Inquiries — This issue is something we need to come to grips with, but I need to remind members that when we removed smoking from restaurants and cafes there was a hang of a lot of shouting and chanting that it was not on. There seems to be that now when we talk about broaching companies about advertising. We can stop it; I am sure we can stop it. It is not about nanny State; it is about common sense. We arrested drinking and driving in most places when it was quite a common habit. I commend this bill.

Firstly, I congratulate the chairperson of the Māori Affairs Committee, Tau Henare, and all the members of that committee. This inquiry was a very significant journey for every committee member.

Many things could be said, but I will share with the House two enduring memories and thoughts that I had as a result of being on this inquiry. The first was that quite a significant number of young Māori women who came along told us how they began smoking. They did not begin smoking, as I had perhaps naively thought, as women in their late teens trying to impress people at parties or something like that. Rather, they began as girls, usually of 10 or 11, who lived in houses of smokers and probably had been passively smoking since before they were born. They rolled and lit the tobacco of their mothers and kuia around them, then started sneaking tobacco. I remember a number of young Māori women coming and telling us that.

As night follows day, they were hooked and they were addicted to tobacco. Those young women with children—and maybe some of them will be listening to this debate—want to stop, but it is not easy for them. They are anxious that their young children do not start in the way that they themselves started smoking.

The picture I had of smoking was quite wrong. Most of the time, smoking is not this idea of a free market with adults who freely consent to take up smoking. I do not want to say in this House that personal responsibility does not have any part in smoking—for some in starting, and for some in giving up. But the more complex, difficult situation of children smoking as a result of parents and grandparents who smoked, which I saw on the committee, I will remember for the rest of my life. That means that a more intense, stronger, more interventionist approach is called for. That is what we have recommended in the report we have produced, which all of us on the committee are proud of.

The second thing I wanted to say is that I was shocked by the statistics and the figures that we were given by a raft of organisations. I remember in particular how the submission of Action on Smoking and Health made very clear to me the stark differences in average mortality rates between Māori and non-Māori. Putting it bluntly, in short, it is depressingly clear that Māori men and women live about 8 years less on average than non-Māori. For a non-Māori male, the life expectancy is 79; for a Māori male it is 70.4. That is an 8.6-year difference. For a non-Māori female the life expectancy is 83 years; for a Māori female it is 75.1 years. That is a 7.9-year difference. We know that the smoking prevalence among Māori men and women is disturbingly high: 42 percent of Māori men and 49 percent of Māori women.

I came away very clear in my own mind that it would be simplistic to say that if we simply stopped, reduced, or eliminated—which would be even better—that smoking rate for Māori men and women, we would completely shrink that mortality rate. But I tell members that it would be the best thing we could do to really reduce that mortality rate. No one should feel limited in our country because of their race, and no one should feel that they will not live as long as another on the basis of their skin colour. Tobacco and the high prevalence of smoking among Māori really does mean that Māori are living too short lives compared with non-Māori in this country. Those are two things I will take away from this committee.

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate this afternoon. The title of this report, and the title of the inquiry, is the Inquiry into the tobacco industry in Aotearoa and the consequences of tobacco use for Māori. Those of us on the Māori Affairs Committee—and yes, despite my fair complexion, I did get to spend time on the committee for this inquiry, and I appreciate the fact that the members of the committee gave me the opportunity to do so—had to regularly remind ourselves that the focus was on the tobacco industry. We all know why we have to curtail smoking prevalence in New Zealand. It is because smoking kills between 4,500 and 5,000 New Zealanders every year. It is because it shortens life spans in New Zealand. It is because it affects Māori more than it affects Pākehā, and therefore has an inequitable effect across the population of New Zealand. The responsibility for all of those things lies squarely with the tobacco industry, and that is where the focus of this inquiry had to lie.

