The government has formed a consensus on what form next year's cannabis referendum will take, and plans to announce it tomorrow.
Photo: 123RF
Justice Minister Andrew Little will tomorrow announce the details for the referendum, which will take place at the same time as the general election next year.
At her weekly post-Cabinet conference today Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern would not answer questions about the referendum, instead deferring to Mr Little to announce the details including how binding the referendum would be.
Ms Ardern said all three government parties had formed a consensus on the referendum.
The opposition got one up on the government yesterday when National's drug reform spokesperson Paula Bennett was leaked a Cabinet paper discussing the four options for the cannabis referendum.
It said there were four options: one which would see a law already in place ahead of the election be triggered by a yes vote, while other three would not be binding as the government would not be obliged to act on them.
Ms Ardern said that while she would rather details of the Cabinet paper had not been leaked, she was confident her ministers were not responsible.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Photo: RNZ/Dan Cook
She said after the leak she had reminded her ministers of her expectations around confidentiality and asked them to pass on the message to staff and officials who also deal with the drafting of Cabinet papers.
She said she did not want to spend time on who might have leaked it.
"Look, I don't want to actually spend too much time being bogged down by that question. I've again restated my expectations of ... Cabinet, but more broadly than that I think I should focus with getting on with the work at hand. We have not experienced the leak of a paper directly before and I don't know that an inquiry would actually answer the question of how this came to occur.''
Heading into Cabinet today, Mr Little had already faced 24 hours of questions about the leaked options without being able to say anything about what the government was going to do.
Justice Minister Andrew Little will tomorrow announce the government's decision about the cannabis referendum. Photo: RNZ / Ana Tovey
Having said in December that the referendum would be binding, he said he would explain what "binding" actually meant when making an announcement.
Electoral law expert Graeme Edgeler however said there was only one definition.
"What Andrew Little meant this morning by 'I'm going to define binding', I have no idea," he said. "I think generally people have an understanding what binding means and in this context it means self-executing. Everything that will happen will happen automatically depending on the result."
Mr Edgeler said Mr Little's statement that it would be binding could only last as long as the government was in government.
National Party leader Simon Bridges said that if a law was passed in Parliament subject to a referendum then any political party would have to seriously entertain that and would "be in a sense morally bound to do that''.
Simon Bridges. Photo: RNZ / Ana Tovey
On that basis, Mr Bridges wants the government to go with a full blown binding referendum.
"If I had to decide on this Cabinet paper I'd go with the option four - I think the other options aren't credible. They don't provide enough information and certainty to allow the referendum to actually be binding - that is because you don't know exactly what it is."
Mr Bridges has not been a big supporter of legalisation, but said he was open to the idea of decriminalisation.
"My personal basis for opposition is quite simply I worry about the mental health. I've been a Crown prosecutor; I've seen the debilitating effect of cannabis throughout large communities, I do worry about that.
"But, I tell you what, I'm not nailed in. One of the things this paper goes through is a discussion about decriminalisation versus legalisation."
The Greens and New Zealand First declined interviews on the referendum, saying they would be happy to comment publicly once Cabinet made a decision.
