Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Associate Minister of Health: I move, That the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

I’d like to thank the Health Committee for their work and consideration of this bill. I’m also extremely grateful to the people who submitted on this bill, especially whānau, tamariki, and rangatahi. Their voices were essential for the consideration of this bill, as it is primarily designed to protect our children and tamariki from the harmful effects of second-hand smoke.

Too many of our whānau, tamariki, and rangatahi are exposed to second-hand smoke in vehicles they travel in. Other jurisdictions like Australia, most Canadian provinces, and the United Kingdom have already put in place legislation to prohibit smoking in vehicles with children, and now it’s our turn to do the right thing for our children. We have a duty under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to enact legislation like this.

This bill will amend the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990 to make it an offence to smoke in a motor vehicle carrying anyone under 18 years old. Compliance and enforcement efforts will first and foremost be focused on public education and changing social norms. While this bill does introduce a new offence and infringement fee, I’d like to emphasise that police will use their discretion over whether to issue a fee, give a warning, or provide information about stop-smoking cessation services available in our communities.

The Health Committee received 147 written submissions and heard 19 oral submissions. The vast majority were overwhelmingly in support of the bill and its intent. Most submitters believe this bill will protect whānau, tamariki, and rangatahi from the dangers of second-hand smoke. During the process of consideration by the committee, submitters raised suggestions about how the bill could be improved. However, the committee was unable to recommend any amendments because of the relatively narrow focus of the bill, which, as I have said, is primarily about protecting our children from second-hand smoke in cars.

I would briefly like to outline some of the suggestions made by the submitters. Firstly, submitters were concerned that vaping wasn’t included in the scope of this bill, especially as we do not know the long-term effects of second-hand vaping. We share these concerns, which is why another bill will be introduced shortly that will prohibit both vaping and smokeless tobacco products—for example, heat-not-burn products—in all smoke-free areas, including vehicles.

Secondly, submitters argued against the bill’s exemptions for vehicles which are stationary or used as a dwelling. This exemption makes it permissible for an adult to smoke in a vehicle with a child if the vehicle is stationary or used as a dwelling. People were unhappy with the idea that whānau, tamariki, and rangatahi living in vehicles, including caravans and motorhomes, would not receive the same protection as those who were travelling in vehicles. The committee listened to those concerns and understood them, but they could not recommend any amendments to the bill as the Smoke-free Environments Act already treats public and private spaces like homes very differently. The bill does not take away a person’s right to smoke in their own homes. We strongly urge anyone that is inclined to smoke in a car to step outside of the vehicle so that children are not forced to breathe in second-hand smoke.

The Opposition signalled in the Health Committee report on the bill that they would be proposing an amendment to the bill in the committee of the whole House stage to remove this exemption, meaning that police would be able to fine people for smoking in their motorhomes and caravans. I find this suggestion by the Opposition to be uncharacteristic of a party which has repeatedly voted against extending smoke-free provisions. They voted against a ban on smoking in workplaces, they voted against banning tobacco advertising, and almost all of them voted against a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, but now they want a wide ban that includes people who choose to live in a motorhome from smoking in their own private dwelling. While we might disagree on this matter, I think we can all agree that not one single member of this House is supportive of people being forced to live in vehicles.

Finally, most submitters thought the 18-month lead-in period was too long, and some committee members agreed. The committee understands that submitters have been waiting a long time for this bill, and they want action as soon as possible. They have the best interests of children at heart, and so do we, but there needs to be an effective transition between Royal assent and when the offences come into force, and we need to bring everyone along with us. The Ministry of Health needs time to educate the public about the changes being made to the law and for the Health Promotion Agency to develop and deliver an education campaign that will run before the offences come into force. We also need to be practical. Police have told the committee they need a minimum of 12 months, or perhaps even longer, to make sure the new offence can be included in their training programmes and IT systems. The 18 months is needed to make sure everything works before the bill becomes enforceable.

This Government is committed to making New Zealand the best place in the world to be a child. This bill is part of our duty of care for the most vulnerable—our children—and for that reason, I commend this bill to the House.