The previous speaker raised the issue of personal responsibility. We have heard from a number of people throughout this debate that if people took more personal responsibility for themselves, they would not smoke, or they would quit smoking, and that the Government has no place in trying to stop them from starting or, indeed, to support them in quitting. That concept completely overlooks the factor that addiction brings in with any drug, but particularly with tobacco. Tobacco kills around 5,000 people every year. That statistic alone actually shows it is the most dangerous drug in New Zealand. I know we could argue about alcohol or about other drugs and the effects that they have on our communities, but in terms of the number of people killed in New Zealand every year, tobacco is the most dangerous drug. Around 80 percent of people want to quit smoking, but they cannot because of their addiction, so we have to forget the argument about personal responsibility.

Most people start smoking when they are too young to make a rational, sensible decision. By the time they have decided that they want to quit, it is too late. They cannot do it on their own, and we here in the New Zealand Parliament need to bring measures into place that not only stop people from taking up smoking in this first place, but also support people to quit smoking when they make that decision—when they take that personal responsibility to get themselves away from tobacco. That is why we on the Opposition benches thoroughly support this inquiry.

The inquiry is a continuation of years of effort. In fact, if people look at Appendix D in this report, they will see a history of the tobacco control measures that have been taken in New Zealand. Various Governments over the years have taken a systematic approach to trying to reduce the normality and acceptability of tobacco smoking in New Zealand. We have done that by taking smoking out of workplaces, bars, and restaurants. We have got rid of tobacco advertising and sponsorship of sport. It seems like the most ridiculous thing to have a drug that kills half the people who use it sponsoring something that is supposed to be a healthy activity, like sport. Over the years those things have occurred, and we have seen the prevalence of smoking, and the number of cigarettes smoked in New Zealand each year, drop. This report says, and it is admirable, that we need to step that effort up.

The report has provided us with a date for an end game. This report says that by 2025, New Zealand should be smoke-free, or as close to being smoke-free as possible. I would like to dwell on that, because most submitters who came to the select committee said the date should be 2020—and for good reason; it is 5 years sooner. Absolutely, we would like to see the smoking rate cut 5 years sooner, but the committee went for the 2025 date simply because we think it is a more viable prospect. In fact, it becomes more incumbent on Parliament and on successive Governments to achieve that situation by 2025. A 2020 target could easily have been dismissed as being ambitious but non-binding, and as not really being a goal that we ever intended to meet. We absolutely intend to meet the goal by 2025, through a range of means: banning tobacco displays; introducing plain packaging; getting rid of the last of the sponsorships through exclusive supply arrangements, which still exist at events like Rhythm and Vines and fashion shows; cutting back on the additives and restricting the additives; being more open with tobacco users about the additives that are actually in tobacco; and having a target for Māori, who are disproportionally affected, so that they too get down to a zero smoking rate, or as close to it as possible, by 2025. That necessitates having a target for Māori, because their smoking rates are so much higher than those of Pākehā.

I was very privileged to be part of the inquiry into the tobacco industry and its consequences for Māori. I thank Hone Harawira for bringing the inquiry to the Māori Affairs Committee. I acknowledge the work of all of the advisers to the committee, especially the specialist adviser, Chris Cunningham, and I also acknowledge a number of people who were very supportive in terms of their expertise: Dr Prudence Stone from the Smokefree Coalition, Moana Tane from Te Hotu Manawa Māori, Shane Bradbrook, and Ben Youdan from Action on Smoking and Health—ASH. These people have spent many years committed to making the changes that are reflected to some degree at least in this report.

I will raise two issues. The first is about the industry and the second is about wāhine Māori and their tamariki.

At the moment most of our approach to tobacco has been to control smokers and to support the industry—of that there is no doubt. We must turn that round. We must control the industry and support smokers to quit. We must not underestimate the power of these corporations and the efforts they will go to to protect their profits while our whānau die from their poisons. Just this week my colleague Dr Russel Norman revealed that the multinational tobacco company Philip Morris is using trade agreements to try to stop Governments from introducing anti-smoking measures in their countries. Philip Morris is targeting New Zealand’s Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which are under way right now, to ensure that Philip Morris will be able to sue the New Zealand Government if it attempts to introduce controls on packaging or controls like the graphic warnings that are on our packets, or to introduce plain packaging, for example. Philip Morris argues that plain packaging of cigarettes is an expropriation of its property right. Philip Morris wants to be able to sue the New Zealand Government in some international tribunal somewhere around the world in order to protect its investment.

