Full legalisation for adults 18 and over — and a whole new business stream for Australians. Farms, processing, testing labs, dispensaries, cafe districts, hemp manufacturing. New jobs, new local shops, a real path off JobSeeker. Criminal records for personal use expunged, and workplace testing that measures whether a worker is fit for the shift today.
Sovereign Australia supports full legalisation of cannabis for adults 18 and over. That means Australians may grow it, and Australians may build businesses on it — farming, processing, retail, hospitality, and industrial hemp — under licence, with quality standards, and paying tax like every other legal industry. It includes designated cannabis cafe districts, licensed the way a bar or a bottle shop is licensed.
The purpose is plain: jobs, small business, local business, revenue for government, and an end to the prosecution of ordinary Australians for something that harms nobody else.
Sovereign Australia also supports reform of workplace drug testing. Testing that reaches back three weeks and more into a worker's private life is an invasion of privacy that tells an employer nothing about whether that worker is safe on the job today. On-site oral fluid testing — which detects recent use, in the window that actually matters — has our full support. Testing methods that measure history rather than fitness for work do not.
Cannabis is one of the most widely used substances in the country and has been for decades, through every version of the ban. Prohibition has not removed cannabis from Australia. It has only removed Australia's ability to regulate it, test it, tax it, or keep it away from minors.
Every dollar spent on cannabis in this country currently goes to an unlicensed supply chain that pays no tax, employs nobody on the books, meets no quality standard, and answers to no regulator. Legalisation does not create that market. It already exists. Legalisation moves it into the daylight, where farmers, small business owners and the Treasury get the benefit instead of organised crime.
A criminal record follows a person into every job application, every rental application, every visa application, for the rest of their life. Handing that to an adult for personal use is a punishment out of all proportion to the act, and it falls hardest on the young and on people who cannot afford a lawyer.
Two Australian Standards govern workplace drug testing: AS/NZS 4308 for urine and AS 4760 for oral fluid. They do very different jobs. Urine testing detects the inactive breakdown products of THC — which for a regular user remain present for three weeks or more, long after any effect has worn off. Oral fluid testing detects the active drug, in a window generally measured in hours rather than weeks.
The practical result is that a worker can be stood down, or lose a job entirely, over something they did on a weekend that has no bearing whatsoever on their capacity to work on Tuesday. That is not a safety test. It is a surveillance test on a person's private life, and it will become an untenable position the moment cannabis is legal — as it already is for the roughly one million Australians using prescribed medicinal cannabis today.
Adults 18 and over may purchase, possess and consume cannabis from licensed retailers. No sale to minors, under any circumstances, with mandatory ID verification at point of sale. The framework is the one Australia already uses for alcohol — an adult decision, taken by adults, in a regulated market.
Adults may grow a small number of plants at home for personal use without a licence — the same principle that allows home brewing. Commercial cultivation is open to licensed Australian farmers, at any scale and by any method the farmer chooses: indoor, outdoor, greenhouse.
Licensed dispensaries operating on the bottle-shop model: ID checked, product sourced from certified Australian producers, staff trained in responsible service. Licensed cannabis cafes permitting on-premises consumption under state hospitality licensing, concentrated in designated districts so that local government, police and residents all know exactly where they are. For regional towns, a cafe alongside a cellar door or a craft brewery is a tourism proposition — visitors who stay longer, spend more, and come back.
This is the part that gets lost in the argument about the drug. Legalisation does not create one industry. It creates a supply chain, and every link in it is an Australian business employing Australians.
On the land: growers, nurseries and propagation, irrigation and shade-house fit-outs, harvest labour, drying and curing facilities. In processing: extraction, oils and edibles manufacturing, packaging and labelling, accredited testing laboratories. In distribution: secure transport, warehousing, compliance and record-keeping. On the main street: dispensaries, cafes, the hospitality trade around them, and the tradespeople who fit those premises out. Around all of it: equipment supply, security, accounting, insurance, training, and the tourism spend that follows a licensed district.
Industrial hemp adds a second stream that has nothing to do with anyone getting high — fibre, textiles, building materials, composites, stockfeed and seed oil. That is manufacturing work, in regional towns, from a crop Australian farmers can grow now.
Every dispensary and cafe is a lease signed on a building that is currently empty, staff on the books, and a business paying tax in the town it operates in. Sovereign Australia's small business policy already opens vacant commercial premises to new operators at a fraction of market rent for the first three years. A new licensed industry and a policy that puts empty buildings back into use are the same project — main streets with the lights on.
An entire legal industry starting from zero is one of the few things that generates genuine ground-floor opportunity — work for people without a trade behind them, and ownership for people who have an idea and no capital. Paired with the Founders Programme, a legal cannabis and hemp sector is a real route from welfare into a wage or into running your own business. That is the point of the policy. It is not about the drug. It is about what Australians are allowed to build.
