Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2)

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on this. While we are supporting in principle this legislation, knowing that it will tighten up rules around the sale of vapes and looking to protect our young people from smoking impact—particularly for the vapes—we know that there is still a gap in terms of the data for the stores, the shops, and the retailers who sell within our communities, whether they’re specialists or general. Further, in terms of the way in which we are going to change both the fines and the infringements, it’s good to see that we are going to lift the bar for the businesses that we do find are breaching the law. One of the issues that we have, though, is the resourcing for the machinery behind the legislation. Do we have enough kaimahi to do the work, because enforcement is important, and who are the safeguards in our communities? Have we fuelled our waka enough—that’s been a question that we’ve continued to ask as a select committee to get the real numbers of who are the staff on the ground in terms of enforcement, and the picture is not clear.

Now, we sat and we heard submissions from the sector, we heard submissions from those who are in industry, and we heard a lot from families and those who are impacted—for example, our Breakfree kids and the māmās who continue to follow us and ensure that we know the grassroots impact of vaping on our young people—and we cannot lose sight of the impact of this knowing that it’s like a ripple effect. Whether it’s an entry into vaping, then they move into smoking, and aha rānei aha rānei [etc., etc.], the impact continues on. It is trying to prevent before we even get to the point of having to block the sale to our youth. Acknowledging The Hashtags and the work that they did in presenting a petition that focused on the restriction of the sale of vaping products to under-18-year-olds, and then focusing on the proximity and the density, I think this legislation is absolutely addressing some of what The Hashtags brought to the House in their petition.

Of course, when we think about marae, we think about schools, we think about early childhood, and we think about communities, because if it’s about where young people congregate, they congregate in sports clubs, they congregate in playgrounds, and they walk the streets. How do we create the smoke-free environment that we all look for? Referring back to some of what we received as the Health Committee and the density of some of the stores in our communities, we saw that there is a large number in lower socio-economic communities, and that’s something that needs to be addressed. Councils came into the submission process and said, “Hey, we are seeking some tools to be able to regulate in local government so that we can control what is established within our community.”

If we think about alcohol, we think about fast food, we think about pokie machines, and we think about smoking, it’s almost like a happy four of impact—acknowledging that the Minister launched her smoke-free action plan the other week but also taking heed from the sector, who clearly said to us, “Where are the population-based approaches and the focus on those who are most impacted?” That is te iwi Māori. We can’t forget that some 14.7 to 14.9 percent of our young people are vaping, and we have 4,500-odd people a year in New Zealand who die from tobacco-related illnesses. In reviewing and reflecting on the announcement of the new smoke-free action plan 2025, where do Māori fit and where do Pasifika fit in terms of population-based approaches to access to that cessation but also in terms of the focus of the next steps moving forward—and young people are essential in this space.

I just want to raise that there are still stores selling disposables in our community right now. I don’t know how many enforcement officers are on the ground and who are actually watching what’s going on, because our workforce is stressed, and we are just hearing from a few kaimahi who share that it’s just one of a number of things that they monitor. When you’re a kaimahi with a broad range of compliance issues that you have to monitor, tobacco is just one of them, and when we think about our low socio-economic communities, there’s a number of stores which pepper-pot across these spaces. Our compliance officers are important, but it is also access to cessation support, it’s the ability to provide those smoke-free environments that are so essential, and then the ability to grow community action in that space. The compliance is one thing; it’s cessation support, and we don’t have enough in schools for young people. In fact, we don’t even have really anything for vapes right now. It’s all focused on cigarettes.

What are the next steps? We heard of the Health Advisory and Regulatory Platform programme, which is targeted in schools, but where else are we going to get the support that we need nationally for young people to quit? We’ve got compliance, where we’ve got issues. We’ve got cessation support, which is absolutely needed for vapes, because that is a gap right now. Cessation providers are saying that they are tobacco-focused, but it’s actually the vapes that are coming through really strongly, so how can we do that together? Then also we’re thinking about building that awareness, and then, of course, there is the action around smoke-free environments, and may I lament the smoke-free generation. That smoke-free generation born in 2009—my own daughter included, and many mokopuna across the country—will not benefit to be that smoke-free generation, because the law was changed.