It is not an empty threat, because right now Philip Morris is taking action against Uruguay’s proposed laws requiring 80 percent of cigarette packaging to carry graphic warnings—just like the ones pictured in this document—against smoking. The World Bank will decide whether Uruguay will have to pay compensation to Philip Morris if it does that. It could mean that Uruguayan people will have to pay compensation to Philip Morris if they want to use their own laws to protect themselves from the harm that tobacco causes.

Members should take note: this report and all the work that has gone into it will be redundant unless we can control this powerful industry, which is selling a dangerous drug that kills 600 Māori every year—men, women, and their babies. Wāhine Māori suffer significantly from the effects of smoking. They have the highest mortality rate from lung cancer in the world, and they suffer from other diseases associated with smoking, like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and cervical cancer. The harm to wāhine Māori from smoking is painfully evidenced through the loss of their pēpi, their babies, from sudden infant death syndrome—SIDS. The number of Māori babies who died from sudden infant death syndrome during 2003-07 was 202, and these babies made up 62 percent of all the sudden infant death syndrome deaths in that period. It is reported that 46 percent of Māori deaths from sudden infant death syndrome is attributed to smoking. We must focus on protecting the 65,000 Māori women who are of childbearing age who smoke. If Māori women are helped to give up smoking, their babies will have a much healthier start in life and it will help to prevent deaths from sudden infant death syndrome. Their babies will grow up in smoke-free homes and smoke-free cars. It will help to address the issue of young Māori girls who smoke during pregnancy. About 45 percent of wāhine are still smoking when they register with a lead maternity carer, at about 14 to 18 weeks of pregnancy. Their whānau will be helped by having more income available. We will have Māori women growing old enough to be our kuia.

It is Māori women who smoke the most and who are at the most threat from the industry that peddles this drug, which kills them. They need the help the most. Our future literally depends on it.

Kia ora tātou katoa e te Whare. I will dedicate this short speech to some very special people: Hūhana Mihinui, who filed the Waitangi Tribunal claim to eliminate smoking amongst Māori; to Māori Marsden, Ngāi Takoto elder, rangatira, tohunga, mentor, and orator, whose death from smoking made me so angry that I gave up on the day he died; and to my father, John Puriri Harawira, a good man and a very good father, who was also killed by the tobacco industry and who, even though he was hooked up to an oxygen tank, was unable to shake free from the addiction that has tortured Māoridom for generations. They have all passed on, of course, but their lives, their energy, and their loss to us have all been a constant spur to me in this crusade against the death and destruction inflicted upon this wonderful country of ours by those murdering pokokōhua we call the tobacco industry.

But today I also take this opportunity to thank many people for their help during the inquiry into the impacts of tobacco on Māori, and all those good people in the tobacco control sector for their commitment to a smoke-free nation, for all their support during the hearings, and for their ongoing work to address the impact of tobacco in communities across Aotearoa. In particular, I thank this small group: Ben Youdan, Prudence Stone, and, most especially, Mary Wilson and Shane Bradbrook, who were always on hand with the statistics, the arguments, the energy, and the passion during the nights when I felt like giving up.

To my colleagues on the Māori Affairs Committee—Simon Bridges, Paul Quinn, Kelvin Davis, Parekura Horomia, Mita Ririnui, the occasional Iain Lees-Galloway, the more occasional but always controversial and positive Metiria Turei, and, of course, our esteemed chairman, the Hon Tau Henare—I offer my thanks for a memorable journey and for a report that is already being cited in health ministries around the world.

I thank my caucus colleagues, Rahui Katene and Te Ururoa Flavell, for covering for me during the months our committee was out on the road and for always being positive and supportive of the work we were doing. I thank my co-leaders, Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples, who thought I was a bit wacky for turning a health issue into a Māori initiative so that we could get traction on something that health select committees had refused to deal with for decades, and for bothering to take up the proposal with the National Government.

