Culture

Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham Tells Parliament He Broke The Law, “Consumed Cannabis”

This guy!

by Hannah Hawkins  5 September 2015

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NSW Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham has been making himself known as a bit of a parliamentary renegade lately. Back in May he smoked an e-cigarette in state Parliament to “highlight weak laws” surrounding the vapour device, and later told Liberal MP and government whip Peter Phelps on Twitter that he was “the law“.

Bucko simply doesn’t give a damn.

With the sweet taste of rebellion still in his mouth, the MP resumed symbolically flipping the bird at government officials and their “ru-ules” yesterday when he announced to a budget estimates hearing that he’d broken the law again, and consumed cannabis that morning.

According to the ABC, the conversation with Primary Industries Minister Niall Blair went like this:

Bucko: Minister, you may or may not be surprised that this morning I consumed cannabis. I broke the law.

Blair: Camus?

Bucko: Cannabis.

Blair: Oh, cannabis.

Bucko: Minister, why are standing in the way of a billion-dollar hemp food industry?

Blair: Do you want me to comment on the first part of the question?

One can only imagine the wild possibilities running through Blair’s head in the brief seconds he believed they were about to discuss ‘Camus‘.

Although Buckingham, who is the Greens agriculture spokesman, was technically correct, he was being deliberately provocative. He hadn’t been hitting bongs outside in the parking lot, or nibbling on hash cookies out of his suit pocket; he’d simply eaten a breakfast sprinkled with nutrient-rich, low-THC industrial hemp seeds. But that was exactly his point: these seeds can’t get him ‘stoned’, yet they are illegal to eat under current NSW laws, which demonises the plant and classifies it as a drug like its THC-filled cousin marijuana.

Buckingham argues these laws are outdated and stifling a potentially lucrative industry.

Presently, it is legal in NSW and most of Australia to grow industrial hemp with a licence, but the farmer is limited to manufacturing and selling it for external use — for example, the oils are frequently used in beauty products, and its fibres in fabric. Hemp advocates have been lobbying the government for years to lift the ban on industrial hemp consumption, as it has been universally established that the plant is a huge source of protein, vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids.

Some companies, fed up with the government’s stubbornness, have just gone right ahead and manufactured industrial hemp into food products, but slapped them with “not suitable for human consumption” labels in an attempt to get past the law. But despite the clear demand for it — and the fact industrial hemp contains less than 1% of THC (the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana) — the government still lists the plant as a prohibited drug.

Buckingham and his wider party have been campaigning for the prohibition to be lifted so the Australian industrial hemp industry and its farmers can catch up to the rest of the developed world — which has widely legalised industrial hemp consumption — and start including food in the wide range of things you can turn hemp into.

In the meantime, stay tuned to see what Jeremy ‘Wild Card’ Buckingham smokes/eats/tweets to a government whip next.

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Feature image under a Creator Commons license, via Flickr.