Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ian McKelvie): The legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: I move, That Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill. At the appointed time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 1 December 2022.

Let me tell you about a patient—we’ll call her Judith—that I met in the emergency department. She was a smoker of 30 years and her lung disease was so bad she couldn’t leave her house to walk past her letterbox. He lips were blue. She had come into hospital because she had caught whatever viral infection was going around that winter. I could see her scarred lungs on the X-ray behind her. In fact, there was barely any of her lungs left at all after smoking for so long. Of course she knew her continued smoking would kill her, and she knew her habit was taking a chunk out of her pension, and it was robbing her of time with her beloved grandchildren. She had every reason in the world to quit but she couldn’t because tobacco is one of the most harmful and addictive substances in the world.

Sadly, after working in a public hospital I don’t just have one story of a life destroyed by tobacco to share. I saw the consequences of smoking every day: heart attacks, strokes, emphysema, bronchitis, asthma, blindness, amputations, and premature birth. It’s a tragedy that these impacts fall most heavily on Māori and Pacific communities. Smoking accounts for 2.5 years of the eight-year difference in life expectancy between Māori and non-Māori. It does not need to be this way.

By going smoke-free we could live in a country where our tamariki spend more quality years with their koro and kuia, where we reduce the number of high-risk pregnancies, where strong, healthy babies are born at term, where there are fewer people in hospital with smoking-related diseases, and where people had more money to spend on the things they need and enjoy.

This bill is about taking urgent action on stopping the leading cause of preventable death in Aotearoa. This bill enables regulations that are appropriate for a product that will kill half the people that use it. This bill responds to the ambitious goals set by the Māori Affairs Committee for Aotearoa to be smoke-free by 2025. Unless we pass this bill, it will take decades for Māori to reach the smoke-free target of less of 5 percent of people being daily smokers, whereas Pākehā are currently on track to being smoke-free by 2025.

I want to take the opportunity to recognise that these changes to get us to be smoke-free are made possible because of decades of work, and Governments of all hues have played their part in driving down smoking rates over the last four decades. The changes in this bill will make smoking less appealing, addictive, and accessible. By enacting these changes, we’re telling smokers we’ve got their back and that we’re taking action against the addiction and proliferation of retail outlets that undermine their efforts to quit. These measures are essential components of our Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan, and that plan also includes strengthened community health promotion, enhanced quit services, and increased mass marketing of quit messages.

To achieve our smoke-free goal, this bill amends the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act by making three changes. Firstly, the bill will restrict the sale of smoked tobacco products to approved retailers only and allow a maximum number of retail premises to be set in a certain area. We know that people trying to quit are at greatest risk of relapse if they live in an area where tobacco is readily available. There are currently more smoked tobacco retailers clustered in low-income communities, so this change will end the deadly toll that tobacco takes on poor communities.

Secondly, we want to make sure young people never start smoking, so we are legislating for a smoke-free generation. This bill will make it an offence to sell or supply smoked tobacco products to anyone born on or after January 2009. This means that 14-year-olds now and generations to follow will never in their lives be able to be sold tobacco, because our law should reflect that truth—there is no safe age to start smoking.

Some might say that social supply will undermine the intent of this law, but studies from the US confirm that regulating the age of purchase does reduce youth smoking. But I am also realistic. There will be a few young people who continue to access tobacco, so let’s be clear about what this bill means for them. Those selling tobacco can be fined, but purchase is not criminalised. Young people who do become addicted will not face barriers to accessing support, and this change occurs in the context of regulated availability of vapes and strengthened community health promotion. So it is not the case that people addicted to nicotine will be forced to purchase from criminal networks. This bill has received a favourable New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet from the Ministry of Justice.

Thirdly, the bill introduces measures to reduce the appeal and addictiveness of smoked tobacco products. Specifically, it requires that regulations are made to set limits on nicotine levels. For decades we have permitted tobacco companies to maintain their market share by making their deadly product more and more addictive. It is disgusting and it is bizarre. We have more regulations in this country on the safety of the sale of a sandwich than on a cigarette. Low-nicotine products will help people either to quit or swap to a less harmful alternative. Low-nicotine products will also protect anyone who experiments with smoking, preventing them from being addicted and taking up regular smoking. There have been several clinical trials on low-nicotine cigarettes, so we can set nicotine levels that won’t cause a compensatory increase in smoking but will instead support quitting.

Our priority in bringing this bill is protecting what is precious: our people, our whānau, our communities. This bill will mean kaumātua will get more years with their whānau and see their mokopuna grow. Newborns will spend their first precious moments in their parents’ arms and not in neonatal intensive care. Our people will benefit greatly from these changes. There will be an estimated $5 billion in savings from future health expenditure. These changes will save lives and could increase Māori life expectancy, and we cannot put a price on that. I look forward to the Health Committee’s consideration of the bill, and I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. National supports smoking reduction and the smoke-free target of less than 5 percent smoking by 2025. The evidence in the Government documents is that by 2025, on current measures, 20 percent of Māori will still be smokers and 8 percent of non-Māori will still be smokers, so a failed target. National will be supporting this bill through to select committee, but there are a lot of answers and analysis that will be required at select committee to persuade us that all of this will work and it’s not just a vanity project that, if it fails, could irreparably damage dairy and small-business owners particularly. We need to be very careful that we don’t treat a target and destroy communities on the way.

There are three operating arms which I will address in order of effectiveness. The first is decreasing the number of retail premises by, effectively, an approvals process. Still to be determined in that approvals process is whether it is the number of retailers per area or the number of retailers per capita. I’d be interested to see the analysis of that in select committee. Dairy owners, I’m sure, will present to the select committee. Certainly, meetings with local people that I’ve had said: “Shane, we understand the need for smoking reduction and we’re supportive of that. All we need is the time to transition the business model. Just give us enough time to transition.” I’d be very interested to hear their submissions, which I’m sure they’ll make. When we look at the modelled impact in the regulatory impact statement of retail outlet restrictions, amongst the three options it is very modest, to say the least.