I also thank the Prime Minister, John Key, and his deputy, Bill English, for agreeing to have this inquiry go to the Māori Affairs Committee when many seasoned politicians thought that it did not stand a Māori’s chance in Parliament of going anywhere. I offer my thanks to you all, but the job ain’t done yet, not by a long shot. Tariana Turia, the “Minister for Tobacco Control”, caught everyone on the hop with her bill to raise taxes on cigarettes, but the debate in the House showed that 95 percent of all MPs from all parties supported the elimination of smoking in Aotearoa. The response from smokers shows that every effort we take in this House to reduce this carnage will be met with a positive reaction from the wider public. Tariana’s courage in driving that bill through the House is a measure of her strength and commitment to this task. Now, following on from the report of the Māori Affairs Committee inquiry into the impacts of tobacco on Māori, Tariana has stepped up again with her next bill, to ban the display of tobacco in shops across the country, which I understand is coming before this House tomorrow.

I call on us all—MPs and the general public—to keep up the enthusiasm, to keep the letters coming in, to keep the pressure on, and to keep the support pumping for what will be an even harder road ahead, because there are battles that we must fight in this war, and war it is. Indeed, if any country killed 5,000 Kiwis in any one year, then we would be at war with it before I could finish this speech, but that is how many people are killed by this industry every single year. Given the billions of dollars that it takes out of this country annually, I guarantee members that it is girding for war itself.

To the Māori Party, for having the vision to take up this challenge, I am most especially grateful. This inquiry, the tax bill, the bill to ban displays, and other measures that I know are being worked on but which I am not at liberty to disclose, are all specifically down to the passion, the desire, the commitment, and the determination of the Māori Party to take the first steps along the road to making this country truly smoke-free and to administer with the courage to walk the talk by putting up the legislation to make that a reality. Happy are those who dream dreams and who are prepared to pay the price to make those dreams come true. Kia ora tātou katoa.

A recurring theme that the Māori Affairs Committee heard during our inquiry into the effect of tobacco on Māori was the fact that the tobacco industry is a killer of whakapapa. I can attest to that from a personal point of view. In the late 1990s my uncle J J Johnson, a cousin of my grandmother, and my uncle Hau Davis, the brother of my grandfather, both passed away within weeks of each other, both from lung cancer, and both in their early 70s. I hold the tobacco industry to account for their deaths. The act of putting a cigarette between their lips in their mid-60s was the result of a decision that they made when they were children.

The select committee heard that the tobacco industry targets the young, the brown, and the stupid. I can attest that my uncles were both very young when they started smoking, and that they were brown, but those gentlemen were by no means stupid. We heard how nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on earth, and when a child is in the grip of nicotine, that child cannot resist it, and it lives with them and kills them in the end. So I hold the tobacco industry accountable not only for the deaths of my two uncles and other relations who have died as a result of cigarettes and tobacco but also for the 600 Māori deaths a year and the 5,000 New Zealanders who die each year as a result of the tobacco industry. That is 50,000 New Zealanders who have died in the past decade as a result of the tobacco industry. This report should send a message to the tobacco industry that its days of ramming its noxious product into the lungs of our people are coming to an end.

One of the most profound submissions that I heard during this tobacco inquiry was from a woman in her 50s or 60s in hospital dying of a tobacco-related illness. With her, watching her die in those agonising moments, were her children and her grandchildren. Because the stress of watching their mother and grandmother was so great, every 20 minutes or half an hour they actually had to leave the hospital room, go outside, and have a cigarette. Do members see the irony in the fact that in order to alleviate the stress, the pain, and the tension of watching their mother and grandmother die, this family had to partake of the very substance that put her in the hospital in the first place?

