Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

In 1990, the then Minister of Health, the Rt Hon Helen Clark, began her third reading speech on the Smoke-free Environments Act stating—and I quote—“There has been [a] lengthy debate on the Bill. It is complex, with a very simple, humanitarian purpose: to combat the appalling death toll that is caused by the consumption of tobacco in our society.” Those words are just as relevant today for this, the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill, as they were when the Act was first introduced.

This bill amends the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990 to better regulate vaping products and smokeless tobacco products. It is the most significant change to the Act since the introduction, and it covers a range of issues from advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, to product notification and safety. A lot of thought, time, and care have been put into crafting this bill and bringing it to this stage.

I want to acknowledge and thank all of those that have been part of this journey: members of Parliament, the Ministry of Health and Government officials, NGOs, the tobacco control centre, academics, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, responsible vape retailers, and, of course, members of the public.

The Smoke-free Environments Act was primarily designed for smoked tobacco products and doesn’t adequately cover the range of regulated products that are available today. These products, which include vaping and smokeless tobacco products, need to be regulated properly to ensure that we protect our children and young people from the risks associated with these products, as well as encouraging smokers to switch to significantly less harmful products.

The bill will prohibit children under the age of 18 being sold a regulated product and will restrict access to a wide range of flavours to specialist R18 vape stores. The bill also reduces the normalisation of vaping and using heated tobacco devices, prohibits their use in legislated smoke-free areas, and prohibits the advertising and promotion of these products, including on TV and social media. The bill will also ensure that smokers have access to vaping and heated tobacco devices that meet safety standards.

I also want to pause and reflect on why it is that we’re here today, ready to pass this piece of legislation. We’re here because, on average, every year around 5,000 New Zealanders—or 13 lives a day—die because of smoking or second-hand smoking exposure. This is more than the number of people that we collectively lose from road crashes, alcohol, other drugs, suicide, murders, drownings, and earthquakes combined. That means that many of us at some point have experienced, or will experience, the pain that comes from losing someone we know and love—a family member, a friend, a colleague—due to smoking. We as a country do not want to continue this, including grieving for so many loved ones each year. We want to take every practical step that we can to reduce the number of people that smoke and die from tobacco-related diseases—this includes supporting smokers to switch to less harmful alternatives, including vaping products. We’re also here because we recognise that vaping products are not harmless and should not be attractive or easily accessible to our tamariki and our young people.

I’d like to conclude by reflecting on the progress that we’ve made today and the heart of this bill. Previous Governments of all descriptions have battled against smoking and tobacco for decades and pursued policies that sought to reduce the harm and death caused by tobacco. Today, with the passing of this legislation, we’re collectively writing the next chapter of our story. At the heart of it, this bill will help to reduce the number of New Zealanders that smoke and die from tobacco-related diseases by helping people to switch to less harmful products, while also ensuring that we don’t have a new generation of people addicted to nicotine.

The next step in this work will be to publicly consult on the regulations that will give effect to this bill. This will take place after the election and will provide businesses, members of the public, NGOs, and other stakeholders the opportunity to influence how it will be implemented.

I strongly commend this bill, in its final reading, to the House. I look forward to seeing the improvement that this bill will make to the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders in the near future. Mālō ‘aupito.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I was fascinated by the Associate Minister of Health’s reference to the Rt Hon Helen Clark and the passage of the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990, and comparing what we’re doing here with what was done 30 years ago. I think there are two quite significant differences to what we’re doing today compared with that time. The first is obvious—that legislation passed in a flurry of controversy. We were all going to resign our jobs because we weren’t going to be able to smoke in our offices; bars would empty out because people weren’t able to have a ciggy with their pints. And none of that happened. None of that had happened, and we look back now and realise that the sky didn’t fall in.

The big difference here, though, is that there’s actually broad support for this, not only across the House but across society. And I think the other significant difference with the 1990 Act is that that was designed very specifically to require and encourage people to do less of something. And, actually, what we’re doing with adding vaping products into that legislation is encourage people to do more of something, as well as less of something else—and that is to vape instead of smoke tobacco. So it’s a slightly unusual sort of a situation we find ourselves in, but it’s the right thing to do, and it does require a regulatory regime.

