberts talking about that today.

This is a debate that's really important for Australians who need access to this product, and I think it's an enormous opportunity for innovation, research and development with the thousands of applications for cannabinoid products that we haven't really begun to understand yet. Of course, it's really important in a state like mine, Tasmania, where we can't necessarily complete on the world stage in commodity products like intensive cropping. It has even been difficult with vegetables in my home state, because we're a small island on the bottom of the world. High-value crops that can be grown in smaller plots, on smaller acreage, are the future for my state. It's where we've been able to leverage our reputation over the years. This is an enormous opportunity. I think a lot of people in this place would like to see this kind of Reefer Madness attitude change and us give suffering Australians what they need.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I don't think that anyone could accuse Senator Whish-Wilson of being grumpy! On that, I commend the bill to the Senate.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.