Worse than that, when that family went out to have their cigarette, they sat on a hospital bench clearly labelled “Auahi Kore”, which means that no smoking is allowed. Even worse than that, adjacent to that area was a maternity annexe. We heard how the children and the grandchildren of that woman would be joined by pregnant mothers to have a cigarette on that smoke-free park bench in the hospital grounds. There we have it—the way the tobacco industry has captured people from one end of the spectrum, unborn children, right through the generations from children and grandchildren up to the dying grandmother up in the hospital ward. We are not talking here about the circle of life; we are talking about the circle of death. The tobacco industry is responsible for it.

We heard how the tobacco industry framed its product to target children, and how if somebody was to walk into a supermarket, a dairy, or a service station they would see behind the teller the power wall display of cigarettes and tobacco products. Around that power wall of tobacco products will be lollies, chips, and all the sorts of things that capture children’s attention and their eye. That is the way that these murdering bastards capture kids from the time that they are 5 or 6. They are held in the grip of the tobacco industry right through until they die, just like that woman in the hospital bed surrounded by her family.

It is time that this Parliament took hold of the recommendations in this report and sent a message clearly to the tobacco industry that its days are numbered in New Zealand.

I will start by congratulating National’s coalition partner the Māori Party. I think the inquiry into the tobacco industry is a wonderful example of how in step this Government is with its partners on all issues and how all the partners work together. Hone Harawira was able to discuss progressing this matter with the chairman of the Māori Affairs Committee, the Hon Tau Henare, and then to bring it to the committee as an issue of great concern to both Māori and the general populace as a whole. On reflection, one has to be astounded that an inquiry of this level into the tobacco industry has not previously occurred. I place on record my warmest acknowledgments of the leadership shown by Hone Harawira and the Māori Party, and also the leadership shown by Tau Henare as the chairman of the committee.

I also place on record my appreciation and acknowledgment of the collegial way in which the committee committed to progressing the inquiry. We were committed to reaching, if at all possible, a set of unanimous recommendations. Although we argued at the edges, there is no doubt that we were able to achieve what we set out to do, which was to bring to the House a unanimously agreed set of recommendations. Those recommendations, as has already been mentioned in a couple of speeches, brought a new approach to this issue by focusing on the industry, as opposed to accepting the industry and trying to reduce the demand side. Instead, the focus was on the supply side and how it could be dealt with. We put the problem back to the industry, which is, in effect, driving this terrible scourge. The recommendations reflect the fact that the industry drives this issue.

Figures have already been mentioned. There is a very high rate of Māori smokers, at 45 percent, and the rate of Māori women who smoke is over 50 percent. When we consider the Māori rate of 45 percent against the non-Māori rate of 21 percent, we see there is a huge gulf and it has to be addressed by future Governments. In particular, this Government has already set about dealing with those issues under the leadership of the Minister responsible for tobacco control, the Hon Tariana Turia. I congratulate her on having already taken the initiative to raise the price of cigarettes over the next 3 years. Part of the problem is that it is estimated that there currently are about 620,000 smokers, and it would take 30 years and over half a billion dollars to get all those people to quit. The real problem is that that does not deal with new smokers who pick up the habit at a very early age. Thank you.

I too congratulate the Māori Affairs Committee on its comprehensive and profound report. I will add to other comments made by previous speakers about smoking. I used to smoke. I started smoking when I was 16 years of age and I stopped when I was 30. I puffed away while I was a medical student and I puffed away while I was a house surgeon. Mostly I puffed away in secret, in front of people who were dying of lung cancer and people who had emphysema. Smoking is a disgusting habit and it is a terrible, terrible addiction. I am very pleased that the Government is putting $57 million into tobacco cessation products because, basically, people who smoke are addicts and they need help getting off their addiction, which is tobacco.

Tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in New Zealand. It is directly linked to 5,000 deaths each year. Four hundred of these deaths are attributed to second-hand smoke. On average, non-smokers live 15 years longer than long-term smokers. Thirteen New Zealanders die every day from smoking; it is an astonishing statistic. Tobacco use is linked to many diseases: lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease such as emphysema or chronic bronchitis, and other cancers such as cancer of the mouth, pharynx, and oesophagus.