The second operating arm is the smoke-free generation; that is, no sales of cigarettes if you’re born after 1 January 2009. This received much media when announced in December last year, but there is nothing new on this menu that hasn’t been considered for decades. The fact that only a few have deployed this internationally should give us some caution. A great media sound bite but does it work? One jurisdiction that has deployed this is the town of Brookline in the state of Massachusetts, Coolidge Corner on the green line. I was privileged to live there for about seven years. They’ve deployed recently, July 2021, a similar policy set. The data on that is still to be forthcoming.

The third operating arm is a lowering in the concentration of nicotine. And if we look at the modelling, this does all of the heavy lifting and, by itself, almost gets us to the smoke-free target that we’re looking for. Again, this is no epiphany and has been contemplated by many jurisdictions over many years. There are, however, many issues that arise from this policy, such as whether people simply smoke more of a lower dose nicotine to meet their current dose. This is important because it is the products of combustion that are harmful rather than the addictive nicotine component. A chief economist has recently quoted the American Economic Review 2006 showing that when tobacco excise increases, smokers smoke more of the cheaper cigarettes. He also comments that some existing low nicotine cigarettes have not been at all popular with the general public and offers further caution to the proposal around the generally poor effects of what, effectively, he calls prohibition.

Those are the three operating arms and, as we go into select committee, I want to just identify some of the pros and cons as I see them here now. First of all: reducing the retail outlets, currently between 5,000 and 8,000. On the positive side, it has a moderate impact, looking at the modelling. It reduces initiation and maintenance and may have a significant impact in low socio-economic areas. On the con side, or the downside, if you like, certainly that black market risk has to be considered. I didn’t see too much modelling or commentary in the Government’s documents. How do you monitor low nicotine levels? That’s an issue and this will clearly affect dairy owners as well.

If we look at the smoke-free generation, the advantages are that there are moderate benefits for Māori, particularly younger Māori—around 20- to 30-year-olds—and significant benefits for youth. On the disadvantages—again, the black market and monitoring compliance.

The heavy lifter, the low nicotine: the advantage is it achieves most of the smoke-free goal. Certainly there’s some work around the Auckland researchers that low nicotine with substantial social support may actually have some impact on reducing smoking. I’d just note that significant social support that needs to be wrapped around it to get that effectiveness. Disadvantages? Again, the black market and this question around whether you just get increasing volume to compensate.

Emeritus Professor Robert Beaglehole, chair of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has commented on this bill and says the following: “These proposals seem exciting and ground-breaking. On closer examination, however, there are problems ahead.” One, on the smoke-free generation, “The good news is that creating a smoke-free generation is now obsolete. Recent data from ASH and the New Zealand Health Survey shows that youth are already almost smoke-free; the most at-risk group is now their (smoking) parents.” Two, retail reductions: “Reducing the sales outlets for cigarettes, and making cigarettes less available than vaping, could be helpful. However, this will only work if the demand for cigarettes responds to the reduced supply. Given the high dependence of smokers on nicotine, we can’t count on a rational response,”. On nicotine reduction: “Reducing the nicotine content of cigarettes to levels where they are no longer addictive or satisfy cravings is, in effect, prohibition and could negatively impact the mental well-being of dependent smokers. There are no real-world experiences with this policy, and its community-wide impact on quitting is unknown.”

He summarises: “As ground-breaking as these policies may be, they will not dramatically reduce smoking rates by 2025.” So it doesn’t sit there empty; he comes up with four alternatives. One, “more sustained and targeted mass and social media campaigns”; two, “ongoing campaigns to support people who want to switch”; three, “more community-led initiatives for Māori, Pasifika and low-income smokers to encourage vaping”; and, four, “track smoking trends to … [reverse] the unfairness of … [previous] tobacco control measures.”

There are a number of questions that we’re going to be asking in select committee that do require some contemplation. Firstly, how robust is the modelling for each policy initiative and what are the underlying assumptions? The regulatory impact statement says this when it looks at the limitations of the analysis: “Most of the measures being considered have yet to be widely implemented internationally, and in some cases, New Zealand will be the first in the world to implement them. There is therefore significant uncertainty in the outcomes.” A second question for the select committee to address is: what is the strength of existing evidence for tangible outcomes for each of the policy initiatives? And, three, given the likely huge impact on dairy and small-business owners and the overall contribution they make to communities, do all three of the initiatives need to be implemented, given nicotine reduction is modelled to almost meet the smoke-free New Zealand goal by itself? That is, can we be as Government-lite as possible, the least heavy-handed, and, at the same time, achieve or near achieve the objective?

These are questions that we’ll be raising in select committee. We look forward to a range of submissions and really getting down to the tin tacks of this so that we can bring back to the House something that is implementable, something that really does help us achieve the goal that we all want to achieve. I commend this bill to select committee. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Mauri, Mr Speaker. Can I firstly, sir, acknowledge your announcement today of your retirement at the next general election I’m sure we will have plenty of opportunity further down the line to talk more about that, but as your parliamentary neighbour can I just acknowledge that, since I have the opportunity to do so this afternoon.

Can I also acknowledge my colleague and friend, the Minister who has brought this bill to the House: the Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall. We all heard her own experiences as a doctor, as a clinician. If we all reflect, actually, I think we will all have our own stories about the impact that smoking in our community has had, not just in our own communities but also in our own whānau and families. So I want to acknowledge Dr Verrall for bringing to the House a bill that will make a significant and substantial change for future generations in this country. That is no easy feat, because it has been on the radar for quite some time, but knowing that this will make a real difference to our Māori, our Pasifika, and our non-Māori and non-Pasifika communities is something that I think we should be applauding and supporting.

This legislative change comes within the suite of changes that have already been enacted. When we talk about the regulation of vaping products, when we look at the enactment of legislation that ceases or stops vaping and smoking in cars and motor vehicles for those who are under 18 years of age, this is the next natural step, in terms of wanting to tackle the issue and do something about it. Protecting future generations is a positive thing for any Parliament, in particular the Parliament that we are all a member of.

Dr Reti has referred to the select committee process. I note that Minister Ayesha Verrall has nominated that Health Committee, a hard-working committee of the Parliament, I know. There is no doubt in my mind that we will hear from small-business owners and dairy owners, like the folk who met with me in my own electorate of Palmerston North last week. We will hear from community providers, we will hear form public health advocates, like others who have been speaking with members in the lead up to this particular bill. We will also, I hope, hear of the personal experiences of community members, of whānau members, for whom, even though this decision may be too late, it is an investment in the future.