I’d like to pay tribute to the claimants at the Waitangi Tribunal who went forward and said no. We need to go back. We need to go back—back to the future—to what we did in the past, which is our Smoke-free Environments Act. These claimants, Auntie Sue Taylor, Hone Harawira, Shane Bradbrook, and Dr Amohia Boulton have their Smokefree Aotearoa claim, and this claim is live right now because they recognise the work that was done before us to lay the foundations of a Te Tiriti - based smoke-free action plan, of which this is one small part.

This is one small part, but we need to do more. In sharing this with you, it’s the next steps, it’s broadening the focus, and it’s also focusing on those populations who need the support, because while we have seen, for instance, a drop in youth vaping and smoking, which we have had ASH - Action for Smokefree 2025 report on, it’s still Māori that are up there, and while there may be drops occurring, it is still Māori who are most impacted and it is still Māori who die the most.

In closing, and acknowledging the work of those before me and acknowledging the importance of our having a smoke-free Aotearoa and going back to 2021, with that action plan that went out, now we have the new plan. I can’t really see Māori and Pasifika in there. The sector has already told the Minister that. It’s been very public in the way that it’s come out and said that it’s a bit beige—it’s a bit beige; it’s not really showing us the road map for addressing smoking-related harm and vaping-related harm to Māori—but, hey, we’re moving forward. It’s different, but we are moving forward slightly.

For that, we are acknowledging the work of the Health Committee and all those who submitted on this legislation, despite it being a bit tight and, of course, truncated, as usual. Kia ora tātou.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to just firstly congratulate Minister Casey Costello on the action she’s taking and the bill she has brought to the House to curb the scourge of youth vaping, which we have heard so much about in the Health Committee. Hūhana Lyndon, the previous Greens spokesperson, told us of the smoke-free enforcement officers. That is also of concern: the under-action or under-resourcing, or whatever is going on there. We need to do more in the way of enforcement in that regard. I support this bill. I think it’s going to be a good bill. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I think this is a positive bill to address the harm that youth vaping is causing. There are number of parts to that, including banning disposables, visibility limits, and increasing the fines. I do want to thank the members of the Health Committee for their work on this bill. There were several changes made when it came to us, and I would like to thank everyone for their assistance in getting it to where it is today. There is more work to do, and I know that the Minister has acknowledged that. She did that when she came to the committee. This is a big issue that we need to tackle, and I’d like to see that we have support from around the House on this. I support this bill.

This is a five-minute, split call.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Thank you. I stand to speak to this bill, and I will take my whole time. It’s actually really sad to see that others across the floor couldn’t be bothered. The reality is that there are changes, but we are seeing—

Sam Uffindell: It’s nice to have you here.

DEBBIE NGAREWA-PACKER: —when you’re ready—the attitude that we have towards an issue that is major for Māori. It’s an issue that is major for Māori, which is why it has had massive Māori leadership championing it. The whole whakapapa for Smokefree Aotearoa came from those leaders, who were really proud to come up with initiatives that were actually not about playing tactfully into the hands of the tobacco companies, but actually being able to end the tobacco industry, to end smoking, and to end, really, what is the greatest preventable cause of Māori deaths.

What we have is the greatest preventable cause of things that are impacting and harming Māori lives. When we go back to this and talk about what it is and how our Māori leaders who champion the vision of Smokefree Aotearoa, the vision of Tupeka kore Aotearoa—and we’re really proud to hear our niece in Te Pāti Kākāriki mention our long-term advocates. My daughter was one of the first from the kōhanga generation and first in the whare kura kaupapa generation, where we were proud to do everything as smoke-free—auahi kore. There was no “auahi half-pie, ka pai”. We had a full intention of making sure that the scourge of this preventable death was never ever going to be part of their future. At everything we did—our sports, “Auahi kore” flags were everywhere; our kapa haka, “Auahi kore” flags were everywhere. When you are to talk to my child’s generation, that was the vision. That was everything intended—not vaping, not all these “half-pie, ka pai” solutions.