The social costs of smoking are very difficult to estimate, but up to 62,000 life years are lost to tobacco-related premature death, which is just tragic, and 19,000 quality-adjusted life years are lost to tobacco-related illnesses. The cost is profound personally, socially, and to the country. It is estimated by the Ministry of Health that of our total health budget of about $12 billion, about $2 billion can be attributed to the cost to the health system of smoking.

For Māori the impact of tobacco is significant and quite disproportionate. For the period 2000 to 2004, lung cancers were responsible for over 31 percent of Māori cancer deaths compared with 17 percent for non-Māori cancer deaths. Cardiovascular disease death rates were two times higher for Māori than non-Māori during the same period. Deaths due to respiratory disease were three times more frequent in Māori than non-Māori.

Smoking and tobacco use in New Zealand is a focus for the Government. One of the six current health targets is to provide “Better help for smokers to quit”. The targets for the current year state: “80 percent of hospitalised smokers will be provided with advice and help to quit by July 2010; 90 percent by July 2011; and 95 percent by July 2012.” Similar targets for primary care will also be introduced from this year on.

We heard an astonishing figure at the select committee: it takes about 14 attempts for one person to give up smoking. That is a huge number of attempts. With tobacco cessation products that figure goes down by half or possibly more. It is a terribly hard addiction to break. The triggers include tackling people in hospital while they are a captive audience in an in-patient setting, asking about their smoking habits, and giving them advice. Even though they may not take that advice, it is just one trigger or prompt to add on to the other prompts. Eventually I am sure that person will give up. Every bit helps, and tackling smokers while they are hospitalised is one way to get to smokers, to try to convince them that it is a good idea to stop, and to give them the help they need. As I said, it is a terrible addiction. There are now many varieties of tobacco cessation products. There are patches, gum, drugs, and chemical-type medicines that can be taken. They all work in different ways to help break the addiction cycle.

Early this year the Government increased the excise tax on tobacco in an effort to reduce the number of smokers and to dissuade young people from starting to smoke, and that is a step in the right direction. All told, the excise has gone up almost 33 percent, or it will do by the time it is implemented in the next few years.

The report that the Māori Affairs Committee came out with primarily looks at innovative changes to New Zealand’s tobacco control programme. It also sets out the broad steps we need to take to achieve the ultimate goal of being a smoke-free New Zealand by 2025. I congratulate the Māori Affairs Committee on this report. Thank you.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on the Māori Affairs Committee’s report on the Inquiry into the tobacco industry in Aotearoa and the consequences of tobacco use for Maori. I, too, would like to offer my congratulations to Hone Harawira and the Māori Affairs Committee on the terrific work it has done in bringing this hugely important issue to the attention of the House.

Firstly, I point out that tobacco was very much part of New Zealand’s culture right up until the 1960s. In fact, it was very much part of the culture of the Western World right up until the 1960s. Tobacco was more or less prescribed by doctors, who smoked heavily themselves, and, of course, it was given to all the members of the armed forces, who became addicted. In the decades since then we have witnessed the awful suffering that those people went through as they died from lung cancer, throat cancer, lip cancer, etc. It was not until about the 1960s that Sir Richard Doll discovered the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. It was a very detailed and elegant piece of epidemiological work that took a great deal of time to finally prove, and, of course, it was met with great opposition by the tobacco industry.

That is why this particular report is so important: because it is an inquiry into the tobacco industry, particularly in Aotearoa, where Māori are dealt such a huge blow in terms of both mortality rates and morbidity rates that are far greater than those of the rest of the population. Nevertheless, I felt that Hone Harawira was particularly controversial when he suggested that the Health Committee had failed to do anything over the decades. After all, I must acknowledge that the last Labour Government brought in the Smoke-free Environments Act, which was extremely positive, and which I personally voted for because I felt it was an important public health preventive initiative.

One must say that about only 15 years ago in New Zealand our buses, aeroplanes, and restaurants were full of smoke, and whether or not people smoked, they breathed in second-hand smoke and were suffering in their thousands. The smoke-free environments legislation has been particularly useful, but it was preceded by a hang of a lot of work by a great many people, including Action on Smoking and Health New Zealand, led by Dr Laugesen, who has worked tirelessly in this area, both internationally and nationally, for years.

