Speaker: Senator David Shoebridge, Greens Senator for NSW
About: In 2025, you can buy legal cannabis in Canada, Germany, and most of the American west coast. In most of Australia, you can get a criminal record for possessing a joint. This presentation is about the gap between those two facts, and the parliamentary talent for pretending it doesn’t exist.
Waiting for Canberra traces the recent history of cannabis law reform in Australia focusing on the the 2023 Legalising Cannabis Bill, buried under concern about the wrong things; the state-level experiments that range from cautious and the ACT’s quasi-legalisation trial, which showed that adults can mostly be trusted to manage their own habits without society collapsing. The community worked this out years ago. Parliament is still getting there.
The presentation asks what a genuine pathway could look like – let’s have a real talk about decriminalisation, convictions expunged, a serious conversation about pilot programs, social clubs, home grow and more.
Bio: David Shoebridge is a NSW Greens Senator and the Australian Greens spokesperson for Justice, Foreign Affairs, Digital Rights, Defence and Migration. Before reaching the Senate, David spent over a decade in the NSW Legislative Council. He launched Sniff Off in 2014 with the NSW Young Greens, a Facebook and Instagram page tracking police drug dog deployments at stations and festivals across NSW. Data obtained by David in the NSW Parliament has been instrumental in showing that drug dogs are wrong more often than not, meaning the program’s main achievement was subjecting innocent people to public searches. He has been in the Federal Senate since 2022 where he has championed whistleblower laws, peace, privacy protections and digital rights for all people. He has led the campaign against the broken FOI laws and travelled to Washington to lobby the US Department of Justice over the Assange extradition. In 2023 he introduced the Legalising Cannabis Bill which remains the first time the Federal Parliament has considered a national approach to legalisation. He remains committed to legalising cannabis.
