Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2)

I move, That the Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a third time.

We have an important opportunity here to do something really good and positive in regard to turning our conversation around, to delivering some practical solutions. New Zealand was too slow to effectively regulate vaping, and youth vaping rates are too high. We have collectively agreed that, we have recognised that, and we know that we can do better. We have to stop young people from taking it up as a habit. That’s about making vaping as unfashionable as smoking is for young people now, and it’s about controls. Encouragingly, we have seen some indications of the levelling off of vaping rates, but we do not want to be complacent.

This bill delivers on the Government’s commitment to ban disposable vapes and have much tougher penalties for selling vapes to under-18-year-olds. It means we will have far stronger legislative settings and policy levers in place to protect our young people. We have talked at length about how far we can go and how much more we can do, but this is a step in the right direction, providing some clarity and certainty about how this country feels about vaping.

We cannot ignore, however, that vaping has been a contributor as a lower-harm product that has allowed people to exit from smoking. It is important, as we have these conversations, that we have some balance, that we have some clarity around what we’re trying to achieve, and, in that balance, ensuring that those who have successfully transitioned from smoking will still have the access to the products that enable them to break the habit of, sometimes, a lifetime.

This bill introduces a number of measures. It includes a ban on disposable vapes, the disposable vape that is the most common device used among our young people. In addition, it significantly increases penalties and fines for people who sell vapes to minors. That is an important factor: ensuring that we send a clear message that we do not accept that there is any excuse for supplying these products to young people, who should not be using vapes. Finally, it puts some restrictions in place around the visibility of the vaping stores, to not allow them to be an attractive honeypot to young people—that we make sure we have some concealment around how these products are displayed.

These changes will be supported by an increased focus on compliance and greater enforcement capability. That work is under way, and I look forward to announcing the smoke-free action plan next week, which will answer a lot of questions about our work moving forward.

The changes take place six months after this bill comes into law. We believe it’s important to give time for all those involved to prepare and get their implementation right, to ensure that we’re sending some clear messages, that there is clear guidance around displays, that the businesses affected will know exactly what is happening.

While we want to control and reduce youth vaping, the Government is determined to ensure that New Zealanders quit smoking. This is an important priority and an important distinction as we discuss vaping. I’m pleased that the changes to this bill ensure that it won’t have unintended consequences by taking the vaping devices that are useful for those who’ve quit smoking. We know that many people who have become smoke-free by switching to vaping are reliant on these devices. We want and expect this to continue to drive us towards our smoke-free goal. The passage of this bill ensures that we achieve better balance and safeguarding our young people from vaping, while supporting people to stop smoking.

There has been a lot of noise in this space, and I appreciate that this is a passionate topic. We have had success in this country in helping people to quit smoking, but, as we went through this process, we recognised that we allowed this habit to become an infliction on our young people and there is much we need to know about how vaping impacts young lives.

I want to thank everyone involved in getting this bill to its third reading; to the Health Committee for your consideration, for your process of implementing some practical suggestions and amendments that made this bill workable and better, for the work that you contributed.

This bill is a major step to protecting our children and young people from vaping. It has been a pleasure to work with those front-line workers who really deliver the hard yards in helping people to quit smoking. Their input and their understanding of the mahi that they do every day has been informative, and I would like to commend those individuals for their work.

I would also like to take a moment to recognise those people who have done the hard work to quit smoking, but also those people who have called on their whānau, their friends, and their colleagues to quit smoking. I hope, because of all the discussion in this space, that, over the next few months, we are reinvigorated, we are reminded that we can achieve something unprecedented in the world and get below that 5 percent threshold.

It is the individuals out there who are telling their family and their whānau to just give it another go. Don’t be whakamā because it didn’t work last time; give it another crack. I really look forward to having those discussions over the next few weeks as we launch the smoke-free action plan.

This is an important step forward. We do not want our young people vaping. We do not want them taking up this habit. We do not want them to be nicotine addicted. We also don’t want anybody taking up tobacco and smoking. It is with great pleasure that I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I note that the Minister has talked about this as being an important opportunity—and indeed it’s a very important opportunity to address a really significant problem that our youth face currently—but from my perspective, it’s an absolutely wasted opportunity.

I don’t apologise for being underwhelmed, because this comes in a week where we have seen, for the first time in decades, daily smokers increase—from 284,000 to 300,000. That is relevant because we have been sold a line consistently that vaping and vaping products are there to support people come off cigarette smoking. We have been sold a line by this Government that they are committed to reducing smoking and reducing the harm of vaping to our young people, and we end up with a bill that really has more questions about what it doesn’t do than what it does do. While Labour is supporting it, this is indeed a wasted opportunity.

If I think about the extent of the problem—and I’ve said it a few times now in the House—let us not forget that New Zealand’s vaping issue with young people is amongst the worst in the world. If we look at graphs that show the US, the UK, and New Zealand, the US is hovering around 6 percent or 7 percent, the UK around 10 percent, and New Zealand is way up there at around 17 percent of young people who have daily vaped over the last year. That is the nature of the problem that we’re talking about, and we have heard in the Health Committee from Vape-Free Kids and from other young people who have described the terrible addiction to nicotine and the terrible mental health issues and concerns that they feel, and the trauma they feel, from being addicted to vapes.