It’s really sad to be here today, and I understand the challenges on this particular bill, but what we have is we’ve seen protests and petitions with over 50,000 signatures, open letters, pleas from over the country, and evidence that indicates that their own voters—yours included—did not want to see anything that compromised the targets, that compromised the messaging, or that compromised the intention of stopping smoking and the tobacco industry in Aotearoa. It is really hard to swallow, because National actually pledged this in 2011, and National actually used to fund and help our kura kaupapa and our kōhanga reo to get that messaging across. National has clearly reneged on that commitment and it feels like this is because they’re prioritising tax cuts over the wellbeing of our people, and it does feel like that on the ground.

We’ve got our Wai claim, and, again, in the era when National was in Government, the Wai 2575 claim identified deficiencies in primary healthcare. The issues that we have to prevent—the diseases and the illnesses that come from smoking—are a major part of what my generation fought for to make sure we didn’t have to be in this hand and in this space again. When we look at this bill and the impact that smoking has and the fact that, for Māori, it’s three times higher than for non-Māori, it is, I guess, a sad state for us, and I’ll say this again, to have to be departing from where those leaders who were looking for a smoke-free environment, who were the likes of Hone Harawira, who, in his time here—in fact, when Te Pāti Māori were in Government with National—was making sure that there was an urgent call to action.

On that note, we will stand and leave that with us. We wish that this Government would honour Te Tiriti and use its influence and its power to stop unnecessary deaths, and to actually go the full hog and leave us in a situation where we can show our mokopuna that we did all we could do to get rid of this sector and get rid of the tobacco industry, and that, instead of having amendments, we actually just stopped and agreed to having a smoke-free environment. Kia ora rā.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As the previous speaker from Te Pāti Kākāriki, Hūhana Lyndon, said, we do support this bill because in some small way, it is a small step towards the right direction, but—there are no other ways to say this—overall, this bill, in terms of what it could achieve, is disappointing.

In many ways, this bill provides a smokescreen for some of the other more concerning things we are seeing towards our smoke-free targets—things around heated tobacco products, for example. When it comes to vaping in particular, one of the biggest problems that we’re trying to solve with this is the number of specialist retailers when it comes to vaping products. This bill makes some attempt in reducing this, but, to be honest, we simply do not have enough data in Aotearoa. We simply do not know the full extent in terms of how many shops that are not specialist vaping stores—dairies, supermarkets, or otherwise—that actually do sell vaping products, or what those impacts are going to be.

There are two specific areas I would like to address: one, we have heard from multiple people in this House that vaping is a particular issue for young people. In clause 12, there are certain provisions around the advertisement or publication on an internet site of a link when it comes to the promotion of vaping products, but one of the questions we asked the Minister during the committee stage was whether we know how many young people get sucked into an advertisement from a website by looking at a banner at the top or bottom of a website. Most of the people that are going to get sucked into vaping will be enticed by vaping through social media, so if we really want to have a bold approach to reducing vaping in Aotearoa among young people, why are we not addressing it from a social media perspective and from a media influencer perspective in order to cut down on the number of young people who are enticed by the promotion of vaping through social media?

There is another concern that I would like to address. When we were going through this bill, we thought, “Why is this bill so limited to simply disposable vaping products and not reusable and refillable vaping devices? Surely, if you want to do something, let’s just ban it full stop. Other countries have done that. We know that Singapore does it.”—until we saw the regulatory impact statement. In paragraph 69 of Banning disposable vaping products and increasing penalties for sales to minors, it specifically talks about Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade advice that anything harsher than simply banning disposable products is going to put us at odds with our international trading partners and, potentially, international companies such as Phillip Morris. This is a huge issue in terms of our trade obligations, as well. We are putting our young people at risk purely because we may have to provide arguments or we may be challenged by international trading partners, and yet we are beholden to international trading partners. That is a genuine concern about the scope of this bill.