The National Party supported this bill at first reading, and it did so primarily because of its intention to keep children safe, but despite misgivings that at least I had and expressed in the first reading about the degree to which the State becomes a player in the sovereign right of a family to determine decisions for itself, regardless of whether those decisions are good or bad. Now, the Minister introducing this bill at second reading was quick to remind the House that the National Party has opposed legislation around smoking in the past, which is a very interesting reflection on the fact that any decision the National Party has made in past years, decades, centuries is never forgotten, but decisions made by previous Labour Governments and Oppositions are never remembered, and I’m going to come back to that.

We were looking forward to and I think we benefited from the submissions to the Health Committee by a number of submitters overwhelmingly, as the Minister has said, in favour of the bill’s passage, but there were a number of areas that I think warranted serious consideration. While the committee may have done that, the Minister and, indeed, Cabinet were not prepared, and the officials could not recommend a single amendment to a bill that we thought had some flaws, and the National Party remains of that view.

I’ll start with the issue of smoking when the vehicle is used as a dwelling. The Minister, I believe, said that it was “stationary or used as a dwelling”, and that’s not what the bill says. The bill actually says that the vehicle needs to be stationary and used as a dwelling. Otherwise, anytime the car was stopped, the bill would not apply, and, indeed, I think that was probably just an error in the speech-writing. But it still strikes me as absolutely ludicrous and a reflection on the failure of the Government to fix what they saw as a problem of homelessness and people living in cars, to the point where they know that such dwellings are going to be used into the future and they are not prepared to extend this bill to exclude those situations. We think that’s a mistake, and we will be introducing an amendment to this bill in the committee of the whole House deleting that provision. It is ridiculous, it is ludicrous, and it should not be in law. Indeed, what we are doing is proposing to Government that it removes its admission of failure—failure to fix the issue of homelessness and living in cars.

Now, I want to also move to the issue that is beyond the scope of this bill, that, as the Minister said, was the subject of quite a bit of the submissions in the select committee, and that was the issue of extending this legislation to include what’s, effectively, the modern ingestion of nicotine: vaping and heat-not-burn products. We heard some fantastic submissions from young people who shared their experience of the creeping prevalence of the use of vaping products by our young. Indeed, the anecdotes were disconcerting to the point where the committee became concerned at the failure of the Government to meet its own set timetable to introduce a regulatory framework for these products—not even in cars, but just as an amendment to the Smoke-free Environments Act. What we heard from those young people was that despite the research and the surveys that people are relying on that say the incidence and prevalence of the use of these products by our young is low, actually, the anecdotes don’t stack up. But I think that makes sense, because I don’t think, even in a survey that might be anonymous, that young people would admit to the fact that they are regularly using these devices.

Now, I’m ambivalent about whether or not this bill be amended to include vaping, but I am much, much more concerned at the complete absence of any regulatory controls on these devices. We had a court case, which may now be three years old, that said, actually, that the Smoke-free Environments Act doesn’t apply to these vaping products, and it should. It’s not a difficult policy decision or conundrum to be solved. The Associate Minister of Health has been lead-footed on this. I implore the Government to get on and get that bill before this House.

Now, I find it, also, incredibly ironic and another concern that we have with this bill, and that is the use of police resources to police this process. Isn’t it outrageous that we have a Government that says, in respect of this, it becomes law and we rely on police to use their discretion about their position of the law and the upholding of the law, but in respect of the Misuse of Drugs Act, an amendment to that Act was passed that directed police not to prosecute for possession and ingestion of any illicit substance—from marijuana to heroin and all the bits in between—when it is not in the public interest. So they direct the police not to prosecute, but invite the police to exercise their discretion on smoking in cars, for goodness’ sake!

The Minister himself has said that the reason that the bill is not going to become effective sooner than 18 months after Royal assent is because the police need time to upgrade their systems to ensure that infringements and breaches of this law can be recorded in their police database. That is a completely incongruous situation if the police are able and prepared and willing to use their discretion—and I encourage them to do that—that the bill is going to be held up in its enactment while they change their IT systems so that they can do the opposite. It just underscores what a muddle this bill is and how inconsistent the Government is on the direction or discretion of the police.

So I am disappointed that not a single change was made to this bill, and it does cause us some concern. But, on balance, we continue to remain of the view that this will, at the margins, benefit our young by encouraging people not to smoke in very close proximity to them. The evidence of the health harms is unequivocal; the evidence of the benefit of this amendment is actually quite equivocal. International studies have shown that there is some benefit but that those benefits can take several years to be apparent—certainly outside the framework of the Government’s goal for this country to be smoke-free by 2025, and, frankly, that lead-footedness is going to ensure that we fail in that goal.