I am delighted to be able to, again, congratulate the Minister on bringing this bill to the House. I look forward to progressing it through select committee. I commend it to fellow colleagues.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of the National Party for the first reading of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill.

I must say, it’s good to be back for the start of the parliamentary sitting week, after three weeks off, and looking forward to some busy weeks ahead, not only in the House but in the parliamentary select committee.

And as that member who just resumed his seat, Tangi Utikere, said, this bill will end up in the Health Committee. We’re looking forward for it to go there and the call for submissions. The last member who resumed his seat did make a comment saying, “knowing it will make a real difference.” And I’m not sure we do know, and that’s half the issue with this bill. I think that’s why the National Party is supporting this bill, but cautiously supporting it, to select committee—only supporting it at this stage in the first reading.

It’d be fair to say this bill is fairly experimental. And when you look at the regulatory impact statement for the Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan, under “Limitations and Constraints on Analysis”, it talks about the measures within this bill, and it says “Most of the measures being considered have yet to be widely implemented internationally, and in some cases, New Zealand would be the first in the world to implement them.”

So look, I don’t have a problem that New Zealand is going to be the first in the world in some of this policy implementation, but I think we’ve got to keep open-minded about the effectiveness of the policy that we are legislating for today. It also says that there is therefore significant uncertainty in the outcomes. And that was my point: there is going to be a lot of uncertainty.

And I suppose what we’re going to hear from the select committee submitters is a range of views, whether they think some of these measures are in fact going to be effective. It goes on to say, “While a strong body of research exists around the theoretical impacts of the various measures, there is a lack of evaluation from comparable markets.” And I suppose what we always try to do, especially on this side of the House, is look for the evidence base.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Oh!

MATT DOOCEY: And what we always like to have is evidence-based policy.

Chlöe Swarbrick: Let’s talk about it.

MATT DOOCEY: And I know my good colleague Chlöe Swarbrick wholeheartedly supports me in that intention for the National Party.

It goes on to say, “Even where there has been comparable implementation and evaluation in overseas jurisdictions, the evaluation is limited.” So I think we’ve got to be open with these measures in this bill that when we go through the select committee process and the bill may end up in a slightly different form, there will need to be evaluation measures built into these policy settings to understand if we’re going to meet the desired outcome. It also goes on to say, “There is no empirical evidence to tell us how the measures will impact equity amongst the New Zealand population.” And I think that’s a key point, because when we look at part of the issue that we are looking to problem-solve and address today, it does show that there is inequity amongst the outcomes of the policy trajectory to date.

Further in the regulatory impact statement, it talks about the goal of reaching 5 percent by 2025, and says that modelling indicates that under a business-as-usual approach, daily smoking rates are projected to only reduce to 8.1 percent for non-Māori and 20 percent for Māori by 2025, and that Pacific peoples are projected to reach 11.7 percent. So it shows that, in fact, we are not on track as a country to reach that goal of 5 percent of the population by 2025 in a business-as-usual approach.

And that is why it’s important that we do look at the policy settings at the moment. It’s fair to say a lot of the policy settings to date about becoming smoke-free in New Zealand has been on the demand side versus the supply side. So when we look at the demand side, it has been around education of people in New Zealand, and specifically targeted education for at-risk groups, and especially young people as well, price increases, and legislation prohibiting smoking indoors.

But this new bill will look at how we maybe introduce some demand side measures to reduce smoking in New Zealand. And when you look at the key three parts of the bill around reducing and looking at supply measures, it’s reducing the number of retail outlets by 2024. Now, I think that’s going to be an interesting one. I don’t think that’s going to be as easy as we think. It’s going to come down to what are the metrics and criteria for reduction, and seeing if it is per capita or a geographic area. I’ve already had a small business in my electorate—Karla who runs the service centre in a small town called Cust—very concerned that when you look at small towns and regional New Zealand, people might end up having to drive to the bigger towns, and that’s going to impact on retail outlets in smaller towns as well. It’s easy to cut outlets out in big metropolitan cities, but it will be interesting when there is only one outlet in each town and something’s got to give. Will it be ending up that some outlets won’t be in any towns at all?

There is the policy setting of implementing low-nicotine cigarettes by 2025. I think when you listen to my colleague Dr Shane Reti, he clearly outlined there is some concern around that, and whether scientifically that is going to deliver the desired effect just by reducing the nicotine, and what will be the consequential behavioural outcomes from reducing nicotine in cigarettes as well, and also implementing a smoke-free generation 2027, which I actually think is quite an innovative policy, and I congratulate the Government for that.

Ultimately, fair to say, within adults, there’s an element of personal responsibility of people choosing to smoke or not, but I think it’s incumbent on any Government of the day to put measures in place to discourage our young ones actively taking up cigarette smoking. And it is encouraging that in New Zealand we are seeing cigarette smoking declining rapidly in large groups of young people—not all young people. Of course, there is the substitution effect of vaping at the moment that we are still grappling with as a country, like many other countries around the world as well.

So all and all, National, as I say, is cautiously supporting this bill for the reasons that I outline that in some ways, some of these policy settings are experimental, and we’re not sure if it will deliver the intended consequence, but I suppose part of the measure to look into those issues is at select committee stage. I’d encourage anyone listening today that is interested to make your submission, once they’re opened by the Health Committee. And I’m looking forward to grappling with some of those key issues around how effective these policy settings will be, and also what evaluation tools we’re going to need to make sure this bill will deliver the desired effect, which is ultimately to have less than 5 percent of Kiwis smoking by 2025. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to take a short call and speak in support of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill. To start with, I would like to quite sincerely thank and quite sincerely commend Minister Verrall for not only her insight but her foresight in bringing this piece of work to this House. This bill is inspirational, it’s aspirational, and, as my colleague Mr Doocey who’s just resumed his seat said, there’s aspects of this bill that are being implemented for the first time anywhere in New Zealand, so there is a little bit of the unknown. It’s certainly not experimental. What is experimental is decades and decades of tobacco use when the outcomes and the deadly outcomes of that were not known.