While, again, the Green Party supports this bill, overall, this bill is uninspired. It is weak, and it does lack that bold vision that we would like to see as a step towards having a smoke-free Aotearoa. With that, we will support it, but we would really like to have seen more. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Excellent—as I’ve sat here, I was just wondering whether some of the other side of the House have read this bill. We’ve heard about having a smoke-free generation and everything like this. This bill is about youth vaping—it’s very clearly about youth vaping. Vaping has actually proven to be an effective tool for those trying to stop smoking, and yet the rise in youth vaping is very alarming. That’s what this bill is here to address, and we’re addressing it head on, including banning disposable vapes, imposing stricter penalties for selling to minors, restricting the display of vaping products, and limiting the sales from vape stores. This is a very good bill, and I commend it to the House.

It’s a pleasure to rise and make a contribution on this bill and to have worked with colleagues in the Health Committee diligently on this bill. All parties supported this bill through the select committee process, so it was good to have the opportunity to make what we all accept is a positive difference, and it’s important to acknowledge the work of so many colleagues in hearing the submissions on this and taking the matter seriously. Members will know that the Health Committee also has a briefing on vaping that it is reporting on, and on the Health Committee, we take care to incorporate a diverse range of views and respect each other’s differences. We always abide by the Standing Orders and, just generally, it’s all run like a pretty tight ship.

At the Health Committee—it may interest members of the House—we also had our annual review recently, and we’re grateful for the Ministers’ attendance at that. The Health Committee was visited by all of its relevant Ministers, and I think that’s a really positive thing for the scrutiny of our portfolios in this Parliament.

Minister Casey Costello made remarks that in her view, youth vaping rates should be zero in New Zealand, and that’s an ambitious and laudable aim, because we’ve heard extensively on the select committee in relation to this bill and others that youth vaping is harmful. It’s harmful in terms of it primarily being an addiction: an addiction that gets young people hooked on a commercial product, an addiction that disrupts their ability to sleep, sometimes, and their ability to participate in education, and an addiction that just means you don’t get to make all of your decisions because a substance is making them for you. We also heard about the other impacts, potentially, on mental health and on physical health as well, although that evidence, of course, continues to emerge.

While my colleague who spoke before me is correct that vaping is a useful tool for people to quit smoking, it is not at all something we want young people to take up in and of itself. The question we have to ask about this bill and the Minister’s aim to get vaping rates to zero percent for young people is: does it go far enough? Vaping rates in New Zealand are incredibly high. For young people, it is almost double what it is in comparable jurisdictions, like the United Kingdom. There are marked inequalities in young people’s vaping rates. It’s much higher—as high as 20 percent or more—for some Māori and Pacific communities. We need to see those numbers come down. Once again, the question for this bill is: will it get us to zero? There’s no therapeutic role for vaping in a generation that barely smokes.

What does this bill do? Well, it does, broadly, four things. It makes a ban on disposable vapes, which is useful because mostly young people smoke disposable vapes; there are proximity restrictions in this bill so that new vape stores cannot take up close to schools and marae and early childhood education centres; there’s a change to the visibility of vapes in the front of vape stores, meaning that you cannot look through the window and see the product; and there’s also an increase in fines. That last intervention, I think, is a useful one because the level of fines determines the likelihood of the Ministry of Health taking prosecutions on these matters, and it is our view that the ministry has been far too slow to take those prosecutions.

All in all, these are sensible measures that we support, but do they go far enough to get to zero? If you look at those four, I think, like many submitters, the answer you’ll reach is probably no. When you think about a young person—a teenager—does walking 300 metres present a sufficient barrier to them purchasing a vape? Now, sometimes there is a young person in my household who might not make the 5-metre walk from the couch to the fridge and might ask someone else to do that for them. However, I think the majority of young people will be able to overcome the 300-metre barrier.

