Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (20:46): As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I want to speak about medical cannabis and what is needed to give more than a million Australians access to this powerful medicine. On Monday, this place was visited by a delegation of concerned citizens asking for major changes to Minister Hunt's regime—his regime of suppressing medical cannabis. I ask the people: are these people radicals intent on subverting Minister Hunt's pharmaceutical game, or are they everyday Australians making a perfectly fair request? I'll let the people decide. Let me name some of the groups in attendance yesterday: the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association, Chronic Pain Australia, Epilepsy Action Australia, Cancer Voices, United in Compassion and the Country Women's Association of Australia. Yes, the Country Women's Association were here yesterday, pleading for improved access to medical cannabis. Mr Hunt needs to worry when he gets on the wrong side of the good ladies of the CWA. Minister Hunt will tell you that the number of approvals is rising. 'More people are getting medical cannabis,' he says. That is not quite right. Every time a prescription is renewed for an existing patient, or a brand of medication changed for an existing patient, Minister Hunt adds one to his count. Even if the patient cannot afford their script, which can be as high as $2,000 a month, they are still counted—even when the scripts are not used. Six thousand six hundred and sixty-seven current approvals is probably no more than 2,000 or 3,000 people actually accessing medical cannabis legally, and it may be even less. I have a problem with that level of dishonesty. I have a problem with how we treated Lee Donnollan, an Army veteran from Townsville, in Queensland. Lee served a tour of active duty in Afghanistan and returned with PTSD. It took 18 months of jumping through health department hoops to get approval for medical cannabis, only to find the prescription for two different types of cannabis would have cost $2,000 a month. Veterans' Affairs refused to pay, and Lee could not afford that sort of money. Mr Hunt's department locks people out of medical cannabis. So Lee Donnollan started growing his own, and medical cannabis worked. Medical cannabis allowed Lee to slowly drop the seven different medications his doctor prescribed and replace them with just one: medical cannabis. His health improved dramatically. Unfortunately, the Queensland police didn't share his vision for better health and arrested him. At that point, Veterans' Affairs relented and started funding his prescription—a happy ending, you would think, Mr Acting Deputy President. But, no, Queensland police have refused to drop his case. The department locks people out of medical cannabis. Here is where it gets interesting. If Lee is sent to jail because he has a legal prescription that Veterans' Affairs is paying for, he will be supplied with medical cannabis to use in jail—the very thing he has been sent to jail for doing. Monty Python couldn't make this stuff up! The hurdles placed in front of Lee Donnollan are typical of the hurdles facing everyday Australians needing to access medical cannabis. To be successful, firstly, the patient must have a condition which cannabis can improve. These conditions include juvenile epilepsy, cancer side effects like nausea, and some types of pain and palliative care—a short list, eh? Or, secondly, find a doctor that the government approves of to make cannabis applications, and that may involve travelling hundreds of kilometres. Or, thirdly, submit your full medical history with proof that you have tried all available medications. The department locks people out of medical cannabis. Then there's a fourth hurdle: pricing. Under Minister Hunt, pricing is being used as a barrier to adoption. I understand the need for security and accountability, of course. However, those very expensive legal requirements are being apportioned against just very small volumes, and that means each prescription has a very high cost, of which the actual plant is a tiny part. The department locks people out of medical cannabis. As long as prices remain as high as $2,000 a month, so few Australians will be able to access medical cannabis that the volumes needed for cheap prices will never happen. Minister Hunt has authored a perfect example of catch 22. Minister Hunt's department locks people out of medical cannabis. Barry Lambert, from the Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics, and Sydney University had this to say about Minister Hunt's system: The Act and Regulations are responsible for these ongoing delays. This dysfunction is harming vulnerable Australians. Without a large-scale domestic industry, expensive and imported products will continue to drive thousands of desperate patients into the black market. And research will continue to be hampered by a lack of suitable pre-clinical and clinical material. While the government has issued 27 grower licenses so far, according to the United in Compassion group only one has been approved to sell their product into the cannabis approval pathway. The rest are relying on the emerging export market to stay in business. Those businesses will need to stay in the export market until the government faces up to its own failure. This is a failure that results from Minister Hunt trying to shoehorn medical cannabis into the world that he and his department understands and creates—a world of pharmaceuticals where every new product is patent protected, enabling huge sums of money to run clinical trials, fill in forms and pass through layers of committees and reports before finally getting approval. The multimillion-dollar cost of that process is built into the price paid by taxpayers forever more. If that process produced a safe result for patients, then one could support that. However, this year 1,000 Australians will die from opioid overdoses—overdoses of legally prescribed pharmaceuticals. These are legal opioids that went through this same approval pathway. The slow, expensive, bureaucrat-laden process is no guarantee of a positive outcome for patients. It could even mean death. Natural medical cannabis cannot be patented. No company will ever spend the millions necessary to navigate this process, because they will never own the rights to the cannabis plant that has proven so effective and safe. The department locks people out of medical cannabis. Yet the need to put cannabis through this process is the reason being advanced for not listing medical cannabis on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods, which allows scripts to be filled on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme at low cost to the patient. The department locks people out of medical cannabis. According to Roy Morgan, as many as a million Australians would try medical cannabis as an alternative to their existing medication. Minister Hunt has managed to get cannabis into the hands of a measly few thousand, and his department has succeeded in locking millions of people out of medical cannabis. In the meantime, many patients are suffering. One Nation calls on the government to respect the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship and allow doctors to make the best decisions for their patients free from federal government interference and the department's locks. The pathway system must be amended to allow a single post-prescription notification from any doctor who chooses to prescribe medical cannabis, together with the doctor's assessment of the results achieved should the patient return for a repeat. One Nation is persistent. One Nation has tried four strategies to remove the department's locks, which are clearly not there because of a problem with medical cannabis. These are bureaucratic locks, not safety locks. One Nation has had to try new strategies, because medical cannabis is so safe and effective. The department is locking out competition to protect big pharma's synthetic drugs. One Nation calls for the list of approved conditions to be removed and for use to be allowed at the discretion of doctors, who are best placed to make those decisions. The Therapeutic Goods Administration must then fast-track the approval of medical cannabis preparations from amongst the Australian growers currently licensed for that purpose. We can then have a conversation about the best model for medical cannabis and people can have access to this wonderful, natural, safe medicine. One Nation will continue to listen to the people, continue to depend on the science and advocate for the science, and continue to speak for the people until the people's needs are fulfilled and lives are restored and enhanced.