This work is also brave, not that it’s not exactly the right thing to do but it emphatically draws a line, a really obvious line, for a future generation, the smoke-free generation. And as someone who has spent far too many years of my life feeling quite helplessly enslaved by the addictive properties of tobacco, I feel quite proud of the fact that this Government is prioritising a piece of legislation, and we owe it to the next generation, the smoke-free generation, to prioritise their health and wellbeing.

So there’s a choice before us today and a decision that we can make throughout this process, of which this is stage one, where we are amending a piece of legislation and we are saying, by doing that, we’re not going to compromise the next generation, the smoke-free generation, which I think is a really exciting step. And we are saying that we’re not going to prioritise what is a deadly and a completely unnecessary product over their wellbeing. So as a member of the Health Committee, I look forward to hearing the submissions and to progressing this bill further in the House and I commend it.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I want to start by joining in with my colleagues in acknowledging the Minister, the Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall, who has been really engaged in answering a number of my questions about this legislation, the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill.

Nicotine is a drug, like alcohol and like cannabis, and the Greens are really proud of our very long track record in this House of being the only party in Parliament that has had a consistent approach to substances and being about harm reduction in the way that we go about approaching them—that is, recognition of the reality that criminal prohibition does not get rid of a substance but that it only typically serves to push that substance underground, where it gets more harmful and is controlled by those who have not necessarily the best interests of our communities at heart. While the Greens have a number of reservations and concerns about some of the elements of this legislation, we will be supporting the critical debate about drug-harm reduction and how best to achieve the Government’s stated aims at select committee, where we will chew over these issues, which I’ve heard also from the Opposition. I do invite the Opposition to continue saying that they support evidence-based drug-harm reduction, because it’s a very useful thing to have on the record.

Some of those outstanding concerns specifically include, firstly, the untested proposal, which a number of others have put on the table in the debate this evening, of substantially restricting the amount of nicotine in cigarettes. It’s untested. It’s untested, from my understanding, anywhere and, therefore, it is going to need some serious, robust kicking around. Secondly, we do have some concerns around the imposition of this so-called “smoke-free generation” ban, which, whilst absolutely innovative and therefore important, does, effectively, make tobacco criminally prohibited for a portion of our population and eventually, were this to come into effect, for the entire population moving forward. Of course, one of the important components of drug-harm reduction as an approach is to note that there are alternatives. So here we are also looking at other methods of administering nicotine—that being particularly through vaping, and, of course, there is a really important discussion to be had there, too.

It’s also worth noting—and this is a conversation that I had with the Minister—that tobacco can be grown naturally, in the same way that the likes of cannabis can be. So there are some important considerations also to be made about what occurs in those kinds of instances, were it the case that this hypothetical future smoke-free generation were to stumble upon some tobacco growing out there in the wild. Thirdly, the Greens continue to have concerns—as, interestingly, I’ve heard from some members of the Opposition as well—about some of the quantification that has or hasn’t been done around the black-market implications. Interestingly enough, these are debates that we also had on Budget night, when I was asking the Minister, then of Customs, about the implications of increasing tobacco excise tax on particularly the need to then put all the more money into enforcement, and where that balance should best be struck and what those implications are for, again, that evidence-based policy that we all seem so attuned to wanting in this debate.

I do really want to emphasise that point on evidence-based policy, because, when we’re talking about our approach to substances, whether they be cannabis or they be alcohol or they be tobacco, it is very much the case that the question has to be: if we acknowledge that a substance can cause harm, how do we best go about reducing that harm? And most researchers in the space of drug-harm reduction will say that there’s a kind of spectrum of approaches that you can take. At one end, one extreme, you have criminal prohibition. At the other end of the extreme, you have, effectively, an unfettered legal free market. At both ends of that spectrum, you have, on the one side, criminal organisations and, on the other side, commercial entities who are attempting to exploit vulnerable communities in order to make a quick buck. In both of those instances and at both of those extremes, you have the maximisation of harm in order to drive a profit motive.

So how do we pull back from those extremes? We pull back from those extremes in the space of sensible regulation, which brings us back to the point of how we go about having the same kind of discussion—what seems like a very rational discussion that we’re having today—about all of the substances in this country, which then has flow-on effects with regard to our criminal justice system and our prison population, but also, importantly, reducing things like methamphetamine harm and the potential harm that is caused by people having to go underground in order to get access to cannabis, something that, notably, more than half a million New Zealanders do on a regular basis. It is really interesting and fascinating and amazing to hear the National Party talking about how they’re evidence based in this approach, because they are, of course, also the same party that stood against all of the same things that they spoke about so positively in this legislation—they were opposed when it came to the cannabis legalisation and control bill.

If we’re to talk about the kinds of approaches that we’ve taken over the past decade in particular, but the past few decades, and the trajectory of travel around reducing harm for tobacco and getting us to this point of reduced consumption, particularly for younger people, we do need to talk about interventions like plain packaging, we do need to talk about interventions like ending advertising, and we do need to talk about interventions like ending consumption in shared and public spaces. These, of course, again, I might add, are the same evidence-based harm-reduction approaches that we had in the cannabis legalisation and control bill, which I hope the National Party is now reflecting on their stance upon, given how they have championed an evidence-based approach to substances and to drugs this afternoon.

Just finally, we all know that we’re all talking tonight about a substance that is incredibly harmful and damaging to people’s lives, particularly in the instance that it is one that can go about causing cancer—and a number of preventable cancers. To that effect, I would implore all of those who have spoken in support of evidence-based harm reduction for this substance or this drug—that being tobacco—this afternoon to apply precisely that same logic to another substance that we will soon get to debate those harm reduction interventions on: that being my alcohol-harm minimisation bill, alcohol being the most harmful substance that we have in this country, whether it be legal or illegal. It is, of course, also a level one carcinogen. That is why we’ve seen the likes of the Cancer Society come out in favour of that legislation, too.

