Blatantly Partisan Party Review XVI (federal 2025): Legalise Cannabis Australia
Running where: for the Senate, all six states and the NT; for the House, a smattering of divisions across NSW, QLD, VIC, and WA
Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, WA 2025
What I said before: “This is a single-issue party and their policy platform does not come close to providing a framework for addressing the bulk of parliamentary business. They’ve won representation in WA and Victoria, and in WA one of their two MLCs was suspended from parliament after spouting anti-vax nonsense.” (NSW 2023)
What I think this year: The quote above alludes to Sophia Moermond, who ended up quitting Legalise Cannabis WA and sitting as an independent because of her antivax, transphobic, anti-wind farm views. I reviewed her loathsome independent ticket for the 2025 WA state election here, and thankfully she just missed out on the last seat in the WA Legislative Council. I plan to post some thoughts about the Legislative Council outcome—announced last week—once I have completed my party reviews. The relevance here is that the calibre of candidates for single-issue micro-parties in general is very uneven, and that Legalise Cannabis in particular can be a real grab-bag with some decent candidates and a lot of questionable ones.
The party’s focus remains squarely on the legalisation of cannabis, not just for medicinal use but also for retail sale, subject to similar regulation as alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, they want it to be regulated more generously, “not subject to the ever-increasing levels of tax paid by consumers on [alcohol and tobacco]”, in the belief doing so would send consumers back to “the illicit market”. Why it’s fine to increase taxes on beer and ciggies but not on blunts is beyond me, especially as Legalise Cannabis in other policies emphasise the potential for taxation on weed sales to contribute to government finances.
As in previous years, Legalise Cannabis link all other issues such as the economy, law and order, and the environment back to cannabis, with rather sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about how legalising weed will result in positive transformation in these areas. I am in favour of the party’s main goal but there are other parties out there with much broader platforms who endorse this measure (notably the Greens). I think it far more sensible to support a party who can articulate why cannabis should be legal within a suite of policies and an ideological purpose that addresses the fullness of parliamentary business.
I urge caution when approaching Legalise Cannabis because of the issues with candidate selection. If you do not have any personal knowledge favourable towards an individual contesting an election on behalf of Legalise Cannabis, I suggest that you put them below more stable and known quantities on the left and centre, but above the Liberals and far-right minors. Kevin Bonham describes the lead candidate in Tasmania, Matthew Owen, as a disability support worker with a large beard (can confirm) but not much else of note. The b_auspol review for NSW suggests that the lead candidate there, Miles Hunt, is a pretty serious campaigner for drug law reform and harm minimisation. I’ll tackle three other lead Senate candidates below: VIC, QLD, and WA (and I imagine the Something for Cate blog will also touch on the VIC ticket when they review Legalise Cannabis). SA and NT voters, you’ll have to look after yourselves, and anyone with a Legalise Cannabis candidate in their local electorate ought to do a quick search to figure out where to rank them.
The lead Victorian candidate is the best known of the bunch: Fiona Patten of the now-deregistered Sex-cum-Reason Party (yeah I did that deliberately), whom I reviewed many times, most recently for VIC 2022. Patten was a member of Victoria’s upper house from 2014 until 2022 and proved to be a positive influence, promoting social reforms with a left-of-centre emphasis on civil liberties. My initial wariness that her party was a mere front to promote the interests of adult industry bosses wore off as her career progressed. Back in 2016, the Sex Party ran a joint ticket with the HEMP Party, the former name of the party before us in this review, so perhaps it’s little surprise that Patten is running for them after Reason’s demise. Victorian voters can comfortably include Legalise Cannabis in the upper reaches of their preferences in my view.
A much less meritorious candidate tops the Legalise Cannabis ticket in Queensland: Belinda “Bee” Jones. If you have spent much time on Australian politics Twitter in recent years, you likely know who Bee is. She exemplifies the posters derided as “drips”, mostly Labor sycophants, but as Bee shows, such accounts are not always rusted on to the ALP. She stood as an independent for the 2023 Fadden by-election, mistaking her Twitter following for a potential constituency in one Queensland electorate: she came sixth (of 13) with 1.05% of the vote. Now she’s fronting Legalise Cannabis. I strongly recommend that Queenslanders send their vote to other left/centre parties first. Bee has won one election though: a “worst of auspol tweets 2022 edition” account on Twitter ran a bracket where the final ended up being one of her tweets against another one of her tweets! The winner? Bee proclaiming that she tweets from 9am to midnight to “hold politicians/media to account” for free. She’s nothing if not convinced her incessant (bad) posting is political praxis.
In WA, Jason Meotti, who was sixth on the party’s slate for the state election, is top of the ticket for their federal tilt. He is a financial planner who took a leading role in the WA branch of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and contributed to WA decriminalising possession of small quantities of cannabis for personal use in 2003. At that time, he was involved with the Democrats: he stood third on their WA ticket for the Senate in 2004, as well as contesting multiple state races between 2001 and 2005, including topping their Southern Metropolitan ticket in 2005. A Jason Meotti stood for Grey Power at the 1991 Geraldton state by-election but I’m unsure if it’s the same guy (he was in his early 20s then and surely a bloke that young wasn’t running for Grey Power?). One Twitter account also says he was once the vice president for WA’s Young Nationals but I am unable to corroborate this. I do not know of any association between him and the Drug Law Reform Party of the mid-2010s. He seems an OK choice based on what I’ve been able to find.
Recommendation: As a general principle, give Legalise Cannabis a middling preference. If the party is on either of your ballots, investigate the specific individuals as some might merit a decent preference while others should only get a weak preference.
Website: https://www.legalisecannabis.org.au/
