Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2)

I present a legislative statement on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2).

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 31 October 2024 and that the committee have authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area despite Standing Orders 193, 195, and 196.

Youth vaping in New Zealand is too high, and the Government is focused on changing the regulatory settings to better protect our young people. The Government is also committed to reducing smoking rates and ensuring that people have the practical tools and support to quit smoking, including access to vapes. The vaping reforms proposed in this bill sit within the Government’s commitment to achieving the smoke-free 2025 goals.

Many people have switched from smoking to vaping. That has been a contributing factor to recent rapid reductions in smoking rates, with nearly 230,000 people quitting smoking in the last three years. We are committed to sustaining that momentum, and vapes must continue to be available as a cessation tool for adult smokers. However, the number of young people vaping remains a concern. Vapes should not be targeted towards children and young people, and they certainly shouldn’t be sold to them.

That is what this bill aims to stop. The bill makes four main changes to tackle youth vaping. Firstly, it bans the manufacture, sale, supply, and distribution of disposable vapes. Disposable vapes are disproportionately used by children and young people. Banning disposable vapes will ensure the vape products that have been targeted at young people and that are the most popular among this group are removed from the New Zealand retail market. This Government is committed to removing disposables as a way to deter young people from vaping. As a consequence, we have taken a strong position on the products that will be banned under this bill. I want to re-emphasise, however, that we want legislation that works. I’d repeat again: we want legislation that works, that works to protect young people, and that allows access to effective vaping products to help smokers quit. It will be important that those with an interest in both areas, including the stop-smoking services, engage with the select committee process.

The second feature of the bill is that it increases penalties for unlawful sale of regulated products to minors. It is apparent that the current penalty levels for breaching the prohibition on selling to minors are not a sufficiently strong deterrent compared to the potential gains for non-compliance, and this has been coupled with low levels of enforcement capability.

The Government is significantly increasing the penalties for illegal sales of vaping, tobacco, and other regulated products to our young people. The maximum fine for selling vapes or other regulated products to under-18s will increase from $10,000 to $100,000. The penalty for infringement offences will rise from $500 to $1,000 for individuals and to $2,000 for businesses. Compliance activities should be targeted at businesses that are non-compliant, not the young shop assistants who often get caught in the middle. These tougher penalties will be backed by a far greater enforcement capability, with 16 dedicated smoking and vaping officers to be in place by December.

The third change the bill introduces is imposing retail visibility restrictions for vaping products. We have all seen the way vape shops display, and it is likely that the marketing and visibility of vaping products has contributed to youth uptake due to the normalisation of vaping, instead of vaping being seen as a harm reduction tool for people who smoke. The Government’s approach is to ensure vapes are not publicly displayed in a manner that appears to be targeting youth. This means that they will not be allowed to be visible from outside specialist vape retailers and inside stores that people under the age of 18 are allowed to enter, such as dairies, supermarkets, and petrol stations. Additionally for those stores with websites, online advertising will be restricted to a list of names and prices.

Additionally, finally, the bill includes early childhood education centres in the proximity restrictions for specialist vape retailers. For those applying to set up a specialist vape retail store, this means that in addition to it needing to be at least 300 metres from a marae and a school, new applications will also need the store to be at least 100 metres from an early childhood education centre (ECE). With nearly 4,500 ECEs around New Zealand, this will further restrict the places specialist vape retailers can establish.

The Government is committed to achieving smoke-free 2025 and to reducing youth vaping. This bill represents the first tranche of Government changes to ensure we have the right settings to protect our young people from vaping whilst continuing to support adult smokers to quit by maintaining access to vapes as a smoking cessation tool. The select committee process is important for ensuring we maintain the excellent progress in reducing smoking rates. This bill needs to progress now so that the changes I believe will have significant impact on reducing vaping come into force as soon as possible.

In the second tranche of work I’m considering ways to strengthen how we regulate smoked tobacco, vaping, and other nicotine products. This includes licensing schemes, how regulations are balanced between products, and the role of alternative products to smoking. Alongside this legislative-focused work, smoking cessation services will remain a crucial part of our efforts to achieve smoke-free 2025. I want to see improved support for our young people to stop vaping.