So, in summation, there are, of course, some noble aims from the Government in this bill. However, there are a number of untested tactics and mechanisms to go about achieving precisely that. The Greens have some serious concerns about the potential for a new kind of criminal prohibition, but we think that this debate deserves far greater scrutiny and we think that the public should be able to engage in that debate. We’re inviting all public health experts, but also all of those with front-line experience of harm at the coalface, to come forward and to speak to the Health Committee, which I’m looking forward to subbing in on throughout the progress of this legislation. If I can close my contribution tonight by just imploring the, what seems like it will now be, 110 members of this House who will be voting on the potential for evidence-based harm-reduction interventions for the substance of tobacco to do precisely the same thing when confronted with the opportunity to do so with other substances. The Greens are supporting this to select committee, and from there on we will see.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the ACT Party tonight to oppose the first reading of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill. It’s hard to know where to start with this bill because it’s so terrible from all angles. So I’ll try and touch on a few main points because we could be here all day talking about how many times this Government has entered this Chamber and started passing laws that are not based on evidence, not based on any good regulatory impact analysis, and, in fact, don’t solve any clear problem. In many cases they actually create more problems than they solve. And this is a very clear point to be made for this bill: there is another problem that comes out of this bill by restricting people being able to smoke.

This bill is short-sighted and it’s short-sighted because of its prohibition. That’s very plain and simple. You know, this Government constantly comes in here and says, “We’re going to tax people because we don’t like them.” It’s quite that simple. Or “We’re just going to ban and regulate something that we don’t like. We don’t like that product. So the best way to solve that problem is to ban or regulate it.” I can think of a few recent examples, and the first that springs to mind is ute owners. Not everybody here will own a ute. And I don’t really care if anybody does or doesn’t own a ute, but the Government doesn’t like ute owners. And so what did they do? They’ve imposed a “ute tax”. And so they’ve said, “You know what? We don’t really like that. Let’s add another cost to some people and we’re going to say, ‘You’re bad, you’re a bad person because we don’t like utes.’” And you just think of farmers; the Government also doesn’t like farmers. They’re clearly bad people according to this Government. They come in here and say, “Well, maybe we should reduce the number of cows people have because we don’t like cows and we don’t like farmers.”

David Seymour: What about landlords?

BROOKE VAN VELDEN: It doesn’t actually improve any situation in New Zealand. It’s just harmful, bad policy.

David’s just mentioned landlords. What about all of the attacks that this Government makes on landlords? They constantly stand up here and say that landlords have caused the housing crisis, when it is in fact bad Government policy that has caused this—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m going to ask the member to come to the bill. This is not a general debate and you’ve mentioned three different topics which are not in the bill. So please come to the bill.

BROOKE VAN VELDEN: Mr Speaker, these all are very, very closely related to the prohibition that this Government wants to make on people who smoke in New Zealand—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That might be so, but you have not linked the two yet.

BROOKE VAN VELDEN: Very good. Well, the point that I’m clearly trying to make with these examples, is that this is a Government that decides it doesn’t like something, so the best way it can solve its problem, that it doesn’t like something, is to ban it or to regulate it or to impose another tax upon it. And so this is clearly a bill that is just control for control’s sake rather than actually trying to get to the root of any problem. It’s nanny Statism and it’s controlling people’s lives.

If I look at the bill and the three things that it’s trying to set out to achieve: it wants to set limits on the quantity of nicotine levels within cigarettes; it wants to amend the age limit to say an entire group of people will never have the legal ability to smoke; and it wants to reduce the number of retailers available in New Zealand that can sell cigarettes. You just have to look at the regulatory impact statement to see why this bill is so harmful and why it should never have been brought to the House.

I want to touch on a few quotes, and so I’ll do a bit of reading here Mr Speaker, if you’ll allow me. I think that these are very important points that need to be made public. The first quote here, from the regulatory impact statement, says, “Most of the measures being considered within this bill have yet to be widely implemented internationally, and in some cases, New Zealand would be the first country in the world to implement them.”. It goes on to say, “There is. Therefore, there’s significant uncertainty in the outcomes. … there is a lack of evaluation from comparable markets. Even when there’s been comparable implementation and evaluation, the evaluation is limited. There is no empirical evidence to tell us how the measures will impact equity among the New Zealand population.” This Government constantly goes on about equity, and yet there is no empirical evidence on this.

So I want to touch on point one, which was about setting a limit on the quantity of nicotine levels within cigarettes. The regulatory impact statement says that this is technically challenging as a policy measure. It says that this option is likely to incentivise imports of illicit tobacco, and that while the current illicit market provides the same product that can otherwise be bought legally, but at a lower price, a future illicit market is likely to offer tobacco with high nicotine content that cannot be purchased legally. This may result in a higher price being charged for illicit tobacco than currently, making illegal sales more appealing for organised crime.

So what is the effect of the Government wanting to reduce people smoking legally? It’s going to increase organised crime. And I want to point to this particular statement within the regulatory impact statement—you see right there? It’s been redacted. The Government, even in its own regulatory impact statement, doesn’t want to point to the fact that there will be an increasing illicit organised crime market. And I really want to know what information the Government is hiding from us here, because I don’t think that’s acceptable.

There will be people in New Zealand who do smoke, and when the nicotine levels are reduced will still be wanting to smoke. They will be addicted to the substance. And so instead of completely reducing the number of cigarettes, they will actually smoke more because you’ll end up with people wanting that same hit from more cigarettes. But the real point here is that nicotine is the least harmful aspect of a cigarette. It’s the tar that causes harm. So by reducing the amount of nicotine in a cigarette, you could end up with some people actually increasing their harm by using more cigarettes and increasing the amount of tar that’s going into their bodies. So that’s harmful for people who don’t have another substance to go towards. And we know that this Government is also wanting to ban and regulate vaping products. So there is an alternative that should be there for people as well.

But do we really want to live in a society where the Government will ban a product and simply try and prohibit it and push it towards the gangs? We know that we have a gang problem in New Zealand. We need healthy, thriving communities and all that this Government will do is put more power in the hands of gangs. I don’t think that’s acceptable. I think the second point about amending the age limit is just simply nanny Statism. You know, they’re telling an entire group of people, “Even once you’re an adult, even once you’re 30, 40, 50, you can’t make decisions about your own life. You need the Government to come in and stop you from making decisions that we don’t like.” I mean, this is just the first instance, but where does it stop? “Sorry, you have too much sugar, so we’re going to reduce how much sugar you can have.”, “Sorry, we don’t think you should be allowed to eat meat, so we’re going to ban sausages.” I mean it’s just ridiculous nanny Statism and it’s control for the sake of it.