I do note, however, that the amount of harm that is understood to be caused by the products that we are now regulating is so low that the Attorney-General gave a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act fail on the prohibition on the marketing of these products, because there wasn’t sufficient evidence that they were harmful. And, actually, I’m quite encouraged by that. We’re doing the right thing, despite the Attorney-General’s opinion. But, you know, when you’ve got the likes of Action on Smoking and Health coming and saying, “Look, we’re pretty relaxed about this. We want a liberal regime, but we need a regime.”, and when the best evidence we’ve got is that these products are 95 percent less harmful than the alternatives that people are using now then we want to encourage smokers to use them. What we don’t want to do is create a back door for people who are not addicted to nicotine to think it’s sexy or fun or cool at a party. And, frankly, they are. So if we sort of denormalise it at that level while continuing to portray this product as an alternative to the deadly harm that tobacco, when smoked, creates, then we’re doing the right thing.

Now, I should just put on record—and I know we don’t dwell, at least at length, on the committee stage that we’ve just had, but I just want to put on record—that actually we accidentally supported the Associate Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 567. I would have opposed, because we wanted the vaping sale rate to be at 50 percent, not 60 percent, that but I wasn’t quick enough to call for a party vote. But the Hon Nicky Wagner’s SOP would have been ruled out as inconsistent with the previous decision of the committee.

Despite that, I do appreciate what the Associate Minister has done right from the get-go. She did say that there was a lot of thought, time, and care—and I know there was a lot of thought and care. We think it took too long, more time than was needed. But I did appreciate as the health spokesperson at that time, the manner in which the Associate Minister was prepared to engage once she had finally done her bit to bring the bill into shovel-ready shape for first reading, that she did engage me. I was wishing that we could have done that sooner. But I think there has been a reasonably constructive process along the way.

I also want to talk about health issues, because this is probably my epitaph—certainly in this Parliament, who knows what might happen in the next—because I’m no longer in that gig. I want to acknowledge the Health Committee; your good self, Madam Speaker; and also the chair of the Health Committee, Louisa Wall; together with my parliamentary colleagues who actually worked really constructively on this bill, but also more or less on just about everything that we had coming through. And that’s the appropriate manner in which to approach issues where we all have the same goal, and that is to improve the health of New Zealanders. We may disagree around the edges, but we certainly agree on that goal. This will do that. This will make the health of New Zealanders better, and it’s a very good thing to do. I’m happy to commend it to the House.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Tēnā koutou katoa. Congratulations, Minister Salesa. This bill has taken a lot of hard work and effort. In acknowledging your work, I want to acknowledge particularly my colleague Jenny Marcroft, who is a member of the Health Committee, who I know participated diligently in all of the select committee processes. And I, too, join with the Hon Michael Woodhouse in thanking all Health Committee members.

We were one of the committees that sat through COVID, and I know initially people weren’t very happy about that. But what I’d like the public to know was that we didn’t actually compromise our processes within this institution. We had 1,271 submissions. We heard from 84 New Zealanders who chose to make a submission on this bill. And so I think we did an incredible job in processing those submissions. So I want to acknowledge the advisers within the Ministry of Health, incredibly professional staff, who were obviously dealing with COVID, but the ministry made a determination that they could, whilst obviously catering to the COVID needs, also support the committee.

I’d like to acknowledge the Attorney-General who did provide some information that our committee was able to deliberate on, and also the Regulations Review Committee, who chose to provide some advice to us.

So the essential premise of this bill is that vaping products are tools to help people quit smoking, and that’s what this bill is all about: to give people tools to stop people smoking. Why? As the Minister articulated earlier, in New Zealand 5,000 people die every year because they smoke. That’s 13 New Zealand citizens every day. Globally, that’s 7 million people; 1.2 million from second-hand smoke. So the reality is vaping, if it’s a tool used to help people stop smoking, is going to save lives. And within that context, we did hear evidence to say that vaping isn’t risk-free.

I think what we’ll see over a few years of research is: how do we quantify the actual risk? So we had health professionals come in, particularly those involved in lung health, to say we have to be vigilant and we have to monitor. There were also issues about young people, young people vaping as a gateway to smoking. And I do want to acknowledge our Māori and Pacific whānau who submitted on the bill. Their biggest worry and concern is that our people are not going to give up smoking, and that we’ll actually end up with a scenario where they smoke and vape. And if vaping actually isn’t as harmless as we think, then we actually have to monitor the implementation of this legislation.