There has been a lot of noise in this space, which has been distracting from sensible conversations about the work that we want to achieve. This bill is another important step in New Zealand vaping regulation that is necessary to protect children and young people and is part of the Government’s commitment to doing so. I look forward to the Health Committee’s consideration of the bill and I commend the bill to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Well, there has been a lot of noise in this space, because New Zealanders want to have our smoke-free generation back. We want to have our young people protected and supported by independent governance and decision-making, not by—pardon the pun—the smoke and mirrors that is coming from the other side, from Ministers who have talked about nicotine being as harmful as caffeine, from Ministers who have cut the tax on heated tobacco products by 50 percent, from Ministers who have stretched out the smoke-free goal for our country that was set by the National Government in 2011, from 2025—so close—to now 2061, as a direct result of the actions that they have taken to make sure that they support their big tobacco friends; from Ministers who have failed to tell their Cabinet colleagues about the $46 billion that the smoke-free generation and the Labour Government’s policies would have resulted in had they not come along and wiped them all away. And we are now expected to swallow the excuse that they want to move and truncate this select committee process forward because they’re committed to smoke-free and to supporting our young people. Well, all I can say to that is, “Yeah, right.”

We will support this bill, and it is very cautiously, because it is at best an incremental bill, but that caution, which was a big toe in the right direction, is now a nail on the big toe in the right direction, because this bill does not go far enough to support our young people. We know that vaping is less harmful than nicotine, but it is still harmful. We know that 5,000 people per year in New Zealand die from smoking and that there are still 330,000 smokers in New Zealand. Yes, we do want to support them from getting off cigarettes, but we need more effective regulations. We need more implementation and more effective monitoring, and, most of all, we need population measures that move the distribution of the focus of smoke-free and vape-free New Zealand, rather than simply targeting the high end. There is a wealth of evidence that the Health Committee has received lately from excellent researchers such as ASPIRE Aotearoa and also Vape-Free Kids New Zealand, which shows that distribution measures are far more effective in achieving the things that the Associate Minister of Health says she wants to achieve.

I would also like to acknowledge the mental health element of this, as the mental health spokesperson for the Opposition. Young people have described to our committee the predatory environment of the vaping companies. What we see in this bill are a few fiddles around the edges to make it look like this Government is committed to doing something. We know there are a whole lot of organisations out there who are passionately interested in this, who want to share their thoughts, their evidence, and their experience, and the Minister has just told us this afternoon that they’re probably not going to have much chance to do that because of the truncated process.

There are many things to do with the restrictions that we could include, but I want to focus my comments about enforcement, because the committee heard evidence that, in the last two years, there has only been one prosecution for a vape retailer that has sold to youth. The Vaping Industry Association New Zealand has given us an excellent submission about the conflicting advice that it has received from the Ministry of Health on how to understand the regulation, so there needs to be a simplification around that. We need to see much more powerful enforcement processes, such as being able to seize illegal vape products or perhaps issue instant fines. I’m sure these are the types of submissions that we would hear in the select committee if people had enough time to be heard, but I find it really rich to take on board that this Government is truly committed to helping our kids get off vapes. We’ve seen the mental health harm that it causes. We have seen and heard their anxiety about vaping. They really want to be free of this, and this piece of legislation doesn’t go nearly far enough.

So, while we are cautiously supporting the bill, we’re deeply disappointed at the truncated select committee period. We’re deeply disappointed that we were only told about that this afternoon, and I would invite everybody watching or listening to this debate to think very carefully about what the motivations of this Government are when it comes to giving tax cuts to tobacco companies and introducing incremental, fiddly-biddly little bills like this one that don’t go nearly far enough.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. I stand on behalf of the Green Party to speak to the first reading of the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2), and we also cautiously support this bill to select committee as well.

To line out some of the reasoning for that—and, of course, broadly speaking, this bill is looking at not necessarily limiting the number of people who would vape but what we are doing is banning the manufacturing, sale, supply, and distribution of disposable vapes, not necessarily non-disposable vapes. But there are also other elements of this which are really important in catching up to the existing legislation around the display of products—the display of tobacco products is visible from a store window etc.—and now it is going to be applicable here to vaping products as well. The bill is tidying up other areas such as not allowing to sell vaping products to under-18-year-olds, which is incredibly important, but also including some of the early childhood education centre elements in terms of proximity restrictions.

