Greens senator David Shoebridge has committed to continuing his push to legalise recreational cannabis after a senate committee rejected the proposal last week.
The bill, tabled by Shoebridge in the upper house in August 2023, would permit adult recreational use and open the door to legal home cultivation of up to six plants, along with a national commercial cannabis market.
The legislation would also create the Cannabis Australia National Agency as a statutory body responsible for registering strains and overseeing activities such as cultivation, possession, manufacturing, retail sales, cafe operations, and international trade.
The senate inquiry into the bill drew more than 200 submissions, with opposition led by the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), among other bodies.
Despite backing from the Australian Lawyers Alliance, the Penington Institute, and drug law reform advocates, the committee cited warnings from medical organisations that broader cannabis access could worsen health outcomes, especially among young people.
The committee's report stated: "The committee is concerned that the legalisation of cannabis for adult recreational use would create as many, if not more, problems than the bill is attempting to resolve.
"While endeavouring to do so, the bill does not address several significant concerns, for example, ensuring that children and young people cannot access cannabis (particularly home-grow), managing risky cannabis use, and effective oversight of THC content."
The committee did acknowledge that most submissions agreed cannabis use "should be treated first and foremost as a health issue instead of a criminal issue".
In his dissenting report, Shoebridge argued the bill would generate thousands of jobs while undermining the illicit market's capacity to earn "billions". He pledged to break the "stranglehold of politics" by returning the bill to parliament this year.
He added that while the report "reasonably fairly covers the evidence" heard at the inquiry, "it does not detail the hundreds of individual submissions… that, almost unanimously, asked us to vote this into law and to finally legalise cannabis".
The committee's decision will disappoint reform advocates — though it is unlikely to have caught them off guard — while others have welcomed the outcome.
Biortica Agrimed chief executive officer Tom Varga said the policy "risked health and risked creating divisions".
"It was poorly considered," he said. "The Greens seemed to have taken all of the worst examples of overseas legislation and thrown it together for this bill.
"Any future framework must avoid any likelihood of sale to minors. Locally, we have ample examples and experience from the tobacco and alcohol industries to understand how important it is to get the regulatory framework right. You only have to witness the current criminal impact on Melbourne's legal tobacco retailers to understand that."
He added: "Worldwide, both adult use and medical cannabis legalisation has gained momentum. The US and Canada are seen as the most mature markets, with Europe starting to catch up. We should be looking to these jurisdictions and drawing upon their legislative and regulatory experiences in terms of what works and what doesn't.
"The Greens' attempt to create a Canadian-style central wholesale structure doesn't work. All that does is increase the likelihood of an illicit market. Even now, the Canadian authorities are amending those initial legislative and regulatory mis-steps, so why would we adopt their mistakes?"