When it comes to reducing retail availability, I think this one is particularly bad for small businesses in New Zealand. You know, this law is asking for a reduction in competition in the market. That’s essentially what it’s doing. It’s the Director-General of Health now being able to pick and choose winners, pick and choose which dairy owners people can go to.

You know, if you had multiple competitors, multiple dairies colluding in a market to say that they were going to stop a competitor being able to sell or buy products, those people would be up before the Commerce Commission. And in this instance, you’re ending up with the Director-General of Health being able to stop competition in a market. We also know that when people are buying cigarettes, that’s not the only thing that they go to buy. When people go to buy cigarettes they go to buy bread, milk, and other things that you can buy from a convenience store. And what’s happening here is that the Director-General of Health, by being able to restrict the number of outlets that can sell cigarettes, is picking and choosing winners and different retailers who will be able to have a good sale versus others who may go out of business, and I don’t think that’s fair. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

I called Dr Anae Neru Leavasa, joining us remotely.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to speak on this Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill. I just want to make a comment on Brooke van Velden’s speech there, she opened up by saying that this bill is terrible at all angles. Well, what’s terrible is smokers having high risks of lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and a lot of respiratory conditions that are a direct result of smoking. And what would you rather do; should we do nothing at all? I really disagree with that previous member’s comments and speech. Just to say that this is about the health and wellbeing of our people; of our community, and, therefore, whānau as well. Because, as we know, there’s not only the smokers that we’re thinking of, it’s the passive smoking that our whānau and our community experience as well. I myself have one lung, I’ve got kids around, and there are other family members who may be smoking around us and that has an effect on those who have other issues, medical conditions that get with worse with passive smoking.

I support this bill because it is doing a job—that we need to fix the environment that we live in. So we look at the bill and one bit of it is about looking at the amount of retailers that are selling, or looking at approved retailers. I know that many of my medical colleagues, what they faced in South Auckland—it is really hard to try to put people on nicotine replacement therapy or other measures for smoking cessation when the environment that they live in is of access to smoking. It just undoes the work that we’re trying to do as clinicians. So that is just one thing. And also the reduction in nicotine in these products. You know, when we were looking at replacement therapy, I always loved to hear that we can use a smaller amount of nicotine when we’re trying to do therapy because we know that higher levels of nicotine is higher levels of addictiveness. So that’s why I support this bill, with its different measures to target smoking. And it’s all about our whānau, it’s all about the health and wellbeing of our people, and that’s why I support this bill to the House. Fa’afetai.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is a split call. I call Simon Watts.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of the National Party as a member of Parliament for North Shore on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill first reading.

It’s interesting to listen to the contributions across this House in regards to the first reading of this bill, and I think one has to reflect back on what this legislation will deliver in terms of outcomes. Will this bill deliver the policy outcomes that are intended?

For that reason, the National Party are cautiously supporting this bill through to select committee. Because we do, at a principal level, believe that we should be undertaking all steps necessary to minimise the impact of smoking and reduce smoking in this country; because of the obvious negative impacts that that has across our communities, and particularly those communities in our Māori and Pacific areas, which have a much more significant impact from smoking than non-Māori.

Some of the challenges, which I am sure the Health Committee—of which there are a few in the House this evening—will go through, , have been noted today. I guess, as a volunteer ambulance officer, probably the job that I enjoy least is when I attend those with exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). For some of those people, you may know it as emphysema or chronic bronchitis. For those individuals that are in a point with both of those diseases when they are simply unable to breathe, it is a hugely stressful and difficult position for those patients; it’s something that they live with day in, day out. But it is often one of the key contributors in terms of that underlying disease—the fact that they smoked.

I guess, in that perspective, I see often the end of the road in terms of the implications of smoking. So there’s the need for us in this House to do what we can to minimise that impact—particularly for our young people in trying to ensure that they don’t start on a pathway which will lead undoubtedly to that or, as previously noted, cancer in one form or another, which has an impact on the individual, the whānau, but, of course, on our broader health system and the finite resources the system has and is struggling with.

I think Dr Shane Reti noted in his contribution—and he knows far better than most in terms of the unintended clinical implications around low-nicotine cigarettes—the reality that the literature in regards to outcomes there is very limited. So we know that while the nicotine element is the part that makes cigarettes addictive, there are other elements, other toxins and chemicals in that cigarette, and it’s the tar that actually causes COPD. So there’s a correlation between, you know, people smoking more to get their fix and potentially an unintended clinical outcome. Of course, you know, the vaping element, again, is relatively new in regards to its position and the clinical implications of that are also pretty unlimited.

I think the other element is saying, “Well, actually—right from the start—are we going to achieve the policy outcomes in regards to this bill?” I think it’s fair to say—and I think a number of speakers in the House have articulated this—that there are concerns that, actually, if we continue along the business-as-usual trajectory that we’re currently on at the moment, we’re not going to hit that 5 percent threshold. So there is a need for us to take an alternative pathway if we are realistic in regards to that. We know that the statistics around Pasifika and also Māori are those that, based on current run rate, will not hit that. So that is inequity in regards to the policy outcome and something that I’m sure the Health Committee will work through.

There’s a number of other elements that, hopefully, that we’ll get some data on—particularly around the impact around the excise tax impact around that. We know that there’s estimates: around $11 billion of savings in terms of the health system. But, you know, it’s easy to talk about savings in the health system; you never translate that into real dollars that you take out and transition to somewhere else because they get absorbed and that’s a reality.

But we’re cautiously supportive of this bill. Thank you.

Kia ora. Tēnā tātou e te Whare. I rise on behalf of Te Paati Māori to speak to the first reading of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill. We will be supporting this bill and acknowledge the Government for progressing the work of Te Paati Māori to end tobacco harm in Aotearoa.

The Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 Action Plan is a continuation of the vision spearheaded by Te Paati Māori MP Hone Harawira and co-leader at the time Tariana Turia to end tobacco smoking by 2025. I acknowledge Hone and Whaea Tariana for their parliamentary and ministerial work that has already reduced consumption levels and is continuing to inspire this policy reform.