For this bill, there are definitely concerns on top of that. I mentioned one of the concerns already, which is although this puts a ban on disposable vapes—which is a step in the right direction—it doesn’t ban or limit non-disposable vapes. For one, it doesn’t limit the number of retailers who potentially will be selling vaping products, which is, I would assume, contributing to the broader target of a smoke-free Aotearoa. Now, the other thing that we see is that when we are looking at some of these alternatives such as vape or even HTPs, heated tobacco products, often it is being portrayed as a way of reducing or moving people away from smoking cigarettes or smoking tobacco.

However, what we have seen in some of the latest data is that a lot of people who do take up vaping have never smoked before. We have seen an increase in terms of young people who take up vaping, and the problem with that is we simply do not know some of the long-term impacts when it comes to vaping. One of the particular areas that may not be immediately obvious is the interaction between flavouring and health concerns. This is something that has been highlighted to us recently: that certain flavouring, when heated, may produce or may create certain effects in our body—some of which may be considered carcinogenic. There’s still a lot more work that needs to be done in this area when we’re looking at the long-term effect to our health when it comes to vaping.

Now, looking at some of the other elements that we’re looking at here as well is that when we look at the first Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill, we were incredibly disappointed at some of the moving away of our target when it comes to achieving smoke-free Aotearoa. Most recently, we have also seen similar moves when it comes to HTPs and heated tobacco products as well. I think, in general, what we would like to see is that the Government is going to take a really bold and visionary plan when it comes to achieving a smoke-free Aotearoa, regardless of if it is going to be cigarette tobacco, regardless of if it’s going to be heated tobacco products, regardless of if it’s going to be vapes, and take a more holistic approach and a more long-term approach when we’re looking at these health effects.

I’m really hoping that when this particular bill goes to the select committee, we will be able to hear from the public and from the health experts about some of these concerns. I would really hope, as part of that—and I genuinely do hope this—that we are able to potentially expand the remit or expand the boundaries of this amendment bill to a much broader context that includes some of the other things I mentioned, such as limiting the number of retailers and such as looking at some of the restrictions around non-disposable vaping products as well.

The problem that vaping tries to assist us in solving is that smoking kills and makes people sick, and vaping is a much healthier alternative. The research shows that nicotine is no more harmful than caffeine, but cigarette tar is very harmful, and that’s why vaping or inhaling water vapour is a much preferable alternative to smoking cigarettes.

The problem this bill tries to solve is that parents and principals have told us that they do not want to see children and young people having access to vaping and that they want the Government to take action to make it far harder to access those products and that the penalties should be significantly increased. That’s what this bill intends to do, to increase the penalties for selling these regulated products—vapes—to minors, to reflect the seriousness of that offence, and to reduce the visibility in access of vaping products to children and young people.

This bill will remove products from the market that have been particularly attractive to young people, and it will amend the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Act by banning the manufacture, sale, supply, and distribution of disposable vapes; increasing penalties; and including early childhood education centres in the proximity restrictions for specialty retailers.

The benefits of this policy and legislative change is that vapes will still be widely available for those people who choose to use them, who are adults, 18 and over, in order to reduce the harm that smoking causes them, but they will not be widely available to children and young people, and that is what this bill aims to achieve. ACT is proud to support this bill. Congratulations, Minister.

It gives me great pleasure to stand and support this bill. It has, really, some key, strong objectives, and that is to remove vaping products that are popular with young people from the market, noting that part of the appeal of these products to youth is that they’re inexpensive, brightly coloured, and easy to conceal. The second thing is to improve the retail compliance with the existing prohibition on sales to minors. If no action is taken, it is likely that these cheap, disposable vaping products will continue to find their way into the hands of young people. Therefore, I commend this bill to the House.

I rise in this House this afternoon to support this bill as a small step in the right direction towards reducing the harmful impact of vaping.

Last week, I hosted Mount Roskill’s first youth vaping awareness seminar. More than 60 concerned parents and community members came together to listen to the seminar and raise their concerns. Teachers, parents, and principals are genuinely concerned about the numbers of young people vaping or having access to vapes. We believe that this bill will help us to make it harder for, in particular, young people to access vapes.

For me, I’m looking forward to seeing this bill go through the Health Committee process. I’m looking forward to hearing further suggestions, to ensure we do everything we reasonably can to reduce youth vaping.