So I look forward to the committee of the whole House because I think there are some technical aspects of this bill that we should debate, that the National Party will be putting amendments up to provide sensible, straightforward improvements to this bill in the interests of the health of our young. I encourage the Government to be open-minded about that because, ultimately, this House is about making good laws, effective laws, evidence-based laws that will look after and protect and improve the health of our young. With that, on balance, the National Party will be supporting this bill at second reading.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. It was my absolute pleasure as the chair of the Health Committee to be involved in the deliberations on the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. The reason I enjoyed that process so much is because a group in Northland led by the Cancer Society, young people, and Māori who are passionate about auahi kore petitioned this Parliament. They petitioned this Parliament because they saw through their own evidence that a lot of the adults in the Northland community were smoking in cars with children. And that’s where this bill came from.

I implore colleagues to read the select committee report. In highlighting the 147 written submissions and the 19 oral submissions, I want to read a list of groups that incorporated the voices of our children. So in addition to Cancer Society Northland, it was Wellington community justice, Holistic Action Sustainable Through All Generations, Hāpai te Hauora Māori public health, Empower Tangata Trust, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Meremere holiday programme, Invercargill City Youth Council, and the students of Wainuiomata Intermediate School.

So this bill—if you ever were to look at one which puts children at the centre of a piece of legislation that actually listens to the voices of children, it is this particular piece of legislation. Underlying what they told us was—I used that in the select committee—#wecantbreathe and #pleaseprotectus, and it was also #pleasehelpourparents: please help those adults in our world that smoke, that are finding it difficult, that need resources, they need a bit of tautoko. Which is why, to be quite frank, the 18 months allows the community through public health promotion initiatives to change behaviour before we actually need the enforcement by the police.

So there are no changes to this piece of legislation; that is a truism. There were a whole lot of other things discussed, including the differential between what is public space and what is a private space, and us being very clear in the smoke-free environments bill that we would never infringe on people’s private spaces. We can get into the debates about, you know, the scenario that colleague Michael Woodhouse brought up, and the National Party can sell its own Supplementary Order Paper, but the reality is we need to pass this bill. We need this done urgently, and so I commend this bill to the House. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak to this in the second reading of the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill.

Clearly, the goal of this bill is to protect children from second-hand smoke. What we know we already sort of knew going into the select committee, but what was reaffirmed to us through the select committee process was that the benefits here are clearly for young children and clearly for Māori in deprived areas. They seem to get disproportionate benefit. I think one of the submissions, particularly—from the Auckland Regional Public Health Service—helped quantify exactly what those benefits to avoiding second-hand smoking for children will be. They said that for under-16-year-olds, 15,000 children with asthma attacks will be prevented. They said for under-two-year-olds, 500, roughly, will be spared from being admitted with chest infections.

Again, for under-two-year-olds, 15,000 glue ear operations will be prevented. I hadn’t really sort of thought on it before as to that relationship. I knew the relationship existed between smoking and glue ear; not quite sure around the physiology. I mean, how does that work? So I sort of tried to look at it over the past few days. I’m not much clearer other than it seems to be that the cigarette smoke irritates the Eustachian tube, closes it off, pulls the eardrum in, and you get glue building up behind the tympanic membrane, which is sort of the best conclusion I could get to. So that sort of makes sense, and that substantiates the data showing that there is a relationship there.

If we look at these submitters to the select committee, there were 120 submissions: 19 of them were oral submissions, 95 percent were in favour of the bill, and the other 5 percent were more just saying “We think education is a better solution.” Submitters had six groups of concerns. Some didn’t understand the bill, and you always get that in select committees, so there was a clarification task to be done.

A number of submitters wanted vaping to be included in this bill and thought it was appropriate. If I could read here from the departmental report from officials addressing this, it says “The Smoke-free Environments (Vaping) Amendment Bill,”—and this is the departmental report from September 2019, September last year—“will be introduced shortly in the next few weeks,”. Wow, September 2019, and officials are telling us it’ll be introduced in the next few weeks. Goodness, that’s a long few weeks. That’s a lot of time between drinks before that’s happened, yet that was the belief that officials were telling us, and that was the evidence that we proceeded through the select committee.