We have long known the impact of tobacco harm on Māori communities. While we still have a way to go, it’s easy to forget just how far we’ve come in the last 20 years. In the year 2000, at the turn of the millennium, the daily smoking rate for rangatahi was 31 percent; today, it is only 5 percent. While this remains higher than other population groups, and we would have to push further, we should focus on the positive and acknowledge that cultural and societal attitudes towards tobacco smoking have shifted hugely. I’m confident that we will never again reach the levels of smoking that used to be a feature of life in Aotearoa.

Looking at the bill before us, Te Paati Māori strongly support the provisions aimed at reducing retail availability and the appeal and attractiveness of smoked tobacco products for young people. Communities have long been fighting to reduce the availability of tobacco and alcohol products in their local areas. There is no good reason for these harmful products to be sold on every street corner.

We must be realistic: drugs will always exist, and some people will always use drugs. While we can’t end drug use, we can end drug harm. We must look holistically at the drivers of drug use, which are often poverty, isolation, mental health pressures, homelessness, domestic and sexual violence, and societal marginalisation. But we must also need to look holistically at the ways to end drug harm, whether it is tobacco, cannabis, meth, or our worst killer: alcohol. This holistic approach requires a focus on love, care, and compassion, rather than stigmatisation and criminalisation. It requires investment in front-line drug and addiction services from kaupapa Māori providers, not investment in police and corrections.

Prohibition—prohibition does not work, aroha atu, we know this. I can’t even say the word! The war on drugs is war on black, brown, and poor communities. As we push for removing criminal penalties for drugs like cannabis, we must not create new criminal penalties for drug use.

That is why we have strong concerns around the generation policy, which would prohibit the use of tobacco products to anyone born after 1 January 2009, meaning anyone 13 or younger will never legally be able to buy smoked tobacco products in their lifetime. This will like promote the rise of a black market for tobacco products, leading to associated issues with crime, safety, and control of products for younger people. It could also likely lead to older siblings, friends, and whānau supplying products to younger people. Māori legal expert Khylee Quince talks about low-level drug offences being used as convenience charges against tangata whenua, which is essentially a way to enter our homes, harass our whānau, and drum up penalties.

There are some factors that mitigate our concerns, such as nicotine will not be banned, vaping products will still be legally available, there will be no possession offences. However, our fear is that supply charges could be used against older siblings or whānau members. Possession offences aren’t the only charges that cause harm to innocent people and disrupt sovereign Māori communities. The trade of naturally grown products like tobacco should not be criminalised; there is simply no evidence-based rationale for it.

I look forward to this bill coming before the Health Committee and the opportunity to scrutinise it in detail. The voices of tangata whenua in this process must be heard. We are confident that we can ensure this bill achieves this shared intention of ending tobacco harm while not creating any new harms through criminalisation and stigmatisation. I look forward to the Minister working with the committee and Te Paati Māori to realise that. Nō reira, tēnā tātou katoa.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s with pleasure and pride that I rise to speak on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill this afternoon. As you may be aware, midwives have a lot of experience in supporting their clients to become smoke-free or to support them in working towards it. The reason why that’s so important is that one in 10 pregnant women in New Zealand still smoke in pregnancy, and this figure is higher in wāhine Māori and it’s higher in people living in poverty.

The effects of smoking during pregnancy are undeniable. Smoking in pregnancy leads, often, to smaller babies, which is not a good thing. I’ve had clients talk to me in the past about it being a desirable thing, but when I explain the reason why, they soon change their minds, as I explain that this is due to a chronic lack of oxygen reaching the baby and it not being able to grow properly. It also leads to early babies—babies who are born prematurely—again, because the placenta simply can’t cope with the inability to give sufficient oxygen levels to the developing fetus. After birth, those babies have a higher level of sudden unexpected death in infancy. Eliminating these consequences is, I would imagine, something we could all get behind.

Every single person I’ve ever worked with wants to do the very best for their unborn fetus. They want to do the very best, but nicotine is highly addictive. The fact that we’re standing here this evening doing all we can to support everybody in New Zealand to become smoke-free is something I think we should be extremely proud of, and we shouldn’t be afraid to be the first to do it. Being the first to do something to eliminate a source of harm for our communities is not a bad thing. It’s never a bad thing, and New Zealand has never been afraid of being the first. We were the first, after all, to give women the vote, and I think that’s a good thing. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. One of the, I think, real benefits of this Parliament, from a policy perspective, is the quality and number of the health professionals we have here. We’ve heard from three of the medical practitioners tonight. We’ve just heard from a midwife, we’ve heard from a volunteer ambulance officer, and somebody experienced in psychological therapy. Now you’ll hear from a health service manager and an accountant—not quite the same sort of gravitas.

But I think what we heard from particularly the doctors and from Ms Pallett was compelling stories about the harm and the addictive nature, and people presenting in emergency departments with terrible, terrible sequelae from their smoking years, but still unable to shake the habit. I’ve joked in this House before, it’s not that funny, but as an ex-smoker, I’ve referred to the fact that giving up smoking is easy—I should know, I’ve done it about seven times. I finally got there, but it is a highly addictive product and the best way is not to start in the first place. So to that degree, I certainly support the goal.

But I do want to touch on a couple of the concerns that I have about whether there is sufficient evidence of this being the right thing to do, and, in fact, more so whether one of the three policy elements could actually cause more harm than good. I’ll elaborate on that in a minute, but I do want to acknowledge the comments that Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made about the previous Government’s confidence and supply agreement with the Māori Party, and the excellent progress that was made, firstly, in setting the goal of Smokefree 2025, which at that time was pretty ambitious. Now, we know we’re not going to get there, but at least we set off on a path that, mainly through impositions of increased excise, certainly put people into the situation of saying, “time to stop”. But for those hardcore, chronically-addicted smokers, no amount of new excise is going to change that, I don’t think. We did need to think of other means, and after what I believe is an unfortunate delay of several years, we now have an Associate Minister of Health who’s acted boldly, I think, in these three ideas.