Finally, I look forward to a day where I no longer hear from the parents of an eight-year-old that their child is vaping. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I think about the changes that have been made with respect to smoking in this country, and one needs only to look into one’s own House to see just how far we’ve come. When I say, “one’s own House”, I don’t mean my personal house or my whānau; I actually mean Parliament.

Once upon a time, you could smoke in Parliament and in fact, our Grand Hall used to be the billiard room. For our members back in the day, and when my great-grandfather was here as an MP, they’d file out the door when the bells rang and they’d pop into the billiard room, have a smoke, crack a brandy. In fact, it was so bad that there was a thick, yellow stain at the top. There was a ring around the room, because that’s just how much people smoked. That’s the harmful impact of tobacco. It was clear for everybody to see, yet they still did it. That’s the point we’re making here about vaping.

I can tell you, after having spent a week on the marae at Tūrangawaewae, it felt like at some point in time you were in Rotorua, because it looked like geysers all across the street as people vaped. You walk along and you’re walking behind somebody and you don’t get washed with a plume of smoke anymore; you get washed with a plume of vapour that smells like bubble gum or it smells like blueberry or it smells like peaches.

While that might be appealing to some, simply saying that it’s just water vapour, when the science hasn’t fully shown the true impact of vaping right around the world—and in fact, you only need a quick Google search or to read some of the more in-depth research that’s coming out of Otago at the moment showing the impact of vaping on lungs. The point we’re making on this side of the House is: why don’t we do this and do it properly? Why don’t we go all the way? Why don’t we wash the tobacco stain that’s on the wall of this House off for ever and get it done? This is the opportunity to do it and we’re not quite doing it.

I can say that as we look across the country—and I, for one, in Auckland celebrated very recently, as the LAPs, or the local alcohol policies, in Auckland have finally recognised that there are far too many alcohol stores in South Auckland—let’s actually change the settings and the plan to make sure that we’re not opening more closer to schools in poorer socio-economic communities. Finally, after 15, maybe 20 years since the well-intended start of those LAPs came in, we have sense in Auckland around alcohol. Well, we’re looking to do the same with vaping, so why don’t we go harder?

If I think of a little place in the Far North, where I come from, a place called Pānguru—a beautiful place, by the way. Everyone in the House who quotes Dame Whina Cooper, that’s where she’s from. If you go to Pānguru, on the one street within a 300-metre stretch is the school, the marae, the kōhanga reo, and the only shop for miles. What does that mean? With all the well-intended things about saying, “Let’s stop Māoris from smoking. Let’s give them the opportunity to vape.”—OK, so then what are these people going to do? Why isn’t this clearer? Why can’t we just go all out and do it properly, make sure that we’re not just simply supporting more bad behaviour?

Smokers will tell you that it isn’t just the addiction to nicotine; it’s the habitual addiction of the hand to the mouth. And guess what happens! You still do the same when you vape. That’s the problem we have here. We need to make sure that we stop this from getting into the hands of our young people. So, while I appreciate that in this particular bill there are harsh penalties for those that break these rules—yep, I’m OK with that—what we’re not doing is actually sending a clear message to families in New Zealand that smoking is no good—

💬 Simon Court: It’s not about smoking; it’s about vaping.

That smoking and vaping are no good, Mr Simon Court. It’s no good, and simply saying it’s water vapour is absolute garbage. A simple Google search will show the impact of vaping on lungs, and we’re doing that to our young people.

All of us come to this place to make sure that we can make positive changes. I urge, as this bill continues to progress, let’s make sure we beef it up. Let’s make sure we go all the way. That’s something we can all buy into, and let’s make that happen. Let’s show this country a very clear pathway and a commitment to making sure that we are smoke-free very soon.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It’s really great to speak in support of this bill—it’s making some four pragmatic and reasonable changes. It’s banning the manufacture, sale, supply, and distribution of disposable vapes; increasing penalties for unlawful sales of regulated products to minors; imposing retail visibility restrictions for vaping products, including early childhood education centres; and proximity restrictions for specialist vape retailers. This is good for the safety of the New Zealand public. This is good for our next generations that are coming through. I commend it to the House.

