MPs’ hypocrisy on full display in cannabis bill
I’ve never had a lot of success with marijuana. I’ve tried it several times, thinking, like beer, coffee and cigarettes that perhaps this was an acquired taste. Perseverance, that was the trick.
Sadly, I never got that special kind of buzz and frankly I suspect that the entire cannabis thing is as much psychological as physiological but that’s not why I am going to be deconstructing the hypocrisy of Amy Adams and Chris Bishop this morning.
The Labour Party and their Green colleagues are wrong on almost every major issue of our times but they are consistent; they do not believe in personal freedom nor personal responsibility. They believe that the state has the right to compel a person by force to act in their own best interests.
They believe sugar is bad for you, so the government has the right to make it more expensive. If you fail to feed your children the government has a right to take someone else’s money and feed them for you. It’s an absurdly stupid and immoral ideology but like Scientology, it’s an internally consistent belief system.
National’s Hutt South MP Chris Bishop has no defence. In his maiden speech he proudly declared ‘‘I am an unashamed economic and social liberal… I think individuals make better decisions about their own lives than governments do’’.
Fine words, but what does it mean in practice? When the opportunity to send the Green’s medicinal cannabis bill to select committee he spoke against it because it lacked a ‘‘robust regulatory regime’’ and he preferred the Government’s bill that might make some regulated cannabis available to a few people who are dying but not those with chronic, non-terminal illness.
Amy Adams also spoke against the bill but not before telling Parliament that she was proud to belong to the National caucus because she believes in freedom. Freedom? I suspect Amy Adams wouldn’t know what freedom was even if a raving Scottish git in a tartan dress and blue war paint yelled the meaning at her across a field of thistle.
In order to stop some people getting high the state is forcing the chronically sick to endure unnecessary suffering. That isn’t freedom and it’s nothing to do with classical liberalism. It’s a barbaric and stupid system that should end.
Swarbrick’s bill would have allowed those with a medical certificate to grow and smoke their own plants. It fell at the first hurdle. Every single National MP voted against it as did every NZ First MP, which you may want to remind grandma about next time she complains about her arthritic joints.