💬 Hon Maggie Barry: Still no date.

Still no date.

The third of the six concerns that submitters had was the exemption for young people to smoke in a car. Officials again pointed to clause 37, where they said “A person under the age of 18 who is smoking in the motor vehicle, either on their own or while people over the age of 18 are in the vehicle, is not committing an offence under [this] Bill.”—it’s this next line from officials—“The purpose of the Bill is the protection of young people from second-hand smoke, not direct smoking.” When would we go past the opportunity not to offer protection and advice to children from direct smoking? Let me read that again: “The purpose of the Bill is the protection of young people from second-hand smoke, not direct smoking.”

I think this bill is a good example of lost opportunities. We seem to have lost the opportunity around vaping. Here we are, we are losing the opportunity to address and help young people directly who are smoking. In officials’ own words, it’s a lost opportunity.

The fourth concern that submitters had, as my colleague the Hon Michael Woodhouse has discussed, was the issue of stationary vehicles being considered a dwelling and being able to smoke as if it was a private dwelling in that vehicle. We’ve got issues with that. We’re going to raise that as a Supplementary Order Paper in the committee of the whole House. So we think that needs another go around. It just does not make sense.

The fifth was reducing the lead-in time, an 18-month lead-in time. Again, substantively, that is for the IT requirements for police to be able to prosecute, if they need to, those who are caught. Wow, what a resource this is going to be for police. As, again, Michael Woodhouse said, how do we align that with the hands-off approach under the Misuse of Drugs Act? We’ll exercise discretion, but, oh no, no, we’re going to prosecute and need 18 months for police resources to figure out an IT system that lets us prosecute those who are smoking in vehicles. That also doesn’t make sense.

The sixth was submitters thought that enforcement shouldn’t be punitive, that there needs to be some reflection around how we might change behaviour, but that it shouldn’t substantially be punitive.

So there were these six things that submitters—six themes, if you like—talked to in this bill. They were thoughtful, and I acknowledge what Louisa Wall the chairperson was saying. I think some of the early start-off to this was the young folks under the help of the Cancer Society in Northland, who brought down a petition. It was on a board, because I recall getting it at Whangarei Airport. They said, “Shane, can you take this down and give it to either John Key or Bill English?”, so I recall doing that. That would’ve been maybe 2015, I’m guessing—there or thereabouts. Right from then to now, the young folks in Whangārei have sort of stayed in this mode, and it still beats for them.

Look, it beats for all of us too, and that’s why we’re supporting it. But we think there’s some parts here that can redress these lost opportunities, and we think we should take that ability that we have to fix it and get it right. There’s a few things here we can do to make it better. So, with that, we’re happy to support this through to the committee of the whole House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise and take my call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. It was a pleasure to sit on the Health Committee as we took a good look at this piece of legislation through that process.

I’d just like to, really, point out that this bill is very narrow in its focus because it is all about protecting children, and that is the sum total about this bill. It is sensible and practical and very pragmatic to take care of our tamariki. The first and foremost thing we must do is to change the social norm around smoking in vehicles, particularly when there are children and those under 18 years of age in that vehicle. So we are very pleased to be able to support this bill. One hundred and forty-seven written submissions were presented to the committee, 19 oral submissions were heard, and, of those, most were overwhelmingly supportive of this bill.

A couple of things that struck me through that process in select committee were that when we put our focus on children, children absolutely add value to our thinking. They enhance our policy development. So it was an absolute pleasure to hear from all of the rangatahi, all of those that came to speak to us in the committee. We learnt about how they want to ensure that any young people don’t sit in cars and suck in that second-hand smoke. We also heard that winding down the window is not a clear air solution. So literally stubbing out those cigarettes and not lighting up in the first place in a car is ideal if there are children in it.

We also heard about their concerns about vaping. I haven’t really come across a lot of vaping, and it was interesting to hear from them how so many young people are vaping and it’s all about the biggest cloud you can create. So they had concerns and actually wanted to have vaping included in this legislation.

All in all, really, it is a very narrow bill which is all about taking care of the health and wellbeing of our children, because when they’re in a car and an adult or a person is smoking, they do not have a choice. This now gives them that choice. I commend the bill to the House.