Kia orana, Mr Speaker. At this stage, we’ll lend our tentative support to this bill clearing the first reading hurdle, but it is disappointing to hear the possibility that this will be subjected to a truncated select committee process. We will leave that to the Minister to move that if that’s what she desires, and we’ll deal with that when we have an opportunity to share our views around the House on that.

It is interesting though, when I look at the content of this bill that’s been introduced, it does seem to be at odds, actually, with the approach that the Government had taken and its response to, effectively, cancelling a smoke-free generation. That’s what the members on that side of the House did previously, and within their first 100 days, they went about effectively dismantling that opportunity for the first time in New Zealand’s history to have a smoke-free generation coming through the ranks. It is a little bit ironic and misplaced that we are considering a bill that has a number of measures that seem to be at odds with the approach that this track record for this Government has adopted to date.

When the smoke-free generation legislation was before the Parliament last year, I had the privilege of being the chair of the Health Committee at the time. As I have a look through this bill that’s currently in front of us, many of the issues that are contained in them, and then some, were front and centre for the committee at the time as they were considering a number of things.

My colleague the Hon Peeni Henare has talked about experiences that I’m sure all of us have had, if not in our own families, in our own communities. I think about the invitation that some vaping products do actually share towards younger generations, things like candy floss, things like unicorn milk. Now, who wants that?

💬 Hon Member: Bubble gum.

I mean, who is that appealing to? It’s very clear that it is appealing to our rangatahi, a younger—

💬 Simon Court: What?

What’s that, Mr Court? You didn’t hear it? I said “unicorn milk” and “candy floss”. My colleague says “Bubble gum”—those sorts of things like ACT Party gospel and vision.

These are the sorts of things that did come up, and it’s interesting that this is a bill that seeks to touch on an issue that is so important to communities all around this country, so important to the rangatahi in electorates all around the country. I think of Manukura in the last term when I visited more than once to talk about what the issues are that matter most to them. Top of the list was vaping—access to vaping and the pressures that they received from peers around the need to do that. It was very difficult, actually, for many to stand up and say, “Actually, it’s so easy to resist that urge.” That’s not the experience. That’s not the case.

It is important that as this bill progresses beyond first reading, we hear from those very people who want to share their experiences and their views with us. This bill will look at their regulatory framework but, more specifically, try and, I guess, tackle some of the issues that are really important in terms of protecting our rangatahi and our young people—things like banning some aspects of disposable vapes, not the non-disposable type, but the proposed action around disposable vapes; things like a new penalty regime that would introduce some changes that would basically toughen up some of the penalties as they apply to those that would be responsible for sale and supply or manufacturing and the like.

Also a really important aspect is the whole visibility thing. We all have places in our own communities, I’m sure, where we walk past and it’s an out of sight sort of place—ensuring that those particular venues and locations are not actually placed in sensitive areas. And one of the good things about this bill is it seeks to introduce early childhood education (ECE) centres as part of that “sensitive” definition. Actually, it’s one good thing that this Government is actually doing for the ECE sector. You know, we’ve already heard today that they’re clearly doing everything else. It’s one; it’s not enough, but it is a start. It is ensuring that early childhood education centres are part of the consideration as to where particular retailers would not be able to be based. It’s very similar, actually, to the approach to sensitive sites for alcohol. There are many comparisons, and, as we dealt with this in the last Parliament, we heard from those that made some direct comparisons with alcohol.

There are some components of this bill that are very, very important. It doesn’t go far enough, in our view. The select committee will be a chance to tease out some of that, and it is disappointing that, at this stage, it looks as though we will clear that first reading hurdle by support on this side of the House.

What we’ve heard across the House today is amazing, really—amazing. We’ve heard that they are deeply disappointed that we are rushing through this anti-vaping legislation. We’ve heard about unicorn milk. We’ve heard that Labour are deeply disappointed that the bill doesn’t go far enough. Well—mind the French—what the hell did they do for six years? What did they do about vaping for six years? With 65 MPs—65 MPs!

The BBC reported on 13 August last year that New Zealand’s vaping crisis data showed that under Labour, the number of teenagers in New Zealand who vaped regularly tripled—it tripled—between 2019 and 2021; all under Labour. Also, under the previous Labour Government, the number of vape shops in New Zealand exploded to 7,500. Like everything else, Labour created the youth vaping crisis and this Government is here to fix it. I commend the bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2) be considered by the Health Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Health Committee.

Instruction to Health Committee