I also think Professor Beaglehole should be mentioned for his extraordinary work on the epidemiology of this problem throughout New Zealand. As an obstetrician, I have, of course, been deeply concerned that thousands of cohorts of New Zealand babies have been condemned in the womb—condemned in the womb—to being stunted in growth and, probably, also stunted in their intellectual opportunities later in life.

There is no doubt that this inquiry is particularly timely. It will lead to legislation, which I understand will be introduced tomorrow, that will bring us one step further in the battle to achieve an essentially smoke-free Aotearoa.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

I am really pleased to take a call in this debate. Before I begin, I congratulate sincerely Hone Harawira and the Māori Party on getting this inquiry out into the open.

I was very proud to be the sponsor of the Smoke-free Environments (Enhanced Protection) Amendment Bill, which I picked up from Tukoroirangi Morgan, who started this journey in 1990. I look around the House tonight. In 1990 the Smoke-free Environments Bill was first put into the House. I picked up responsibility for the Smoke-free Environments (Enhanced Protection) Amendment Bill when I came into Parliament, in 1999. So it has been a long journey. It was 13 years after the enactment of the Smoke-free Environments Act when that bill, by then renamed the Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill, was passed. In the House tonight I can see about four members who were there at that time, and who remember that journey and the very, very bitter debate on that bill. So this inquiry is the next step on a long journey towards reaching the goal of halving the prevalence of smoking in New Zealand by 2015.

I thought some members would be really interested to know that in 2003, when we passed the Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill, the environment in the House was very bad. I had death threats, I had an anthrax-like substance that turned out to be talcum powder delivered to my office, I had protection, and I was considered to be the loony left. ACT and Rodney Hide came into the House and called us feminazis who were trying to socially engineer the environment about smoking in New Zealand at the time. This newspaper headline indicates the sort of thing that we went through. It was very ugly. Every night I would go home and think I could not carry on with it. The measure was right, and it was logical, but the level of animosity and hatred in the House was so high that I was not sure I could go through with it. One night, after 5 hours in the chair, I went home and my son, who is of Māori ancestry, said I did not look very good. I said to him that the Smoke-free Environments Amendment Bill was destroying me personally, even though as a nurse and a midwife I knew we were doing the right thing about the prevalence of smoking. He told me to keep going and that it was the best thing I had ever done. He said he was very proud of me, and so were all of his colleagues.

Now let us look at New Zealand today. I want us to move on from 2003, when only two National MPs at the time supported that absolutely hallmark legislation to change the whole environment for New Zealand regarding how we look at the effects of second-hand smoking. Through the work of the Māori Affairs Committee and of Hone Harawira, we are now grappling with the next stage of a journey to recognise that we have to deal with smoking in New Zealand. I did believe—and I always said this then—that smoking was a public health issue, and that it would require the use of a variety of tools to change societal attitudes. Overnight in 2004, New Zealand society changed. People just went smoke-free in cafes, bars, and workplaces. We look back now at what happened six years ago, and we cannot believe the hatred and animosity towards what was right at the time for legislators to do—that brave thing.

So my congratulations go to Hone Harawira and also to Tariana Turia on leading the charge to get this inquiry heard. Many requests for inquiries do not see the light of day. Those members won, with their coalition partner National. This inquiry has given us a lot of tools and recommendations for the Government to consider. I know that Tariana will now bring a bill to the House. I hope it is a bill with teeth, because the next step has to be just as brave as the Smoke Free Environments Amendment Bill was. I see that there are recommendations in this report to establish a tobacco control authority. I think that is good, though it is bureaucracy again. The real steps are in the recommendation to look at stopping children from starting to smoke and helping people to quit smoking. That is where we can nip smoking in the bud. There are many schoolchildren—9-year-olds—who are addicted to tobacco. If we do not put one-to-one programmes beside those kids, to make them realise that tobacco is an addictive substance, their lives will never change.

Motion agreed to.