Now, the matter of disposable vapes is also very helpful, but is it enough to get you to zero, or near that? No, because not all young people use only disposable vapes. The increase in fines—well, that might tip the calculus for what we know are some of the unethical vendors in New Zealand who do sell to young people. We see in countless controlled-purchase operations that there are people selling to under-age consumers, and yet that is likely to impact at the margins and there’s still social supply of vapes. The visibility of vapes at the shop fronts—once again, it’s a helpful measure—but let’s face it, the entire shop front is the ad for the vape store. Those big neon signs that seem to dominate many small towns on their main street are actually the ads for the product itself.

In my view, it’s reasonable that we agree with many of the submitters who said that this bill will not get us to zero and will not address the scale of the public health problem that we have. That’s why I support many of the measures that they mentioned—and they bear repeating—that could show where this bill could go further, and it was unfortunate that they were ruled out of scope for the submissions and were not reported on adequately.

There were concerns about the number of vape stores; not just where they go—as we’ll deal to with the proximity restrictions—but the number overall. There have been large increases. We have now as many vape stores as we had tobacco stores, and there are seven times more vape stores in the poorest neighbourhoods than in the richer neighbourhoods. That shows why it is that we have these inequalities—it is because of deliberate targeting by the sellers of these products at the poorest people. Submitters suggested the options for a sinking lid on the number of products, for plain packaging, for more education, for limits on the amount of nicotine, and also for the opportunity to futureproof the Act.

To summarise, these products were developed as a form of new product for a tobacco industry that knows it’s on the way out. New Zealand does not owe the tobacco industry a transition plan, and certainly not at the expense of its youth. I commend the measures in this bill to the House, but we can do so much more.

The time has come for me to suspend for the dinner break. The House will resume at 7 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The House is resumed. When we adjourned for the dinner break, we were discussing the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2). We were up to call No. 9, which, I understand, is Carlos Cheung.

Madam Speaker, thank you. Vaping causes major health issues, especially youth vaping. After hearing so many heartbreaking stories, finally, today is a great day for all the parents, a great day for all the school principals and teachers, and a great day for Mount Roskill because, finally, we have a Government that is willing to crack down on youth vaping. I commend this bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you, and I would’ve assumed that Carlos Cheung, the gentleman who just took his seat, would’ve had a little bit more to say if he was as requisitely proud of this Government’s actions as he just stated that he was. Nevertheless, on this side of the House, as has been said, we reluctantly support this bill in the spirit of it being better than nothing and in the spirit of it being a bit of a once-over-lightly sort of attack on youth vaping, but that shouldn’t discount the fact that we do have some genuine concerns.

Obviously, one of the main concerns we have is about the really, really obvious density of vape stores that’s concentrated in low-income communities. If this Government was actually serious about meaningfully addressing some of those issues, it would have been good to have seen that there was some type of sinking lid policy and that there was any type of initiative to really tackle what is a really inequitable impact on youth vaping in particular communities.

We know also that the lack of enforcement funding is a real issue with this particular bill. The bill raises penalties, for instance, for illegal sales to minors, but it fails to allocate adequate funding for enforcement. It really hasn’t got the requisite teeth to do what it says is written on the tin.

We also think there’s a missed opportunity for much more comprehensive regulation, and, as I’ve said, the concentration that is really exacerbated by easy accessibility in low socio-economic areas is not anecdotal. We know that the University of Canterbury found that there were seven times more vape stores in those neighbourhoods with lower incomes than others. It is predatory, and let’s not pretend that it isn’t. This is a predatory market, and I think that it would have been much better and we would’ve received this bill much better if we thought the Associate Minister of Health had paid requisite attention and had really put the heft of the Government behind trying to do something positive in that direction.

We also think that the bill lacks provisions to address what will be emerging vape technologies. We know this will be somewhat of an arms race—you know, this is something that’s going to move really quickly. There are the marketing tactics and all of the things that go along with a predatory market that’s cheap, that’s pop-up, and that’s designed to get people buying products on impulse and through addiction that deserved a little bit more regulation than what is occurring here.