The only other thing I really wanted to highlight is that in the US there have been issues about people who have died after vaping cannabis oil. So we have to be really careful about our communication and the education we provide to New Zealanders about how to use this tool because we don’t want to inadvertently enable another issue to emerge.

Just finally, I want to highlight that included in the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) was a carryover from our smoke-free cars legislation. We are now making sure that our cars will be vape-free. And why? Because fundamentally we want to denormalise both smoking and vaping. While acknowledging that vaping is better than smoking, vaping isn’t good either. That is the issue. So I thank the Minister for her SOP, the changes that she made.

And just finally, I can’t not acknowledge the work of the Hon Nicky Wagner. She has dedicated the last years of her life here in Parliament in being an absolute champion for this kaupapa, and I thank her for her contribution. She’s obviously engaged in other activities right now, but I know her heart is with us.

So in that final acknowledgment, I just want to conclude by saying, as the chair of the Health Committee, I’ve been incredibly proud of the work that we’ve done. And with my colleagues, I want to thank Dylan and the team who have assisted us in our work. Finally, I commend the bill to the House. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to see this bill finally to the House, because, on net balance, we do believe that the vaping products are effective—that vaping as a mechanism is effective—in smoking reduction.

We have taken on board the advice we heard from officials, and the cautions. In fact, if we look at one of their very early statements, the statement to us as a committee was “I would like to say that the evidence associated with vaping is still emerging and strongly contested. Particular areas of debate are the safety of vaping products, the effectiveness of vaping as a support for smokers to quit smoking, the role of flavours in supporting people to switch from smoking, and the extent to which we should be concerned about increases in vaping among young people.” We took these concerns on board, and yet we still believe, net, that there are advantages to vaping—to reduce the use of cigarettes, primarily.

I’ll come back, but before I forget, I do want to acknowledge that we were working during lockdown, and Matt Doocey and the Hon Maggie Barry did a lot of heavy lifting from our team during the lockdown, so I did want to recognise them.

Fundamentally, this was a balance we were trying to achieve in this bill between moving people down a pathway from cigarettes, to vaping nicotine, to vaping flavours. That’s the pathway we want to encourage. Our dilemma was not going the other way—not being a gateway from vaping flavours, to vaping nicotine, to then taking up cigarette smoking. In that pathway we—certainly, I—learnt an awful lot about flavours. Who’d have known that they could be regulated into the classes of nicotine, menthol, mint, dessert, and fruit, and that youth particularly are interested in the dessert and fruit? It was one of the discussions we had around whether a specialist vaping store should be allowed to have dessert and fruit flavours.

I’d like to also thank the officials, who did a lot of work to get us to this place today. We’re really pleased, this is an effective mechanism. It has taken us time to get here, but here we are, so let’s just keep moving and see if we can get this out, get it into the public, and get this effective mechanism—for young people particularly, where we’re most interested—where young people can find an alternative mechanism to reducing cigarette smoking. So we’re supporting this bill, thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I am really pleased to take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill in its third reading tonight.

As a member of the Health Committee, I would like to begin in acknowledgment of the chair, Louisa Wall; our deputy chair, Dr Shane Reti; and also all members who contribute to that committee. This was a piece of legislation which we were all supportive of, and we had some great discussions throughout our select committee. At the centre of our discussions was helping people who were smokers to transition away from that nasty habit, which consumes your life—and I say that as a former, born-again non-smoker. Had there been vapes around when I was much younger and I gave up cigarettes, I’m sure my transition would have been much easier, and certainly those in my family may have felt the transition a little less intense. So this is an amazing tool, and congratulations to the Minister, the Hon Jenny Salesa, for bringing this to the House. You have made a wonderful contribution to society, to the health of our young people, and for that I commend you, and working collegially with New Zealand First and our confidence and supply partner, the Greens, as well. It’s been a wonderful experience to do that with you.

This is all about making sure we have a tool, as we’ve mentioned and heard in the House tonight, that will help people transition away from cigarettes, and this product, even though it is considered 95 percent less harmful than smoking, is something that we will need to keep an eye on in the future. There are quite a staggering number of people who are using vapes to come off tobacco—150,000 to 200,000 people vape in New Zealand, and 47 percent of them are former smokers; 50 percent are dual smokers and vapers. So, even though they still may be smoking cigarettes, they are vaping as well; so their reduction in cigarettes has increased with their use of vaping. That is a great transition for them, and, as other members have mentioned, we want to see the pathway away from cigarettes, not from vaping to cigarettes. That has been a great discussion we’ve had, and I think, with the changes to the legislation—thank you to the Minister for the Supplementary Order Paper and the amendment to that—that will go some way.