Everything grown and sold commercially must meet an Australian quality standard — batch testing by accredited Australian laboratories, full disclosure of what is in the product, and child-resistant packaging. This is the single largest public-health gain available. Nobody currently knows what is in black-market product, because nobody is required to.
Australia's medicinal cannabis industry is already significant, and it is held back by licence approvals that can take years. Sovereign Australia sets a hard six-month deadline on cannabis licence decisions — medicinal or recreational. The regulator decides inside six months, or the licence is deemed approved. Australian farmers supply an Australian market and an export market that pays a premium for Australian certification.
Hemp was infrastructure for most of human history — rope, canvas, textiles, paper, building material — before it was banned alongside its psychoactive cousin. It is a fast-growing, low-input crop that builds soil, and it feeds directly into construction materials, composites and manufacturing. Legalisation restores it as a mainstream Australian crop.
Criminal records for personal possession and personal cultivation are expunged when the Act commences. Australians should not spend the rest of their lives carrying a conviction for something the Parliament has just declared legal.
Legal cannabis is taxed. The rate has to be set where it undercuts the illegal market rather than protecting it — tax it too hard and the black market simply survives, which defeats the entire purpose. Revenue is directed to drug education, mental health services, and community infrastructure.
Sovereign Australia supports moving workplace testing to on-site oral fluid testing as the standard method for determining fitness for work, and ending the use of history-based urine testing as a basis for standing a worker down or terminating them. An employer is entitled to know that a worker is fit for the shift in front of them. An employer is not entitled to a record of that worker's private life going back a month.
Safety-critical work stays safety-critical. Nobody operates a haul truck, a crane, a train, an aircraft, or a piece of heavy plant while impaired — before this policy or after it. Employers keep their duty of care and keep the right to test. Where a worker is impaired, the consequence is the same as it is today. This policy changes what is measured, not whether safety is enforced.
Oral fluid testing is quick, done on site, hard to tamper with, covered by its own Australian Standard, and — critically — it detects the active drug within hours rather than metabolites over weeks. It is the closest instrument currently available to a fitness-for-work test. It is not a perfect impairment meter; no such device exists for cannabis in the way a breathalyser works for alcohol. But it is a far better proxy for "is this person right to work today" than a method that cannot distinguish between this morning and last month.
There is a second cost to testing on a weeks-long window, and it is worth stating plainly. Cannabis stays detectable in urine for three weeks at a minimum for a regular user, and often longer. Methamphetamine clears in a matter of days. For a worker on a roster who needs to be clean for the next swing, the testing regime is quietly signalling which drug is easier to hide — and it is not the safer one.
Western Australia has one of the most serious methamphetamine problems in the country, concentrated in exactly the regional and resource workforces where testing is most intensive. Sovereign Australia does not claim the testing regime caused that, and no study has established it. What we say is that the question has never been asked: we have built a system that catches the least harmful drug for a month and the most harmful one for three days, and then told workers their jobs depend on passing it. Nobody works impaired — that does not change. But an incentive structure that points a workforce toward the more dangerous drug is a policy failure, not a safety measure.
Legal does not mean impaired. No cannabis impairment while driving. No cannabis impairment at work. That is the rule, it is simple, and it does not change under this policy.
Sovereign Australia is not proposing any change to the road laws. Driving offences stand as they are. The reform set out above concerns how a workplace establishes whether a person is fit for the shift in front of them — nothing more.
| Current — Prohibition | Sovereign Australia — Legal And Licensed |
|---|---|
| Supply controlled entirely by an untaxed illegal market. | Licensed Australian farms, processors and retailers, taxed like any other industry. |
| No quality control. Nobody knows what is in the product. | Australian quality standard, lab batch testing, full disclosure, child-resistant packaging. |
| Adults carry lifelong criminal records for personal use. | Legal at 18+. Existing records for personal possession expunged on commencement. |
| Minors buy from dealers who never ask for ID. | Mandatory ID at point of sale. No sale to minors under any circumstances. |
| A whole industry exists off the books — no wages, no shopfronts, no tax. | A legal supply chain: farms, processing, labs, transport, retail, hospitality, hemp manufacturing — and a path off JobSeeker. |
| Farmers locked out of a crop their land and climate suit. | Cultivation licences open to Australian farmers. Industrial hemp restored as a mainstream crop. |
| Licence approvals take years, throttling the medicinal industry. | Six-month hard deadline on licence decisions, or deemed approved. |
| Workplace urine testing reaches three weeks and more into a worker's private life. | On-site oral fluid testing — fitness for the shift, not a search of the weekend. |
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No memos pinned to this policy yet. When a Sovereign Australia memo on this topic is published, it will appear here with a short summary. The full memo index is at sovereignaustraliaparty.com.au/memos.html.