Essentially, just to sum up, as my colleagues have said throughout this debate, we think it’s a missed opportunity, which is a shame. We think it’s actually quite baffling that despite those alarming youth rates, the Minister has delivered a bill that, essentially, just scratches the surface. We think, therefore, that the Minister has had a little bit of selective hearing in so far as which aspects of youth vaping the Minister has chosen to pay attention to and which seems to have sort of gone in one ear and completely slipped out the other. We think that an enforcement plan without enforcement, essentially, is exactly what it says: it’s an enforcement plan without enforcement. It may sound good and it may alleviate some conscience or give people the opportunity to pat themselves on the back, but if it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to do and you don’t resource the enforcement aspect of this, then it doesn’t really work.

Importantly, we also think that a real opportunity was here, and there’s been plenty of time to have done the work and put the bill together to make sure that it was futureproofed before—you know, this bill, by the time it has passed, is, essentially, going to be left in the past. A failure to account for the fact that emerging products and the type of market that we’re dealing with will always be one step ahead is a missed opportunity.

We will support the bill. We do think that it is, essentially, kicking the can down the road. It is better than nothing—slightly—and I’m sure I will have another colleague offer some more evidence in that direction. For this session, we are happy to say that, with huge reserve—and we will be watching what happens in the implementation of this bill—we will support the bill at this stage.

Kua pānuitia te kōrero e pā ana ngā taipitopito o tēnei pire, nā reira he poto tōku tāpiri ki tēnei kōrero. Ka tautoko ana au tēnei pire ki te Whare. Tēnā koe.

[The details of this bill have been read out, and so I don’t have much to add. I support this bill to the House. Thank you.]

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s good to be able to stand up and take a call on the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2). During an earlier speech by my colleague, just about two speeches back, a member from the other side of the House said, “What did you do in the last six years?”, and I thought that that was a really good question. The answer is—

Hon Members: What did you do?

REUBEN DAVIDSON: —I’ve got 10 minutes; I can wait—Labour led the world in the last six years. That’s what we did. [Interruption] Hold the applause.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: OK, interjections are fine, but that’s a barrage, and now I can’t hear.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: We wouldn’t want to deprive you of this speech, Madam Speaker, because Labour led the world. Labour had a plan. That plan was the Auahi Kore Aotearoa Mahere Rautaki 2025, the Smokefree 2025 Action Plan. I’m not surprised that the other side doesn’t want to hear this, because this was about ensuring that young people never start smoking. It was about reducing the nicotine in carcinogenic tobacco products and it was about limiting the number of shops that can sell cigarettes. [Interruption] All that energy that was going to be burnt off at the ball is being burnt off in the House tonight.

Now, these changes weren’t going to come into effect immediately. We were going to give retailers time to transition to a new business model, but we knew that by establishing a smoke-free generation, we were making it clear to New Zealanders that we’d have a smoke-free future, and so many New Zealanders were proud of that. This coalition Government wasted no time in letting that go up in smoke against expert advice and against very, very strong public opinion, because New Zealanders overwhelmingly support keeping smoke-free legislation. Health Coalition Aotearoa and the University of Otago’s tobacco research group, ASPIRE, found that 67 percent of respondents either strongly supported or supported keeping the laws, and a petition was signed by than 46,000 people—46,000 people—who wanted to stop any changes. That petition was handed over to Parliament.

The really interesting bit that the other side might want to hear is that more than half of National voters supported retaining the legislation—think on that—and the reason that people supported the legislation was because it saved lives. Globally, it’s estimated to be 1.2 million lives that legislation like this could save if Governments around the world were as brave as we were to roll it out and not as—I’m not sure of the word—that this Government has been; as gutless as this Government has been in winding it back.

It would be remiss of me as our spokesperson on statistics not to also point out that our smoking rates have more than halved since the 2013 census, and that’s a statistic that we can be very, very proud of—halved since 2013.