I would just like to mention one of the discussions we had in select committee. There were a couple of themes that came through strongly in our discussions—1,200 submissions, 84 of them oral, and, as we’ve noted, we heard through the lockdown period via our Zoom conferences. We heard from vaping consumers, from Māori and Pasifika organisations, from the health sector as well, and flavours were a big discussion, because some of those flavours, with their creative names—creative writers dreamt up all wonderful names like “Unicorn Dust” and all this sort of thing—wonderful vanilla dessert flavours that were very appealing, maybe not just to young people, but certainly the advertising is an incredibly powerful tool in the way that it can change people’s minds. That can be not necessarily a good thing; it can persuade people. So, by having restrictions around advertising and restrictions around flavours, we can ensure that young people won’t be exposed to this product and thinking that it’s a normal thing to do. That’s something I am very pleased about in this bill.

Really, in essence, this bill is a bridge for smokers to quit, and that’s the most important thing—along with not encouraging or enabling our young people to get hold of a product. I’d just like to also mention, too, some schools, particularly a school that I live near. Some of the teachers have drawers full of vape that they’ve confiscated from their young people. Now, they’ll be very pleased that there are regulations that will stop some of those young people being able to buy them. This is a very good bill. Thank you very much and congratulations to the Hon Jenny Salesa for bringing this to the House, and along with banning smoking in cars carrying our kids. Well done. Congratulations. The public has asked for this, we have delivered, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Indeed, a pleasure to stand and make a contribution on this, the third and final reading of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill. I, too, stand and offer my congratulations to the honourable Minister Jenny Salesa and also acknowledge again the members of the Health Committee and the chair, Louisa Wall. I also want to acknowledge the officials for the great work that was done in a very collaborative way across the House to get this bill through.

It would be remiss, too, if I didn’t also acknowledge the Hon Nicky Wagner for her work, and although we didn’t get quite through the changes there that we wanted in terms of how we felt we could strengthen this up, ultimately, at the heart of this bill, we are talking about the thousands of New Zealanders that die prematurely from smoking-related illnesses.

I am not a smoker myself, but I did grow up in a household where it was very normal to walk into the lounge and there’d be smoke everywhere, and it’s different times today. I just want to acknowledge the Minister and everyone for the work on this. Ultimately, this is a good bill, and we are finally here. Congratulations to everyone. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

It’s just that I am finding my shoes.

💬 Hon Members: Ha, ha!

It’s 11.20 p.m. Kia ora, Madam Speaker. The Greens are proud to stand and support the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Bill. As my colleagues across the House have said, this is a bill to regulate what are currently grey areas, where we can allow ads to, effectively, target kids via YouTube, for example. We cannot trust harmful substances to self-regulate, so we work to make this about public health and safety of products as much as possible.

This is my first speaking and engagement on this bill at all. So the bill, of course, will broaden the scope of products regulated under the Smoke-free Environments Act to include vaping products. I was fortunate to hear directly from various Māori and Pacific smoke-free advocacy organisations. I was fortunate to hear directly about the positive impacts on whānau who have been able to use vaping as a successful and positive tool on the pathway towards smoke-free, to be able to cut down the massively harmful cigarette and tobacco smoking and going across to vaping, a lesser harm, on their way to smoke-free. It was also clear from those presentations that there was a call in the passage of this bill to make sure that we—and I did hear the Minister refer to it and acknowledge the call—continue to engage directly with Māori and Pasifika smoke-free advocacy groups and organisations and directly with communities, given that Māori and Pacific are disproportionately represented in people who smoke.

So we are pleased, after the careful consideration and work that happened at the select committee stage, to make sure that this absolutely is about public health and safety and a positive journey to becoming smoke-free, rather than vaping itself being an activity that stands on its own, and rather than people going towards vaping.

So, all in all, some helpful amendments were made, some helpful changes were made, to strengthen the protections and the regulations in the bill. Good acknowledgment has been made of the monitoring work that will continue to be necessary as we check to see how this will actually fly in the real world. So, with that, the Greens are pleased to support this bill. Thank you.

Bill read a third time.