It’s a pleasure to rise and take a call on this bill. Just to pick up where the previous speaker, Jenny Marcroft, left off, I think there’s a lot of the purpose of the bill and the goals of this bill that we all agree on. We all want to make sure that our most vulnerable Kiwis, being our young Kiwis, are protected, and so I don’t think we’re disagreeing on that. We’re not even disagreeing on supporting the bill. We are, in fact, supporting this bill through to the committee of the whole House stage, but we want to make sure that this bill has the maximum impact that it could possibly have.

I don’t sit on the Health Committee, but I’ve had a chance to digest some of the key themes. I want to just pick up on, I think, a really important aspect from the select committee, which was around vaping, because I can’t understand why we’re advancing this bill to protect our young children, yet we’re not making any substantial changes in the area of vaping—particularly as it relates to, of course, protecting our young New Zealanders. There are no changes that come from select committee to this bill in the area of vaping, and this Government has had many chances and a lot of time.

You know, for the last two years we’ve had calls on this Government to introduce some framework around vaping that would regulate it and protect our most vulnerable New Zealanders, our young children, from accessing and getting hands on these products, but this Government hasn’t given us a date on, in fact, where we’re at with that vaping legislation. They could have told us tonight; they were supposed to tell us a few weeks or so after September. Well, we’re a few weeks after September of 2019. So we’re failing to take action on what I think, and what the select committee submitters think, is a serious issue, which is around vaping and the lack of regulations that there are currently in existence. This is important, because of our goal in New Zealand, which is to be smoke-free by 2025, and vaping is a channel by which we can achieve that goal, but we do not have the clear regulations around that for New Zealand.

So, we’ll be putting up some Supplementary Order Papers around this in the committee of the whole House, but I ask and I call on the Government to act on this issue now. Introduce your legislation around vaping. We’ve even given you a helping hand. There is a member’s bill in the ballot that, effectively, regulates it. It’s from my colleague Nicky Wagner. She’s got a fantastic bill—and I say this earnestly in a non-partisan fashion, right? She’s got a great member’s bill. You could just delete her name and take it as a Government bill, if you like.

💬 Hon Nicky Wagner: I’ll give it to you.

She’ll give it to you. This is such an important issue for New Zealand.

It’s an important issue for my community in Northcote, where I’ve got half a dozen vape shops around my area. They don’t have the certainty of knowing how to go about their business. The people who are using these products don’t have the certainty, and, as a result, the issue of the welfare of our young children in New Zealand is at risk. So I call on the Government to take my colleague’s bill out of the members’ ballot, to call it their own, and to introduce legislation tomorrow for vaping.

So, on balance, we’re supporting this legislation in the House. There are a lot of flaws with this legislation, but I commend this bill to the House.

It’s a pleasure to rise on behalf of the Green Party to support the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. The submissions were largely in favour of the bill. We know that passive smoking, particularly in closed environments, leads to higher mortality rates, particularly from cancer—in other words, passive smoking in motor vehicles carrying children. This bill will save lives.

Given all of that, we commend this bill to the House. We’re looking forward to its rapid passage through the committee of the whole House stage, and on to its hasty conclusion—it’s that simple. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is an interesting bill. There’s no doubt about it, we should not be smoking in cars. If we want to look after our young children’s health—anybody’s health, actually—we shouldn’t be smoking in cars, but it’s unfortunate that we actually have to bring this bill.

It is such an obvious thing to anyone that’s involved in smoking and who has any knowledge at all about the effects of smoking that of course you wouldn’t smoke in your car. It’s a shame that we have to spend time on this, because I think one of the issues about this is how you enforce it. If people are still smoking in their cars when they understand the dangers of doing that for their children, it’s very difficult to enforce that. We have seen around the world other police forces are tending to take a deep breath when they see somebody smoking in their car and to perhaps have a discussion with them, which is a good thing, because anybody who is smoking in their cars with young people is obviously addicted to smoking and really needs help rather than prosecution.

I would like to echo what Dan Bidois said. I would far rather be sitting in this House tonight debating a bill that regulates vaping. We’ve got to the stage where, if we want to achieve Smokefree 2025, we really have to make sure that people have options to give up smoking. What we’ve got left in our community is people who find it really difficult to quit, and there’s very strong communities that find that difficult. We need to give them all the support and all the resource to help them quit. One of those resources is regulating vaping.