Cameron Brewer: Well done, John Key; well done, Tariana Turia.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Whilst you might want to congratulate yourself on the other side of the House, Mr Brewer, I challenge you to check the numbers in three years’ time, because they will have gone back up. [Interruption]

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Shh! Too loud—not the speaker; just the crowd.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Now, I want to take a moment to look at the local situation in the mighty Christchurch East. At the Lynwood Avenue and Buckleys Road corner by Eastgate, we have got so many vape stores, and there is not a week that goes by that I don’t get people saying to me that there are too many vape stores in this part of the city. In the New Brighton Mall, we’ve got too many vape stores, and there is not a week that goes by that someone doesn’t call me and say that there are too many vape stores in this community.

In South New Brighton, only just 300 metres away from our local school; less than 100 metres away from our preschool; on the doorstep of our community facility, the Bridge Hub; and over the road from Common Ground, which is a community space often full of kids and families enjoying time together, we have got a vape store, right on that community’s doorstep—right on that community’s doorstep—and I know that these issues are not just restrained to the mighty Christchurch East. I know that they happen across Christchurch, I know that they happen in Woolston in my colleague’s electorate, and I know that they happen right across Aotearoa New Zealand. Too many vape stores.

Now, if you believe that New Zealand deserves a smoke-free future, and I do and I would find it hard to find anyone in their right mind who would disagree with that statement—although judging from some of the interjections tonight, there may be members on the other side of the House who quite like the idea, for whatever reason—this select committee and this bill had so many submissions and so many opportunities to address the very, very real concerns about the rates of vaping and youth vaping happening in our communities, and those opportunities were missed. We know that for young people in New Zealand, vaping rates are over 17 percent, and when you compare that globally to the less than 10 percent in the UK and the less than 7 percent in the US, that is something that we should be deeply concerned about and something that we should be doing everything we can to address. Those opportunities that came to the select committee and could have been integrated into this piece of legislation were not.

New Zealand youth vaping rates are far too high. Smoking had lost its allure—we’ve seen that; smoking rates have come down—but vaping rates have accelerated and escalated, and we know that that is often a gateway for young people to then move to smoking. I absolutely support the banning of disposable vapes. We know that that was an accessibility issue. We know that that made vapes far too available to young people, but we need to see a reduction in the number of stores. This legislation could have allowed for that to happen and could have put a focus on some of our more socio-economically deprived communities, where we know there’s a prevalence of those businesses and those stores selling vapes.

There could have been more done to address the proliferation of flavours. Nobody needs to smoke a vape that says “Blueberry crumble” and smells like a Smurf. There’s absolutely no need for that nonsense, and it should have been addressed by this bill. Plain packaging could have been addressed by this bill. Nicotine limits could have been addressed by this bill. Enforcement could have been addressed by this bill. Futureproofing could have been addressed by this bill. But none—none—of it was. None of these things were addressed by this bill. Instead, with the bill that I am speaking to—and that we will support because it does a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of work to address the challenges that our community faces around vaping—there was so much more we could have done, and, really, if this is getting back on track, then I’m disappointed.

You could have done so much better. I’m not surprised by some of the grades we saw issued in the New Zealand Herald this week, if this is the kind of law that we see from this Government. [Interruption]

Cameron Brewer: Oh, jeez! Wait till they get to the Labour Party.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Now that you’ve finished—briefly—I’ll take the opportunity to remind you that under Labour, New Zealand led the world with our smoke-free legislation. While this coalition Government turns its back on that vision and that plan and that legislation, there are other countries that are picking it up and making it a reality, and it’s an embarrassment that this coalition Government will not do that. I know that in my local community there are deep concerns about the rates of youth vaping and the prevalence of vaping stores and I know that will be the same across your communities as well, and you have missed the opportunity to represent and serve your community by putting some teeth into this legislation.

Whilst I support it, we need to do more. You could have done more. You have chosen not to do more, and that is beyond disappointing. It’s an embarrassment that you’ve walked away from such strong legislation and destroyed the smoke-free future that New Zealanders deserve.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. The Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2) aims to better protect our young people from the harm of vaping. While vaping was aimed at helping people to quit smoking, it has instead proliferated among our young people, and that is what this legislation is intended to remedy. I commend it to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a third time.