You may recall, some time ago, the Government announced they would be conducting a ‘“world first” closed track driving trial’ to evaluate the impact of THC on driver impairment and assess various technologies that can measure impairment.

Legalise Cannabis Victoria was pretty unimpressed because there have been a truckload of such studies (pardon the pun) and it’s pretty clear there is no quantifiable link between the amount of THC you have in your system and the extent of impairment. In short, there is no equivalent to the .05 used for alcohol roadside testing.

David Ettershank and Rachel Payne suggested, in no uncertain terms, they thought the Government was just trying to ‘kick the can down the road’ and push this into the next Parliament. They did however feel the evaluation of testing technologies could be useful.

The Government’s response was that the trial would be done and dusted by mid 2026; plenty of time to resolve this in the current Parliament (which ends in November). So last week, David and Rachel finally got a briefing from the Ministers Office and Swinburne University.

Surprise, surprise! Turns out that the trial is taking longer than expected and Swinburne won’t have a report until 2027 and the Government response will be some time after that. As if that’s not bad enough, we also had it confirmed that due to budget and time frame issues, there will be no evaluation of impairment testing technologies.

Once again it’s all too apparent that this Government does not give a damn about the thousands of Victorians who consume medicinal cannabis and need to be able to use their vehicles responsibly. This Government just never ceases to disappoint! Grrrrrrrrr!

We can, perhaps, draw some comfort from the fact that the Government did agree to remove automatic licence loss for unimpaired medical cannabis patients, but we need, and the community deserves, some closure on this critical issue.