These are young people who have not necessarily ever smoked. We’ve let them down, and now there’s an opportunity to do something about it, and my concern is that we have wasted that opportunity, that we have real questions over the implementation of this bill and what it doesn’t do, and that we may not ever get around to doing it properly. All we have is the word of the Minister about an action plan coming into place next week after the first part of the legislation, which seems really incomplete. Let us not forget that this is a Minister who did support tax cuts to big tobacco companies. That is how I want to contextualise my comments about this wasted opportunity.

If we look at what select committee submitters told us in the very short time frame that they had to be able to submit, they talked about their concern about the prevalence and about their communities, particularly low socio-economic communities, where a Canterbury University study has shown that there are up to seven times as many vape stores that those young people have to contend with in their neighbourhood. That’s walking past, seeing the signage, seeing the visibility, having the peer pressure, and being exposed to accessibility of vapes. Now, this bill may go some way in terms of reducing that visibility, but it doesn’t do anything about the big neon signs that advertise specialist vape stores. We didn’t have an opportunity to really explore whether that was possible because, like we heard so many times on the select committee and so many times, in fact, in the committee of the whole House, that was out of scope.

What could have been done? What could have been done, we heard, was there could have been a sinking lid for communities where there was a particularly high prevalence of vape stores; where, instead of just outlawing them, allow them to continue; and when they would naturally have natural attrition and close, make sure no more vape stores came up in that area. That seems like a really good argument. We heard from a number of submitters on that. But no—out of scope, waiting for the next bill.

What about the flavours? Flavours like sweet menthol and sweet tobacco. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence from the young people that I have met with in my mental health spokesperson capacity who have talked about the cynical targeting of young people with some of the flavours on vapes. That would have been so easy to clean up in this bill. It’s not that complicated if there’s political will.

We’ve also heard about the plain packaging. If it applies to cigarettes, why could it not easily be adopted for vapes? Yet that’s something that, once again, we were told was out of scope. One of the ones that I really found the most frustrating was the failure to address the levels of nicotine in vapes. Young people told us how addictive nicotine was and what a difference it would make if there was a tapering of the nicotine levels. Again, that is not rocket science to do. We have plenty of support available if there is political will and if there is enough time for a proper legislative process and enough time for proper consultation, but, sadly, that didn’t happen.

Then we had submissions saying that perhaps the industry could be regulated so that at least we could rely on data coming from our own sector, rather than the desktop-style research that informed the policies which looked at Australia, the UK, the US—countries that don’t have the same level of vaping problems, that don’t have the same social make-up that we do—and I think there was even a reference to Hungary in that desktop research. Now, if we had been able to explore regulation and been able to have proper data, we would have been able to consider things like when we look at the limitations on where vape shops can be situated, rather than just focusing on schools or just focusing on early childhood education centres. What about churches? We know that many young people are exposed to vape shops around churches, and we know that some of our highest vaping levels are amongst our young Māori and Pacific women. We didn’t have any analysis of how to have a more nuanced approach that would serve those young people. Instead, we relied on overseas research and pretty bold assumptions about what was going to reduce the visibility and accessibility of vapes.

Now, when I questioned how that happened, I was told that it’s to do with the process. Not only did we have dropped on us at the eleventh hour an edict from the Minister that this was to be a shortened committee process, and that we would have to sit at odd times to be able to hear all the submitters, but we also heard that many things were out of scope, and we also did not have the research available because the officials had not had time to do their work properly.

There were two regulatory impact statements. Both of them mentioned very explicitly the caveats around the quality of advice that they were able to give. They did pass the threshold, but there were caveats about the quality through lack of time and through lack of scope, and one of them, the latter—the August regulatory impact statement (RIS)—actually explicitly mentioned that because the decisions had already been made at a ministerial level, there were many things from a policy perspective that could have been addressed and looked at that weren’t.

When we looked at the cost-benefit analysis in the committee stage, there were assumptions made based on incomplete evidence where there were no costings. We were expected to rely on a cost-benefit analysis that suggested a course of action where there were no numbers underpinning the analysis, because officials simply didn’t have the information. The evidence base for this bill is a little bit of a house of cards. We will support it because we strongly believe that it’s really important to come in to bat for our young people to make sure that no further young people take up this addictive and worrying and concerning habit that they themselves have said they don’t want to do. Without even touching a cigarette, we want to make sure that that doesn’t happen, and so we are cautiously supporting the bill.

The questions are overwhelming. What is in the next tranche of legislation? How will enforcement occur? The Minister has said that the enforcement will come in the next bill. Well, I find that bizarre to have a bill that is trying to regulate and restrict something that says, “Oh, we’ll deal with enforcement later.” The only additional enforcement powers of those who are the directors that were going around to look at prosecutions and to look at compliance—they had one extra power, which was to ask people for their date of birth. There’s no analysis about whether that is sufficient to be able to make this bill work, and we heard in the committee that there’d only been a couple of prosecutions in the previous year because the thresholds were not such that prosecutions could be taken. The legislative fix for that is in this bill, although the Minister herself gave a different reason for the legislative fix, which makes me wonder if she was really across the RIS.

These are all questions that will come up, surely, in January, when we expect the next bill before the House. If it doesn’t come before the House then, then there are real questions as to what this bill is aiming to achieve. With those notes of strong caution, we will support the bill.

Debate interrupted.