The retail outlet issue we agree with in principle, and it’s certainly going to be helpful for those who are addicted and trying to quit because, generally speaking, when people have kicked the habit it’s the temptation of walking into a dairy and knowing that those cigarettes are behind the counter that actually tempts them to go back. There’s no doubt there’s going to be a cost on this really important part of the retail sector, and for many of them, the margins that they make on cigarette sales is what keeps them going. That’s not a reason not to do this. But I do think we need to be eyes wide open in terms of what it will mean, not just for them and their businesses but, actually, if we accelerate the demise of the corner dairy—which has been going on for a generation or more—then this could be the thing that that tips them over. So I think eyes wide open is a really important thing to do there.

The area that I have the biggest concern about is the low-nicotine cigarettes, and it does worry me that we may be doing more harm than good and I encourage the select committee to really drill into this. Why do I say that? Well, as Brooke van Velden has mentioned, nicotine is the addictive substance, but it’s the other things in smoked tobacco that causes the harm. Nicotine itself just really doesn’t do much harm at all, except hook you into the substance. It’s the toxins, the tars, and the carcinogens that are in smoked tobacco that cause all the harm. So the policy question, therefore, is this: if nicotine levels drop, will people compensate—what’s known as compensatory smoking? Will they smoke more?

The evidence on that is equivocal. In the United States, there was a kind of candy-coated Food and Drugs Administration research that suggested that would be significant quality adjusted life years—in the hundreds of millions—for their population, if indeed that were true. But looking more into European and United States studies, it did suggest that—well, firstly, the research is difficult to draw a conclusion from because with such a high dropout rate. That in itself, I think, informs the decision—it’s, like, probably half of the people who went on through clinical trials to low-nicotine cigarettes actually dropped out. So you can pretty much say, I think, for them, if they continue to smoke—and most of them did—that they weren’t prepared to continue with a low-nicotine product. For the rest of them, there is clear evidence that carbon monoxide exposure increased because of the compensatory smoking. If one isn’t getting nicotine through one cigarette and needs two to satisfy the craving, then that’s going to cause more harm than good. There’s enough evidence, I think, that exists already for concern about this, for caution around this, and I would encourage the Health Committee to make sure that they get the best advice that they can from the ministry about what they have looked at, because there is definitely, I think, an equivocal evidence base right now.

The other thing to do, obviously, with the low nicotine is: what’s going to happen to excise? Rather disappointingly, but not unusually, the regulatory impact statement doesn’t say a lot about whether excise will go up, down, or stay the same. I presume it’s going to stay the same. Paradoxically, if that trend of compensatory smoking exists, then it may be possible that if people aren’t in a mood to quit and they have to smoke low-nicotine cigarettes, the Crown revenue from excise may actually go up, and that seems counterintuitive. But I think we need to have some kind of financial analysis of the impacts of this.

The third area is in the age restrictions, and we heard a very interesting contribution from both Chlöe Swarbrick and Brooke van Velden on this. As a father of teenagers, I actually support this, but I’m not sure how effective it is. Debbie Ngarewa-Packer talked about the potential for punishing people who are nevertheless of an age if they smoke. I’m not sure that that’s actually going to happen; it’ll be the sellers that are punished. I haven’t looked into the bill about whether or not somebody who may, over that age, buy cigarettes and then provide them to someone who was born after 2009, whether there is some culpability there.

But my main concern in this area is: how effective is this going to be? We know from the Government’s attempts to regulate and control the supply of vaping products to under-18-year-olds that strong anecdotal and some evidentiary base exists that that’s been a failure and that the number of secondary school students who now vape routinely and regularly is much, much higher than the Health Committee heard when we went through the Smokefree environments amendment bill in 2019—or 2020, I think it was. We heard from school kids coming in from St Bernard’s College, and I think it was Wainuiomata college that came in and told us that the data we had from the ministry was simply not consistent with their lived experience, that there was widespread use of vaping products in amongst the under-18-year-olds.

I raise that because simply prohibiting the purchase of something doesn’t mean it’s not going to be used, and we do risk potentially romanticising the product by making it out of their reach and having the opposite effect. Now, I don’t think that’s as material of a concern as I have with the low-nicotine cigarettes. But I do think the Health Committee needs to look really deeply, as it tried to do with the vaping products and, actually, we didn’t get a very good response. So I think we’ve really got to keep the ministry’s feet to the flames on this one. I applaud the ideas, I applaud the novel approach to breaking this cycle of nicotine dependency, but we’ve got to go in with as much of an evidence base as we can, and particularly if there’s a risk that we could do more harm than good. But I wish the select committee all the best in that; I’ll be watching it very, very closely, because I’d really like it to succeed.

Members, it has come time for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Members, before the dinner break we were debating the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill. The next call is a Labour Party call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Every year, thousands of children get sent to hospital with things like bronchiolitis, pneumonia, and asthma. All of these are basically made much, much worse by exposure to second-hand cigarette smoke. And smoking in pregnancy not only increases the risk of premature birth but also, once babies are born, increases their risk of sudden, unexpected death in infancy. So it’s incredibly urgent that we help smokers to quit and also stop young people taking up smoking in the first place.

What this bill does is it builds on a number of bills that I’ve already spoken on in the House over the last few years: one which regulated vaping, and then another one which banned smoking in cars with children. So this is an important next step. Basically what it’ll be doing is helping us with implementing the Smokefree Aotearoa 2025 action plan.

When talking to a number of smokers, what they often say about why it’s so hard to quit is that nicotine is incredibly addictive. And so what this bill will do is it means we can create regulations that set limits on the level of nicotine in smoked tobacco products.

I think one of the other issues people find when they are trying to quit is that you can actually pick up smokes and tobacco pretty much anywhere. I think any of us that have gone to the supermarket with a shopping list and then ended up coming home with a whole lot of other stuff you never intended to buy knows about the impact of just opportunistic buying. I think having the exposure to tobacco products in so many dairies and so many other places means that it’s very, very hard to quit. So what this bill will do is it will actually limit the number of retail outlets that can sell smoked tobacco products, and also allow to have a look at maximum numbers of retail premises in particular areas. So that means basically people’s exposure to opportunistic products will be much more limited.

So this is a really, really important bill, and I’m very pleased to commend it to the House.

The question is, That the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Smoked Tobacco) Amendment Bill be considered by the Health Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Health Committee.

Instruction to Health Committee