Now, the issue that we have with vaping is: how do we get the balance right? We want to encourage anybody who is a smoker to quit, and to use vaping to quit is a good option. For people who haven’t been able to quit any other way, and who’ve tried every other option—they’ve tried abstinence and they’ve tried nicotine patches, they’ve tried every kind of way to give up smoking—vaping often is the answer for them. So we want anybody who smokes now to attempt to vape to quit.

But what we don’t want is young people taking up vaping. We understand that vaping is up to 95 percent less harmful than smoking, but we still don’t want our young people taking it up. If you don’t smoke, you shouldn’t vape. So how do we promote vaping to people who are smokers to help them quit while not encouraging young people to take up vaping?

Actually, it’s interesting. The research that’s come out most recently has said that even though young people do try to vape, very few of them actually continue to do it regularly, particularly on a daily basis. That makes sense. Young people are absolutely wired to take risks—to do things that their elders don’t approve of. So I would far prefer, if it were my children, that they tried vaping than smoking. The key issue here is not to get too frightened about children taking up vaping, because the chances are that if they weren’t vaping, they’d be trying to fag behind the bike sheds. So the key issue here is how do we help people quit smoking by trying vaping and to support them with vaping, and how do we make sure that that balance is right so we don’t encourage young people to vape?

I think if we reflect on what’s happening around the world, we have the UK, which has had vaping for about at least a decade, or maybe 12 years. They’ve had good, strong regulations around that and they don’t seem to have had any problems, whereas we look at places like the US, which had very little regulation, and they’ve got all sorts of issues there and problems that have come because there are no controls.

Now, my bill, which I developed when I was the Associate Minister of Health, and I do have to point out that back in 2017—it seems a long time ago now; about May 2017—the National Cabinet passed a paper that endeavoured to produce that bill for Parliament. That bill was written up and it was ready to go. If we’d been in Government, it would have been in the House much earlier than it is today. I took that Cabinet paper. I worked with that Cabinet paper to create a member’s bill which is sitting in the ballot. The people who wrote that Cabinet paper are the same people that are advising the Minister of Health today about vaping.

So I would like to suggest that we should take up that bill, that we should use it, and we should get regulation in New Zealand, because at the moment it’s the wild west. At the moment, young people have got the ability to vape, with no rules around it. If we have clear regulations to make sure that we look after the quality of not only the vaping implements but also the vaping juice, I think we would protect young people, so I ask the Minister to please get some regulations around vaping. I’m very happy for her to use my bill. Thank you.

This is a split call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m delighted to stand and speak in the second reading of the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Bill. I’m going to leave aside vaping and talk about the bill. I do also acknowledge what the member Nicky Wagner is saying. However, we’re talking about a bill that 147 written submissions were gathered for and we had 19 oral submissions. Now, I wasn’t a member at the time that the submissions occurred. However, I was around at the first reading.

One of the things, I guess, that is really important that we all understand about this bill is that it is set up specifically to support the most vulnerable in our country. It’s around those young people who are absolutely unable to make the choice to get mum or dad or someone else in the car to stop smoking. So this bill is a very simple, very small bill, with very limited scope, and that’s what we are dealing with here—very limited scope. It, essentially, just says that it becomes an offence.

Now, one of the things that the Opposition have been talking about tonight, which I would like to correct, is that it does not become a criminal offence and there is no prosecution. This is an infringement. So there will not be a criminal charge against the person. It’s an infringement notice, so it is a very minor notice. People have talked about the fact that there will be a prosecution, but that doesn’t happen in the infringement system. I just wanted to clarify that because I think it is extremely important that we’re talking about a long run-in time. We’re talking about 18 months in order to get this set up so that they police can train their staff. We’re talking about having a computer system—the ITS system—managing this infringement process.

But the reality is, very simply, it is protecting our young children, our young people, from smoking in cars. It doesn’t do anything more than that. It’s a good start. There is more to come, as the Minister said. I commend the bill to the House.

I don’t agree with much of what’s been said on the opposing side, but I do commend this bill to the House and urge everyone to get on with it—an 18-month delay. At this stage, we can talk about vaping, and that’s what happens at second readings—you talk about things that submitters have proposed. A lot of them talked about it. The Cancer Society has just said today—

I’m sorry to interrupt the member, but the time has come for the debate to be interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 10 p.m.